Back in 1982 I and Anders Wästfelt had, unknowingly of each other, started to look into the history of the Swedish East India Company (1731-1813), and the mystery that appeared to cloud the foundering of the Swedish Eastindiaman Gotheborg in 1745. I had at this time started to collect Chinese porcelain as a hobby.
When collecting anything it is normal that you also want to know more about it. It appeared to me as if on the muddy bottom of the Göta River there rested a fantastically exciting treasure, that could help me understand the 18th century people who brought this exciting porcelain back home to Sweden in the first place. It was the wreck of the Swedish Eastindiaman Gotheborg, that had foundered during mysterious circumstances 240 years earlier.
This cargo could also prove an invaluable help towards the dating of otherwise un-dateable Chinese export porcelain, still available in droves in Swedish antiques shops. One thing to remember is that this happened in the early 1980s which was much before people like Michael Hatcher had started to pick up whole porcelain cargoes in South East Asia.
One question that intrigued me and I could not find any answer to anywhere, was how come that the Gotheborg sank that close to home in the first place? It just must have left some kind of impressions in the literature, somewhere?
I looked everywhere. The Regional Archive (Landsarkivet) had a large collection of documents but nothing that answered this simple question. The Museum of Maritime History in Gothenburg had some documents too of which a lot were relating to the salvage operation by James Keiller and Carl Lyon in around 1906. The one line "due to the shortcomings of the pilot" that appeared in the Sven T Kjellberg (1972) book about the Swedish Eastindia Company, remained the one clue. Eventually I did find the actual source of this line in a small handwritten comment in the "Ledger A of the SOIC" at the Regional Archive in Göteborg but besides this, all remained infuriating darkness.
In the collection of the Historical Museum of Gothenburg some artefacts was kept that was made from blackened oak from the hull of the original Gotheborg. On these items there occationally occured small handwritten messages glued or stapled onto them, that hinted at that there had been something not quite regular with this foundering. The the word used was "underslef" meaning embezzlement, but nowhere was there any information to be found. Other sources talked about hidden compartments in the hull.
In this process I had started to track down and read every single book that could possibly mention this "accident". My hope was that somewhere in a fleeting obervation there would be recorded a contemporary meaning about what had happened. Or at least something. Most hope I had put into contemporary newspapers or travelogues, or published diaries that covered the period, but nothing. For one thing because at this time there were hardly any newpapers in the first place.
By now I had started to become convinced that there indeed must be something hidden here. I found it hard to belive that a financial loss of this magnitude, with ship, cargo and all, could have happened within sight of the home harbour without it leving any clear explanation anywhere, in any document. Then one reference appeared. It said that "in 1745 the captain Moreen himself was to come down to the City Magistrate to with hand on pen sign an explanation to what has transpired". This was good news but, nowhere in the archives could this specific document be found.
Then as fate would have it the antiques dealer Björn Gremner, introduced me to "a diver who had been down to the ship you are so interested in", as Björn put it. This was around Christmas time in 1982. And, yes I was interested to meet him. His name was Anders Wästfelt and he appeared with a box of shards and some wooden sticks. No doubt, these were porcelain shards and wood from the tea and porcelain chests of the lost East Indiaman Gotheborg. This nobody had seen before.
From then on we met regularly. Anders and his divers cum maritime archaeologists team did a lot of groundbreaking research as the excavation project progressed. Several books got published and the general interest in the Swedish 18th century as a period of peace, trade, science and general progress was very much promoted.
Eventually in 1992, ten years later the opportunity arrived that my ten years of research, could be combined with the enormous publicity and goodwill value that Anders' had created with his excavation project, into the founding of the second phase of the project, the reconstruction and rebuilding of a sailing replica of the Gotheborg.
Without my reading up of every single - published or not - source about the Swedish East India Company nobody else would have been able to guarantee that the project would be a thoroughly positive historical event, so that it could attract sponsors and that no dark secrets would be lurking anywhere; except possible why the original Gotheborg sank, but the point was that together we knew that this project would be feasable. There were great benefits to be reaped and if we were worth our salt as salespersons, we could do this.
Now, there were only a few hitches left to deal with. One, to create an organisation; to find a place to build a shipyard; to find someone who could build the ship and try to figure out how to finance the whole thing.
The list below is my personal list of printed sources I felt were of interest to the understanding and study of the Swedish East India Company (1731-1813). I tried to find and read every single one of these. One of the reasons was that every single one of them came with a list of sources, and I wanted to have and track them down too. I kept this list updated to 1995. After that I felt that we ourselves would be the main sources to most that was written and that there indeed were no published explanation to what really happened when the ship sank.
Ten years later, the 30th of September 2005 the Swedish Newspaper "Expressen" finally published the sensational news that a contemporary copy of the missing Declaration of Sea Accident had finally been found. It was added to the documents from a court case where the crew from the Gotheborg was suing the Captain for their missing payments due to the ships wreck.
Here is a direct link to my translation and a transcription of the original text. http://www.gotheborg.com/project/sjoforklaring.shtml. It looks good but all my research instincts tell me this is just another no explanation, granted, with more details to it.
Copyright © Jan-Erik Nilsson, Gothenburg, Sweden. 1982-2009.
Readers are encouraged to use the key combination 'CTRL'+'F' to search within this page.