Thirty Years War - 1989 magazine article

Review - Article

Came across a story from the 

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - APRIL 1989 issue while studying the Thirty Years War

KRONAN: REMNANTS OF A WARSHIP'S PAST

August 8, 1980

Wreck of the Swedish battleship Kronan discovered by remote-control television camera at the bottom of the Baltic Sea four miles east of the Swedish island of Oland. After a 30-year search by the article's author Anders Franzén he was hoping for proof of the wreck's identity. His crew raised one of the six-pounder ship's cannon bearing the inscription "VIVE LE ROI -1628. They had found the vessel, that year's largest of Sweden - the KRONAN or CROWN. It had sunk on June 1, 1676. King Karl XI's vessel had been nearly 200 feet long, weighed 2,350 tons and bore 126 guns. She had taken seven years to build. And she was destroyed in less than a minute. Close to 800 men died.

Crewman Anders Spaarfelt was blown sky high by the explosion, flew over two enemy ships and landed safely in the sail of a Swedish vessel.

Back in the 1650s the Danes had vowed to win back the Baltic provinces seized by Sweden.

The Kronan had been launched in 1668 and commissioned in 1672. Four years later she and 600 other Swedish warships were sent into action in the Baltic. Commanding the vessel was Baron Lorentz Creutz, also commanding admiral of the Swedish navy.  

The article's author, a naval historian and engineer had originally begun  searching the waters where the wreckage lay submerged. In 1956 he discovered the wreckage of the Swedish ship Vassa, sunk on her maiden voyage in 1628 out of Stockholm. In 1979 he resumed his search for the Kronan, almost three times the weight of the Vassa. And in 1980 it turned up on his crew's "device" (a remote control television camera, not a cell phone). The Geographic's article recounts some of the vast number of artifacts retrieved from the wreck.

The article ends:

"The recovery of Kronan off Hulterstad . . . is a major event and one of great significance even far outside the realm of marine archaeology . . . . This work and those fateful human events will remind us–despite everything–of our close contact with things past."

There could be no finer epitaph for Kronan.

David Minor

The Eggman Cometh

April 10, 2004

The famous poet and story teller from the north, not getting any younger, seeks warmer climes. He arrives in the town by the sea, writes some poems about farming, then dies. Big Yawn! Let's give it to the boys in rewrite. Tell 'em to punch it up a bit. So the rewrite crew, better known as the Medieval Mythmakers, takes the basic outline and cooks up their own version. Which goes something like this -

Long ago, in some Un-United Kingdom far to the west, a Druid magician and astrologer bedded the goddess Maia, or maybe one of her descendants, who soon gave birth to a son. (In an example of dueling myths, some versions even state Maia was a virgin.) It's said that on the day of his birth the ground under Rome shook. Perhaps looking far into the future and getting hooked on television westerns, Dad decided to call the boy Virgil. His parents initiated him into the mystical arts and, at the age of 14, he was sent off to a deserted temple to wait for visions. He was about to get a little shut-eye his first night when something told him to look under the rock he was going to use as a pillow. He uncovered an urn and pulled the stopper, releasing a demon, a beautiful female demon, who gave him a book of spells and a magic wand. And he was off to Hogwarts. No, that was another wizard; he was off east, to Rome.

He spent the first part of his life in the Italian capital, tossing off poetry and the occasional enchantment. Tourists can see the results of one of the latter in Rome today, the Bocca della Verita or Mouth of Truth. One wall at the Church of Santa Maria, contains a large face with a gaping mouth. You place your hand into the mouth. If you are telling the truth you will be unharmed; if there's a lie in your heart or on your lips the mouth snaps shut on your hand. I'm not making this up; ask any tour guide.

After writing the Aeneid Virgil did head south. Traveling down Italy's west coast he eventually came upon the city of Parthenope. Perched between a mountain and a wide, sweeping bay, the city's beauty worked its spell on the magician and he settled in, an early snowbird. There were many other newcomers to the area and it soon became necessary to start a suburb. Which quickly outgrew it's parent and was given the name Neapolis. Later it was decided that 'Naples' was easier to spell.

