New approaches to fighting at sea

When Vasa was being built, the tactics of sea battles were changing. Cannon had not yet been used in a coordinated or decisive way, and the goal was to capture the enemy ship by boarding, rather than to sink it. Later in the 17th century, ships and cannon were coordinated in the line of battle: opposing fleets fired at each other in two lines. Vasa stands somewhere between these two approaches to fighting at sea. She has a large number of heavy cannon, at the same time that she was manned and equipped for hand-to-hand combat. The high stern allowed men with muskets to shoot down into the decks of a lower ship, and on the upper deck were guns called stormstycken (literally, “assault guns”), which fired canisters of small shot and scrap metal, much like a giant shotgun.

A machine of war

The complete crew of Vasa was about 450 men, of whom 300 were soldiers.

Vasa was not the largest ship built in this period, nor did she have the most cannon. What made her perhaps the most powerful warship in the world up to that time was her broadside, the combined weight of the shot that could be fired from one side of the ship, more than 300 kg in all. A truly fearsome machine of war!

Armament

64 bronze cannon:

• 24-pounder – 48
• 3-pounder – 8
• 1-pounder – 2
• Stormstycken – 6 (of three different sizes)