The sea monster figurehead from a 15th century ship believed to be the best preserved vessel from the late medieval period has been raised from the Baltic Sea near Sweden, approximately 500 years after the Danish warship sunk while anchored at a port in Ronneby.
Johan Rönnby, a professor of maritime archaeology at Södertörn University, told BBC News that the creature on the figurehead is “some kind of fantasy animal” which looked like “a dragon with lion ears and crocodile-like mouth. And there seems to be something in his mouth.”
The figurehead, which belonged to a 15th-century warship owned by Danish King Hans known as the Gribshunden, weighed 660 pounds and was carved from the top of an 11-foot-long beam, according to Discovery News. The vessel reportedly went down in 1495 after it caught fire while en route from Copenhagen, Denmark to Kalmar on the eastern coast of Sweden.
Well-preserved wreckage could reveal much about ancient ships
The Gribshunden, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus’ flagship Santa Maria, is believed to be the best-preserved specimen of a 15th-century shipwreck ever discovered, as experts said that precious few wrecks from that era escape the ravages of sea worms, the website added.
“The ship comes from a time just when Columbus was sailing across the ocean and Vasco da Gama also went to India,” Marcus Sandekjer of the Blekinge Museum, a group involved in the salvage effort, told Reuters. “This is the same period and we can learn very much about how the ships were made, how they were constructed since there are no ships left from this time.”
“It’s unique in the world and I think there are going to be more excavations around here and we’re going to find some more unique objects,” he added. “But this… today is just fantastic.”
Sandekjer, Rönnby and the rest of their team said that they hope to recover more of the wreck of the Gribshunden to the surface of the near future. The location of the discovery is fortuitous, as it was found in the Baltic Sea’s brackish waters. which are unattractive to sea worms. Armor and weapons have previously been recovered from the wreckage, said ABC News Australia.
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Feature Image Credit: Södertörn University
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