A 15th-century royal warship resting off the coast of Sweden had cannons, handguns, crossbows and other weapons, according to a new underwater investigation.
The wreck of the Gribshunden, the flagship of King Hans (or John) ofDenmark, was found to be a fearsome ship of war 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 accompanied by armored soldiers firing handguns and crossbows from the ship's upper
One of the first vessels designed to carry weapons was the wooden ship. The new "carvel" shipbuilding technique, imported to the Baltic from the Mediterranean, was used to join the planks of the hull edge to edge on a wooden frame.
New photos show that a $17 billion wreck is remarkablypreserved.
The Gribshunden could be built larger and stronger than ships with lapstrakes because of that.
Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science that this is a new technology. King Hans uses the ship in a way that is unique to him.
The image is the first of three.
The ship was intended to intimidate the king's rivals and he frequently traveled on it from the mid-1480s.
Sweden didn't submit to Hans' rule until 1497 after he gained the crown of Norway.
He is trying to get Sweden to join the Nordic Union. Hans is on this ship a lot. The Kalmar Union was the name of the Nordic Union after the town in Sweden where it was agreed in 1399.
Hans embarked on the Gribshunden, also known as the "Griffon", for negotiations at Kalmar when the ship mysteriously sank, supposedly after a fire broke out, at an anchorage just offshore.
A witness to the disaster said many of the men on the ship were killed.
Many of the ship's guns were probably salvaged soon after the sinking, as the latest excavations found only 14 gun carriages near the stern.
The eastern Baltic Sea is too cold for shipworms, which is a mollusk. The wooden gun carriages are still intact even though the iron guns have rusted away.
The ship sank after being holed below the waterline, possibly because its gunpowder stores had exploded. One of the first ships to carry gunpowder probably didn't have standard operating procedures in place for safety.
The ship was teeming with extreme creatures.
The image is the first of three.
The wreck of the Gribshunden was rediscovered by local divers in the 70s. The figurehead of a person clutched in the jaws of a dog or dragon was recovered in 2015, Live Science reported.
The team recovered more artifacts and captured three-dimensional data during the August and September dives.
The Age of Exploration ships that were built at the same time but are now lost are a proxy for the wreck. This is the only one like it that has been found.
He said that the combination of guns and crossbows, as well as the remnants of shirts of mail armor, show the transition from earlier weapons to gunpowder.
The guns on the larger ship were mounted on the carriages and fired projectiles that were about the size of golf balls. The handguns were very simple and had projectiles that were fired by touching a match to a hole in the back. They were a small cannon.
The study of the Gribshunden is not being led by a maritime archaeologist, but he is leading research into a rare 400 year old ship found in the western Baltic. One of the oldest purpose-built warships ever discovered was the Gribshunden.
When a trading bloc dominated the Baltic from the 13th to 17th century, archers were put on cargo ships. The Gribshunden had cannons on the forecastle and sterncastle.
It was originally published on Live Science
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