Aboard the World's Largest Wooden Sailing Ship! | Götheborg Of Sweden

We're here in London's Docklands but of course we're not here for the skyscrapers. No, no, no, we're here for this. Now you'll probably know that we love a bit of maritime history on this channel so when we heard that one of the world's most impressive ships was in London for just a few days we had to check it out. Exactly, this is the Gotterberg. It's a replica of an 18th century Swedish East India Company trading vessel and it holds the title of the world's largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship and it actually leaves in a few hours so we best get on board. All right, let's go. Look at this. Time for the master. Before we start going I'd like to present the crew to you. The reconstructed Gotterberg may be the largest wooden sailing ship in the world today but in the early 18th century the original was just one of many huge trading vessels on the high seas. Now for a long period of time exotic goods reached Sweden via the Silk Roads however in the 16th century this all changed when the traditional land routes were eventually replaced by maritime transportation. The Swedish East India Company situated in the port city of Gothenburg was established in 1731 to conduct maritime trade with China and the Far East. In this respect Sweden was relatively late to the party the last of the prominent seafaring European nations to engage in the East India trade. Once it had secured a 15-year monopoly on all Swedish trade with the East Indies the company traded mostly with China throughout the 18th century completing 132 voyages with 37 ships, the Gotterberg included. Swedish company ships would sell silver acquired through the exchange of timber, copper and iron in Spain for Chinese tea, silk and the much desired porcelain. The party would not last long however with increasing competition and the introduction of new rules and regulations regarding the imports of tea to England the profits of the Swedish East India Company dwindled and the risks of smuggling the commodity now outweighed the benefits. Now despite the Swedish East India Company going bankrupt the enormous profits clearly influenced Swedish history and the footprints can be seen to this day. This ship is a clear example of how the company's legacy has endured. Originally named the East India Man the Gotterberg was built in Terranova Stockholm and officially launched in 1738. Now according to one Swedish writer building a three-masted sailing ship like this could take as little as 18 months. With a name clearly influenced by the establishment of the company in Gothenburg the Swedish ship set sail on its maiden voyage in 1739 with a crew of 144, 30 cannon and a whopping cargo capacity of 830 tons. Although life was harsh for the crew most trading voyages were uneventful and extremely profitable. Pirates were a perennial issue and on one occasion the ship was hijacked by an English frigate off the coast of Spain. The real disaster struck on the 12th of September 1745. The ship ran aground on a rock on its way into Gothenburg harbour returning from its third voyage to China. To learn more about the fate of the original ship I spoke to the chief guide and event manager aboard the Gotterberg Cecilia Bothorp. Cecilia first of all I know I'm pronouncing it wrong how do you pronounce it in Swedish? In Swedish Göteborg. Göteborg. Okay I might stick to Gothenburg just for now. Oh it's okay. It was a very experienced captain on board. Yeah. This was a voyage that they had done like you said three times. Yeah. What went wrong? We don't know. Okay. Yet we don't know. It's still a mystery. Yeah is it a mystery yeah and some scam about insurance no because the insurance system was not as likely as today so no one knows and this was the the date was the 12th of September 1745 and it was a really bright day a little brisk conditions were fine they could see everything and yet they still managed to and did it sink straight away or was it oh no it was standing on the ground and of course and no one died at this occasion and for several months of course they were bringing up the the exotic goods that they have brought back from China and saving the rigs and all the details the cannons I think and as much as as it was possible and the ship was standing on the ground for more than 100 years wow it wasn't crash sank forgotten no but they couldn't salvage it it was no it was it was almost it was there to see but it was exactly yeah and the the noble persons and society in Gothenburg were conducted diving tours to the to the ground and in it is called the porcelain ground and today below deck you can see some of those finds on display so when they excavated the ship in 1984 they managed to salvage roughly 10% of the cargo and we know it was exactly 10% because we have the original amounts of cargo on board and it would have consisted mainly of this sort of stuff here we have ready to order Chinese porcelain that would have been silk and here we actually have some original pieces from the excavations and some porcelain here and the detail is still absolutely extraordinary the ship was forgotten because on the west coast in Sweden the water is very salty and in the water lives a worm that eats the wood so it's mainly nothing left of the original ship but of course all the iron nails nails yeah yeah they are still there yeah and they can be weighed in so of course if you mark it on a paper you can see the shape of the ship and that and contemporary paintings from that time so all this together was giving us the idea to not just do a model small one like this but a model with a scale one to one and that idea was quite incredibly turned into reality but it wasn't easy funds had to be raised the disused Eriksberg's wharf in Gothenburg had to be pressed back into service and a team of modern craftsmen needed to relearn the shipbuilding techniques of the 18th century now the original Gothenburg may have taken less than two years to build but this one took about eight so construction started in 1995 it was launched in 2003 and then went on its maiden voyage around the world ending up in China in 2005 and the reason that it took so long to build was because so much research went into making this ship look like the original so the Gothenburg obviously not as big as some of the huge warships of the day but still pretty big so 58 meters long it's 47 meters tall from the top of the mast down to the waterline five decks in total including the sun deck and a deck that's sort of below the waterline and it's serviced today by 70 to 80 crew and 20 of them are professional the rest are volunteers who kind of join the ship at the various ports that it stops at now they also used 10 tons of hemp rope when building this ship as well as almost 2000 square meters of linen sail and that was all made using 18th century techniques and just like the 18th century maintaining the ship's wood, rope and sails provides plenty of work so Aurelion is the sail maker of the Gothenburg and can you just tell us a little bit about what you're doing i mean is this intense work are you having to repair a lot of this stuff yeah exactly my job is to repair sails and to repair and fix sails i believe there's 2000 square meters of sail on this ship so that's quite a lot and potentially does it does it get torn and broken quite often if you're sailing on the ocean they're not often broken it's just the old sails this one for example have 20 years old 20 years old okay one trip to china many trips in europe below deck you get a sense of how much thought must have gone into this epic reconstruction and