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A tangle of spars and the topmast lie against the hull. The windlass at the bow is still rigged for handling the anchor, though the rope cable has rotted away. A wooden handspike is still in its socket in the windlass, which was used to winch up the anchors, as if a crew member working it had just walked away. The pumps, with their handles alongside them, are visible near the stern, next to the dislodged tiller (ships of this period did not always have a ship’s wheel) that was used to steer Vrouw Maria.
This wrecked ship looks as if she could be pumped free of water and, with a few repairs, rerigged and fitted with sail, resume a voyage interrupted 230 years ago. Discovering that Vrouw Maria is so intact raises the big question as Mike approaches the open cargo hatch. What will we find? The camera on Mike’s helmet reveals a tightly packed hold with very little space between the top of the cargo and the deck. It looks like Lorentz and his crew did not get very far in unpacking Vrouw Maria. We can see hundreds of clay tobacco pipes and an open crate that displays piles of eyeglass lenses. We can also see other crates, tall and narrow, standing on end.
Thanks to Christian Ahlstro m’s research, we know what Lorentz and his crew managed to pull out of the hold; some of it matches what had been declared to the Danish customs officials at Elsinore — and much of it does not. Among the diverse cargo that Vrouw Maria’s crew salvaged were rolls of cloth (both coarse and fine), lead chests of coffee, a chest of tea, a chest of bound books, a box of cheese, a box of snuff, a box of “mirrors with gold frames, one round box of cartouche-packed tobacco, one round box with a small musical mechanism, twelve small ivory eggs, one linen package containing six pairs of cotton stockings,” plus a large painting with a gilt frame and five smaller pictures. These items were listed in the archives because the Swedes ended up auctioning them under the provisions of admiralty law. The Russians were eager to retrieve what they could, particularly the Empress Catherine’s treasures, but the Swedish governor of Turko, Baron Christopher Rappe, reported that “unfortunately, Her Majesty’s paintings are not included.”
As I look at the tin crates standing on their ends, trapped by other cargo, I know I’m not alone in hoping that they hold Catherine’s paintings. No one knows just how many paintings the Russian agents bought in Amsterdam and placed in Vrouw Maria for shipment to St. Petersburg. In 1961, Dutch researcher Clara Bille studied the fate of the Braamcamps collection in her doctoral dissertation, and working from that, Maritime Museum of Finland curator Ismo Malinen has suggested that as many as thirty-five of the Braamcamps paintings ended up on the ill-fated ship.
Vague descriptions exist for many of the paintings, outside of brief notations in the Braamcamps auction catalog printed in July 1771. There were two paintings by Coedyk, a tableau and a scene of a man and woman sitting at a table. There was a Rubens portrait of “one of the four evangelists,” and a “portrait of a man” by Rembrandt. There was a painting of a “lady at a table” by Gerard Douw, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and a scene of a man driving a herd of bulls by another Dutch master, Paulus Potter. Van Balen and Bruegel’s The Virgin and Infant Jesus, and three other Bruegels of unidentified landscapes and people, were packed in with paintings by Joseph Laquy, Jan van den Helden, Adriaen van Ostade, Jan van Gooyen, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Guido Reni, Lo Spagnoletto and several other artists. One of the paintings was an appropriate subject to be in a shipwrecked and sunken art collection: Abraham Stork’s Ships at Sea.
The narrow tin crates in the hold of Vrouw Maria may very well contain these paintings, but we will not know for sure until the archeologists methodically excavate the ship and every crate is raised to the surface, then carefully and scientifically opened in the lab.
Mike approaches the bow, and the bluff, almost apple-cheeked shape of the old ship comes into view. The open hawse pipes gape like empty eye sockets. Trailing off the bow is a fallen section of mast that has an end shaped like the side of a giant cello. The age of the ship is apparent, and for me, it is thrilling to see, close up and in detail, a type of ship that has not sailed the oceans for centuries and which most of us have only seen as an engraved drawing in an old book. Mike moves along the port side of the wreck, and there, cemented to the hull planks by rust, is one of Vrouw Maria’s iron anchors. From its position, it looks as if the anchor was lashed up against the hull, its hooks pointing skyward and not hanging down, as we might expect. The anchor may have been tied by rope that has disintegrated, because something had to hold it against the planks long enough for the rust to bind with the wood. But why it is where it is, and how it was set, are mysteries.
As Mike continues back to the stern, we see that the lintel above the entrance to Lorentz’s cabin is beautifully carved with a scroll decoration. It is a lovely touch on a utilitarian, hardworking ship, and a reminder that people loved and cared for her. That hint of a long-ago emotion has survived the wreck and Vrouw Maria’s long slumber in the deep.
The time has come for Mike to start ascending, but he pauses for a moment to gaze back at Vrouw Maria, lying silent in the cold greenish-blue gloom of a Baltic grave. Then he begins the long slow climb back up to the surface, pausing to decompress as we share notes and observations.
We’ll repeat this process tomorrow and in the days that follow, and the Fi
The discovery of Vrouw Maria poses a unique opportunity and a challenge. This intact wooden ship of 1771 is a time capsule. Packed full of merchandise as well as Catherine the Great’s collection of paintings, the ship, when excavated, will yield valuable details about European trade of the time and Russia’s rapid pace of westernization. As for the thirty-five or so lost paintings that still rest in Vrouw Maria, they may very well not be in as good condition as the ship. Even if the panels and canvas have survived, the paint may not. Conservators, the scientists who meticulously battle the ravages of time and the elements to restore and repair antiquities, are sure that any watercolors are gone. Other paints may have emulsified or washed away after two centuries in the sea. But paintings have survived Baltic immersion, including one from a seventeenth-century shipwreck, and Catherine’s paintings may have been sealed in waterproof containers. It will be years, however, before Vrouw Maria and her cargo are raised and every crate is carefully unpacked in the laboratory.