Immediately after the catastrophe, the search for who was responsible began. Vasa's Danish-born captain Söfring Hansson was arrested and interrogated immediately at the Royal Palace "Tre Kronor". The questions were many.
"Were the men drunk? Were all the cannon properly secured?"
The Captain replied:
"You can chop me into a thousand pieces if all of those cannon weren't secured. And before God Almighty I swear that nobody onboard was drunk. It was simply a little gust of wind that made the ship capsize. The ship was too unstable, even though all the ballast was in."
No evidence remains from Captain Hansson’s testimony during the main inquiry a month later, but his words still linger:
"The ship was too unstable!"
The crew said the same thing. Nothing was done wrong onboard. The problem was that the ship was too unstable.
Jöran Matsson, the ship’s master, revealed that before the ship’s departure, the captain wanted to demonstrate the ships instability for Vice Admiral Klas Fleming. The demonstration consisted of 30 men running back and forth over the deck to make the ship roll. After three rounds the admiralforced them to stop or the ship would have capsized. Fleming was one of the Nnvy's most influential men and a personal friend of King Gustav Adolf.
Admiral Fleming was never questioned, but is reported to have said:
"If only His Majesty were home!"
Suspicions subsequently shifted to those responsible at the shipyard where Vasa was built. But the master shipbuilder, Hein Jacobsson, and one of the principal contractors, Arendt Hybertsson, maintained before the Royal Council and the Admiralty that Vasa was built according to dimensions that the King himself had approved. Hybertsson added that only God knew who's fault it was.
To refer to the King and God was of course a way of avoiding responsibility.
And as far as we know today, nothing was ever clarified and nobody was ever punished for the incident.
Today we can establish that Vasa was a very well built ship and that it didn't differ much from other warships of the 1600s
All ships with lots of cannon were tall and unstable by modern standards and they occasionally capsized. The cause of the catastrophe must therefore lie in the period’s inadequate knowledge of how to build and sail a large vessel with two gundecks, as well as the specific choice on that day to sail with all the gunports open.
Find out more about the circumstances of the catastrophe in the presentation about the sinking.