Arguably Europe’s most extraordinary maritime museum is the Vasa Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden. It’s the home of King Gustavus Adolphus’ short-lived flagship, the Vasa, which on 10 August 1628, flooded and abruptly sank minutes into her maiden voyage. The root cause of the catastrophe was a flawed ship design.
The Vasa Museet’s centerpiece is the entire ship, recovered in 1961 and carefully preserved after more than three centuries on the bottom; a superb collection of ship’s gear, period artifacts, and crew manikins, realistically modeled from some among the eleven sets of discovered human remains. To visit the Vasa is to return to the early 17th century at sea.
A museum in Portsmouth, England’s historic naval dockyard offers a less complete but still fascinating glimpse of an even earlier combatant ship, the Mary Rose, King Henry VIII’s flagship, sunk in 1545 and substantially, but not entirely, recovered in 1982.
The Mary Rose aside, my candidate for a close second place in the European maritime museum sweepstakes is the Museu Marítim, sited in the restored buildings of the medieval Barcelona Royal Shipyard at the southern end of this city’s pedestrian promenade, La Rambla, and close to its near-200-foot-high monument to Christopher Columbus, the Mirador de Colom.
The centerpiece of the Museu Marítim is a spectacular, life-sized replica of the Real, Don Juan of Austria’s flagship. On the afternoon of Sunday, 7 October 1571—very late in the usual fighting season—he led the fleet of the Holy League against the massed galleys of the Ottoman sultan, Selim II, at the Battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras, west of Greece. The original Real was built in 18 months, beginning January 1568, in the same yard in which her replica was constructed from 1965 to 1971 and is now handsomely exhibited, faithfully painted in a scheme originally described by Juan de Malara, one of Spanish King Philip II’s courtiers in Madrid. De Malara finished the original allegorical design begun by Giovanni Battista Castello of Seville.
By 16th-century standards, the Real was enormous, and even by current standards the sleek galley under two towering masts is beautiful and imposing: nearly 200 feet long, 24 feet across the rowing frames. She was home afloat to 236 oarsmen—slaves or convicts pulling in fours on each of 59 near-400-pound oars—and 400 sailors and soldiers, and carried five forward-firing cannon and a number of smaller swivel guns in broadside.
The enormous battle—in which some 212 galleys and galleasses of the Holy League fought nearly 330 generally smaller Ottoman galleys, galliots, and fustas—was the biggest and last naval battle exclusively between vessels under oars. In terms of the scale of fighting afloat and the losses of men (approaching 35,000) and ships, Lepanto wouldn’t be rivaled until 20th-century fleet actions.
Lepanto arrested the Turks’ expansion over water only temporarily—they rebuilt their fleet in just two years—and the Ottomans had enough vigor more than a hundred years later to threaten Christendom by besieging Vienna a second time. The Ottoman Empire didn’t finally collapse until after World War I, having placed a bad bet on a German victory.
Other museum exhibits include handsome models of ship types at sea during the great age of exploration, including the nao, the lateen-sailed xebec, the carrack, and the armed galleon, as well as examples of contemporary work boats of the western Mediterranean. The museum also includes a well-stocked gift shop and a café. Access to the museum is through the Plaza del Portal de la Paz.