Virgil, falling in love with the sunny south, decided to make Naples his final dwelling place, but also felt that some home insurance wouldn't be a bad idea. Home-made, of course. Easter hadn't been invented yet, but the far-seeing magician decided to color an egg. Summoning up an ostrich egg, he colored half yellow, with an image of the sun on it, and the rest blue, bearing the symbol of the moon. He then said some magic words and proceeded to carry the egg around the walls of the entire city. Afterwards he passed the egg through vapors from burning sulfur as he intoned: "Though many live and die, the Egg remains, The twofold Egg that turns through night and day. Its shell contains the Force of Life within, Protected from the Chaos that surrounds. So also this our home shall be secure, However long the Egg is kept intact."

He then placed the egg in a cage supported by four pillars, symbolizing the four elements (This made for a very simple Periodic Table). The resulting structure was placed in a hole in the ground and a fortress was built over it. On an egg-shaped floor plan for extra insurance. It must have worked. Go to Naples today and you'll be shown the prison called Castello dell'Ovo, or Castle of the Egg.

Script 358

(c) 2004 David Minor / Eagles Byte

NAPOLEONIC COMPLEX

Script No, 480, September 16, 2006

© 2006 David Minor / Eagles Byte­

Back in June of this year [2006] the U. S. Interstate highway system celebrated its 50th anniversary. When it was built back in the 1950s one of the justifications for the immense project was national security. (It was named the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways). Rapid troop movement within the country would be facilitated.

Another set of projects under way 150 years earlier had a similar goal. Napoleon Bonaparte was the multi-tasker par excellence. To help solidify his sphere of influence over France and much of Italy he would have to be able to move his forces quickly to anticipated trouble spots - no plans for Moscow yet - and the biggest bottlenecks were the passes through the French and Italian Alps. He knew that from experience. So, in addition to his many other projects - defensive works in Belgium, Italy and Poland, the harbor at Cherbourg, a canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea (that one didn’t work out, then), and the beautification of Paris - the Corsican corporal undertook a roads project of his own.

The plan was to construct a broad carriage road along an alpine route that would penetrate the mountains between Switzerland and Italy at Simplon, and the French pass at Mont Cenis. The first or eastern would allow penetration close to the region around Milan and the more western would allow quick access to Turin.

Construction accounts and records are not readily available, but French engineers and road builders, working between the years 1803 and 1811, somehow managed to pull it off. On the outer fringes of the route Bonaparte had crews pushing roads through marshes and forests in north-eastern France and west-central Germany. In a time when most of the work was done by crude machines and brute strength the builders bridged ravines in the mountains and chopped passes through until carriages (and cannon, of course) could be sent rapidly back and forth between borders. It might take fifty winding miles of zig-zagging road to cover a crow’s flight of thirty and, although the eighteen-foot-width permitted three carriages to travel side-by-side, there were many sections where it took sixteen mules to pull them up and down the nearly perpendicular roadway. In the winter it was necessary to attach runners to the carriage wheels.

Several times a year the hands-on French dictator would make an inspection tour of the various projects he was pushing through western Europe. He’d stop at each work site and subject his project managers to a rigorous and minute examination of their progress, until he was fully satisfied with the work.

Back in 1804, the same year he became emperor, he wrote, "Men are only as large as the monuments they leave." He actually left several smaller ones - a hospice and barracks at Cenis and a triumphal arch (never completed) near Milan. Lord Byron had his own view of the engineering feat and perhaps, in an oblique dig, of its creator. “The Simplon is magnificent in its nature and its art – both God and Man have done wonders – to say nothing of the Devil – who must certainly have had a hand (or a hoof) in some of the rocks and ravines through and over which the works are carried.”