Kronan

1676

Swedish flagship, the Battle of Öland, the magazine Location: south of Öland, Baltic Sea · Coordinates: 56.67°N 16.53°E · Casualties: ~800 · Survivors: ~50 · Depth: 26 m · Cause: capsized · magazine explosion — Heeled sharply during a tactical turn at the Battle of Öland on 1 June 1676 against a combined Danish-Dutch fleet. Her gun ports were open. The powder magazine ignited and she blew apart. She sank in under an hour. · Fate: excavated from 1980 · Kalmar Läns Museum · Type: warship · first rate · Tonnage: 2,140 tons · Crew: 850 · Flag: Kingdom of Sweden · Launched: 1668 Flagship of the Swedish navy, 124 guns, the largest warship in the world when she launched. At the Battle of Öland on 1 June 1676, a sudden turn with gun ports open pitched her over; the magazine ignited and she exploded in minutes. ~800 dead, ~50 survived. Discovered in 1980 by Anders Franzén, the same man who located the Vasa; her site has been excavated continuously for more than forty years. The Vessel The Kronan (Swedish: "the Crown") was a Swedish first-rate ship of the line, built at Stockholm between 1668 and 1672 under the direction of the English shipwright Francis Sheldon. At 2,140 tons displacement, 53 metres in length, and armed with 124 bronze guns, she was the largest warship in the world at the time of her commissioning and remained among the five largest for the decade of her active service. Her construction cost, approximately 326,000 riksdaler, represented the equivalent of roughly 10 per cent of the annual Swedish state budget of the 1670s. Kronan was the flagship of the Swedish navy and the personal prestige ship of King Karl XI. She embodied the naval ambitions of Sweden at the peak of its seventeenth-century imperial phase, when Swedish territorial possessions extended across the Baltic to include Finland, Estonia, Livonia, and parts of northern Germany. Her design drew on English and Dutch naval architectural precedent (Sheldon had previously worked at Chatham Dockyard), but her armament and decorative scheme were distinctly Swedish: extensive gilded carvings across her stern and quarterdeck depicted scenes from Swedish mythology and the iconography of the Vasa dynasty. Her complement in wartime was approximately 850: 500 sailors and gunners, 300 soldiers of the marine infantry embarked for boarding actions, and 50 officers. Her master on her final voyage was Vice Admiral Lorentz Creutz, a 60-year-old career naval officer who had been appointed commander The Disaster At approximately 14:00 on 1 June 1676, Kronan executed a turning manoeuvre to bring her broadside to bear on the approaching Danish fleet. The manoeuvre was a standard line-of-battle tactical turn, but it was executed in conditions that were marginal for a ship of her size: strong southwesterly wind, heavy swell, and insufficient reefing of her topsails. As Kronan heeled into the turn, her hull angle exceeded approximately 35 degrees from the vertical. At this angle, water flooded into her lower gunports, which had been left open for action; the lower gun deck began to flood progressively. The heeling increased. Within less than two minutes of the initial heel, the ship was beyond the point of recovery: she heeled further, the loose gun carriages on her lower deck ran to leeward, and the concentration of 40-plus tonnes of bronze guns shifted to her downward side. Then, at approximately 14:05 on 1 June 1676, Kronan's powder magazine exploded. The explosion tore the forward third of the ship apart; the detonation was heard on Öland five kilometres away and was clearly audible from the bridge of the Danish flagship Christianus Quintus. The forward section of the ship disintegrated; the stern section, still intact, capsized and sank within approximately four minutes of the explosion. Of the 850 aboard, only 42 survived, rescued by boats from the nearby Swedish ship Svärdet. The 808 dead included Vice Admiral Creutz and all the senior officers of the Swedish flagship. The immediat