where a few compromises had to be made down here we get a really good view of the main mast here and you can see it's made of 18 different pine trees sort of twisted together and the way it's fixed in position is these iron bars would be heated to 800 degrees they'd expand placed around the mast and then cooled so they'd contract and hold this in place now there isn't loads of headroom in the reconstruction of these decks but they're not actually quite as low as the originals would have been they're about 10 centimeters higher now that's to comply with working regulations but obviously people in the 18th century would have been a bit shorter than today okay so we've come right to the front of the ship to the bow this is the modern carpenter's workshop here you've also got the anchor chain which would be pulled up using this lever but kind of interestingly about this area the toilets in the 18th century would have been here right next to the bowsprit so there'd have been a little opening to the open air there you'd have gone out onto a platform and that's where you'd have done your business but also every nook and cranny of the ship would have been used for storage this was a trading vessel after all and if we go down here we're going to see that there's plenty more storage space two more decks to go down beyond the waterline another deck here that would have been full of woods and copper and all the things that they would have traded at Cadiz and in the far east and then we go down even further I mean this is right below the waterline it's absolutely full of rope hemp rope down here which just shows how much you need to carry to keep this vessel going there's a really strong musty smell down here and I think it's from the tar that's used to coat all of these ropes that's what they would have used on the original 18th century vessel it's a really distinct smell but basically it protects these ropes from fungus and it's essential but what I really wanted to know was what sailing this unique ship is actually like I spoke to a man well acquainted with the challenges of working on an 18th century replica what are the kind of key challenges of sailing a wooden ship today? I mean you have some kind of modern appliances aboard you have an engine of course to kind of you know to get you places but what are the kind of key challenges of a wooden ship? I think one of our biggest challenges from the practical side is that modern harbours are not designed for sailing ships so we do have to motor in and out as a matter of safety we have the engines in addition they would have had twice as many people on a ship like this back in the day labour was cheap and how do you say wages were cheap but now we do it with half the number of people but it's still just as heavy to use this stuff right not too many people have the skills to work this kind of ship today presumably no it's rather niche one thing that's very iconic is the spritzels in Swedish we call it the blinda and the skuvblinda you don't see that on modern ships so much anymore but it's interesting because they're actually incredibly important to the balance of the ship and to be able to keep the rudder as straight as possible if you have to counter any turning with the rudder you create drag in the water and you go slower so it's in our best interest to do our job right and trim all the sails evenly across the length of the vessel so we can steer as straight as possible and go as fast as possible our topsails are incredibly heavy if you look at for instance this line here which is one of the topsail sheets around all four sides of the topsail this size line is stitched into the side and just this rope weighs a lot and that's without accounting for the the flax canvas and then when it's wet too and has absorbed a lot of water it's uh i think it's 500 to 700 kilograms dry wow so you can imagine what that is saturated with water yeah so they are yeah incredibly heavy takes a lot of effort to put a good stow in yeah i mean i guess that's the challenge of having a slightly smaller crew on board but if you if you see these guys we there's so much technique involved we very seldom just pull on a line we often more jerk on a line and to quote the famous captain Irving Johnson it's like the difference between pushing a nail into a piece of wood versus hitting it with a hammer you can generate a lot more force in an instant by everybody in unison jerking at the same time and so these guys are getting ready to brace around the foreyard here and they're probably going to try to sharpen it up more so they're pulling on the port side to pull this end of the yard closer to them and giving slack on this side to allow it to go out with the new volunteers working hard to ready the ship for departure i thought i'd lend a hand and it's most effective to have outstretched arms using your grip strength not wasting your arm strength and use your strong muscles and your legs to lean back into it and keep a foot behind you in case it becomes slack very quickly you don't land on your ass great so this is like the anchor position and tug of war right so dave this is the the ship's wheel the helm is the right term right exactly i mean the first thing i notice about this is you can't really see where you're going can you no not on this ship but you don't really need to we have a skylight here and one of these panels opens up so the navigator the mate on the watch can tell you a compass course or a rudder angle to maintain and then you just do it here you can see a bit of the horizon so you can see some relative motion to see how fast you're turning but we also have some modern gear to help us with that so the technical job the kind of the officer would probably be standing up there right yeah exactly they're the ones kind of who are sort of assessing the course and this guy's just following instructions we're just the dumb muscle got it and so essentially this wheel turns the rudder at the back of the ship and that's what yeah to give a good explanation you can see it here we have the helm up here with this rope this rope made from 14 moose pelts it's a leather rope so it doesn't stretch as much it goes down two decks to the steering flats where it then goes outboard through a block and inboard attaching to this massive tiller like this big which is attached to the rudder so you can see the comparative size of the wheel yeah a huge rudder that's turning excellent much as we'd have loved to stow ourselves aboard as the ship headed for open seas it was time for us and London to wave goodbye to the Gothenburg so Luke just remind me how you pronounce the name of this ship I think it's Jotaboyn it's all about the confidence anyway don't quote me on that excellent but what a fantastic reconstruction of a ship yeah I think the history of the original ship is absolutely fascinating but this ship has a history of its own doesn't it? it does yeah and what really strikes me is that people can volunteer to sail on this ship today and actually get that experience of what it would have been like in the 18th century I don't think we've really seen that before have you? members of the public on board learning how to sort of set the sails incredible stuff and it's just the size isn't it it's the sheer scale this is the largest wooden ship in the world it's absolutely insane heading off to China heading off to China well we wish you luck welcome to the History Hit YouTube channel hope you enjoyed that video and if you'd like to see more videos where we attempt to try and bring history to life please don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell cheers guys see you soon