“The Osmund Wreck is unique – I’ve never seen anything like it,” says diver Jim Hansson, marine archaeologist at Sweden’s Vrak, the Museum of Wrecks in Stockholm. “The type of ship is still unknown to us and there are still large areas of the shipwreck and cargo that are unexplored.”
Now a grant equivalent to almost £120,000 from Swedish charity the Voice of the Ocean Foundation means that an archaeological operation to explore the rare 500-year-old Baltic wreck will be able to go ahead in 2024, with Hansson as project manager.
“Each dive provides new information and, thanks to the grant from Voice of the Ocean, we can carry out significant excavations of the wreck as soon as the spring,” he says. The foundation conducts, supports and promotes ocean science and communications.
The large, clinker-built, three-masted Osmund Wreck was found at a depth of 30m north of Dalarö in Stockholm’s central archipelago in December 2017.
Archaeological divers from Vrak, which is part of the Swedish Maritime & Transport History Museums (SMTM), carried out the initial investigations and were able to date the vessel to the middle of the 16th century. They also established that there were unusually large amounts of iron – mainly in the form of “osmunds” – in what appeared to be the intact cargo.
Osmunds are small standardised balls of wrought iron, weighing just under 300 grams each. Associated with the first European production of cast iron in furnaces such as Lapphyttan in Sweden, these were exported from the early Middle Ages to the start of the 17th century.
The sailors’ personal belongings also remain on the shipwreck, along with kettles and other galley utensils. Besides osmunds, some of the barrels contain what could be anything from butter to tar or potash and still require analysis.
Research on the Osmund Wreck can expand knowledge about 16th-century iron production, trade, shipping and shipbuilding modernisation, says Vrak, which will resume the work begun in 2018 as a joint research project with Jernkontoret, an organisation that compiles data on the Swedish iron and steel industries. Their long-term project is called “The Baltic Sea as an Iron Market”.
“Since it is very rare to find large amounts of osmund iron, there is great international interest in our research,” says Jernkontoret co-ordinator Catarina Karlsson. “In the Baltic Sea, only a few parallels to this wreck have been found – one in Germany, one in Polish waters and recently a wreck off Tallinn [Estonia].”
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Absolutely incredible! Closest I’ll ever get to exploring a Shipwreck. Thanks so much!