A 15th-century royal warship resting off the coast of Sweden once served as a “floating castle” for an intrepid king, according to new underwater investigation that revealed cannons, handguns, crossbows and the vessel’s stern superstructure.
The new finds on the wreck of the Gribshunden — the flagship of King Hans (or John) of Denmark until it sank in 1495 — show the vessel plied the seas as a fearsome ship of war armed with dozens of guns and packed with soldiers.
It’s thought that the Gribshunden was armed with up to 90 early cannons, although they were much smaller than the ship-smashing cannons of the late 16th century, and that they were complemented by armored soldiers firing handguns and crossbows from the ship’s upper deck, forecastle and sterncastle — the tall superstructures built at each end of the ship.
The 115-foot-long (35 meters) wooden ship was one of the first vessels designed to carry artillery. It also utilized the new “carvel” shipbuilding technique, imported to the Baltic from the Mediterranean, of joining the planks of the hull edge to edge on a wooden frame instead of overlapping them in “lapstrakes.”
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That meant the Gribshunden could be built larger and stronger than ships with lapstrakes, and so it could carry more in heavier seas.
“This is kind of a new technology,” Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden who is leading the latest excavations, told Live Science. “It was designed to carry artillery, and King Hans uses the ship in a way that no other king does.”
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Royal flagship
From the mid-1480s, Hans frequently journeyed on the Gribshunden throughout his realm, often surrounded by a large royal fleet, Foley said, adding that the ship was intended to intimidate the king’s rivals.
The son of the previous Danish king,…
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