Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [45]
This wrecked ship looks as if she could be pumped free of water and, with a few repairs, rerigged and fitted with sail, resume a voyage interrupted 230 years ago. Discovering that Vrouw Maria is so intact raises the big question as Mike approaches the open cargo hatch. What will we find? The camera on Mike’s helmet reveals a tightly packed hold with very little space between the top of the cargo and the deck. It looks like Lorentz and his crew did not get very far in unpacking Vrouw Maria. We can see hundreds of clay tobacco pipes and an open crate that displays piles of eyeglass lenses. We can also see other crates, tall and narrow, standing on end.
Thanks to Christian Ahlstro m’s research, we know what Lorentz and his crew managed to pull out of the hold; some of it matches what had been declared to the Danish customs officials at Elsinore—and much of it does not. Among the diverse cargo that Vrouw Maria’s crew salvaged were rolls of cloth (both coarse and fine), lead chests of coffee, a chest of tea, a chest of bound books, a box of cheese, a box of snuff, a box of “mirrors with gold frames, one round box of cartouche-packed tobacco, one round box with a small musical mechanism, twelve small ivory eggs, one linen package containing six pairs of cotton stockings,” plus a large painting with a gilt frame and five smaller pictures. These items were listed in the archives because the Swedes ended up auctioning them under the provisions of admiralty law. The Russians were eager to retrieve what they could, particularly the Empress Catherine’s treasures, but the Swedish governor of Turko, Baron Christopher Rappe, reported that “unfortunately, Her Majesty’s paintings are not included.”
As I look at the tin crates standing on their ends, trapped by other cargo, I know I’m not alone in hoping that they hold Catherine’s paintings. No one knows just how many paintings the Russian agents bought in Amsterdam and placed in Vrouw Maria for shipment to St. Petersburg. In 1961, Dutch researcher Clara Bille studied the fate of the Braamcamps collection in her doctoral dissertation, and working from that, Maritime
A drawing of the bow of Vrouw Maria. Piirtänyt Kalle Salonen, Nauvo Trunsjö
Museum of Finland curator Ismo Malinen has suggested that as many as thirty-five of the Braamcamps paintings ended up on the ill-fated ship.
Vague descriptions exist for many of the paintings, outside of brief notations in the Braamcamps auction catalog printed in July 1771. There were two paintings by Coedyk, a tableau and a scene of a man and woman sitting at a table. There was a Rubens portrait of “one of the four evangelists,” and a “portrait of a man” by Rembrandt. There was a painting of a “lady at a table” by Gerard Douw, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, and a scene of a man driving a herd of bulls by another Dutch master, Paulus Potter. Van Balen and Bruegel’s The Virgin and Infant Jesus, and three other Bruegels of unidentified landscapes and people, were packed in with paintings by Joseph Laquy, Jan van den Helden, Adriaen van Ostade, Jan van Gooyen, Adriaen van de Velde, Philips Wouwerman, Guido Reni, Lo Spagnoletto and several other artists. One of the paintings was an appropriate subject to be in a shipwrecked and sunken art collection: Abraham Stork’s Ships at Sea.
The narrow tin crates in the hold of Vrouw Maria may very well contain these paintings, but we will not know for sure until the archeologists methodically excavate the ship and every crate is raised to the surface, then carefully and scientifically opened in the lab.
Mike approaches the bow, and the bluff, almost apple-cheeked shape of the old ship comes into view. The open hawse pipes gape like empty eye sockets. Trailing off the bow is a fallen section of mast that has an end shaped like the side of a giant cello. The age of the ship is apparent, and for me, it is thrilling