The Brooklyn Rail

The seventeenth-century Swedish warship, the Vasa, much like the Titanic, was not supposed to sink. Yet, minutes into its maiden voyage, it capsized, brought down by a light wind and a design flaw that caused it to keel over and take on water through its portholes. Tragically, lives were lost along with thousands of artifacts. Three centuries later, a determined naval engineer and amateur archaeologist successfully pinpointed its location in Stockholm’s harbor, and the ship was salvaged mostly intact. Author Joan Wickersham was cajoled into visiting the Vasa Museum by her husband, who had read about the shipwreck in National Geographic as a child. Beguiled from her very first encounter, she returned to the museum many times, haunted by the shipwreck that was both ghostly and corporeal. In the presence of the once mighty and magnificent ship, she wondered, “How can an absence / fill up all this space?” It is a paradox she attempts to understand, if not come to terms with, in No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck.

Eschewing straight prose in favor of narrative poems, Wickersham excavates history, memory, love, curiosity, resilience, and the fragility of hope and ambition in telling the story of the Vasa. It is a slim volume that contains multitudes, yet Wickersham holds us captive with a deftness and clarity of imagery. The poems that spring from her ruminations and speculations about the Vasa spin and spin much like a zoetrope, alighting on different aspects. Considering the gust of wind that caused the Vasa to tilt, she writes: “You never meant to kill anyone. You didn’t even realize, right away… No one saw you, blamed you, even thought about you, then or at the inquest. You were nothing, compared to what that ship would have met at sea.” She goes on to wonder what it must have been like for Anders Franzén, the aforementioned naval engineer who located the Vasa in the 1950s with such simple tools as a grappling hook and homemade coring probe: “The probe brought something up. A plug of oak. Black oak.” It was a discovery that would bind his name to the Vasa forevermore.

There is an ekphrastic quality to the poems as Wickersham engages with the past and present, conversing with lost souls and the found objects now displayed in the museum. She probes the quirkiness of impermanence and mortality through two pairs of shoes in a locker, a game board, large bronze cannons, a box full of herring bones “each no bigger than an eyelash,” a key that perhaps last resided in the depth of someone’s pocket, and a pelican button so small that she must “take on faith that what I’m told is here is here…” By opening herself up to the whispered stories these ephemera have been yearning to tell, their stories—the Vasa’s and hers—seep into each other, becoming one.

In a section that keenly illustrates the synergetic push and pull between prose and poetry, Wickersham recounts the gathering of the human bones found in and around the wreck, the initial identification and burial, the discovery of more bones, the disinterment of the buried bones, and the reburial. Osteologists, first one and then another many years later, give the bones names and designations, yet repeatedly identify and misidentify the rightful owners of these mortal remains even with the science of DNA at their disposal. “Two of Kalle’s vertebrae belong to Beata; but three of hers are reassigned to Filip. Beata loses two metacarpals to Cesar, but gets a clavicle from Erik, and a tooth back from Niklas which, since the tooth was all there ever was of Niklas, means he never existed.” It is quite madcap.

Constructed as a testament to Sweden's naval strength, the Vasa embarked on its maiden voyage to support the Baltic wars. Among the 150 people on board were some of the crew's wives and children. Unfortunately, the Vasa was doomed from the moment it set sail. It was rushed into service by order of the king. It was built top-heavy, and when the breeze tipped it over, the lower tier of gun ports that should have been closed quickly took on too much water. While some passengers swam ashore to safety and others clung to the masts until rescued, around thirty individuals trapped below deck perished. The subsequent inquest failed to assign blame or deliver any significant consequences for the disaster.

Time, however, has turned the failure of the Vasa into triumph. The ship still exists when it should not. Wickersham brings a lament into her interrogation of time and what it chooses to destroy or preserve. In sections much like dioramas of construed memory, she recalls her parents—her father, whom she lost to suicide, and her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer soon after. Again, she builds a bridge from her present to the past, the universality of loss reverberating in the sleek and intimate passages, where history fades and memory comes to the fore. Their absence is “negative space—a vast stone canyon shaped like a ship, without a ship to fill it.”

Why did it happen? How did it happen? These questions continue to hound those attempting to reconstruct and understand any grievous event or loss. What can be substantiated and what cannot? Not only did the Vasa sink in dramatic fashion, but the drama persisted even after it was excavated. There was the challenge of how to best raise it from the deep and the fight to preserve it when exposed to the outside environment. As one of Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions, decisions had to be made about where to permanently house the wreck. All the while, anthropologists, archaeologists, and researchers studied it, attempting to divine its secrets, one of which was how a wooden ship survived largely intact underwater for centuries. Wickersham has an answer for us. It is a coda that holds fast to the notion that there is little that happens to us that is inconsequential.

The filmmaker Werner Herzog has spoken about how he always hopes to achieve “ecstatic truths” in his work—essential truths that are greater and more meaningful than mere facts. A way to get to these truths, he posits, is through the avenue of imagination. As such, using the compelling saga of the Vasa as a vessel to vividly explore what lies in the hinterlands of human experience and memory, Wickersham offers a contemplative look at what can be lost, what is salvageable, and how we endure despite it all. “This is as much as it is possible to know,” Wickersham writes.