The Vasa: A Warship That Sank in 20 Minutes

In 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa set sail on her maiden voyage, built to be the pride of the Swedish navy — and sank before she’d even left Stockholm’s harbor.

Top-heavy with too many heavy cannons and too little ballast to compensate, the ship rolled over in a light gust of wind less than a mile into her voyage. Dozens of people on board drowned.

A Perfectly Preserved Mistake

The Vasa lay largely intact on the cold, low-oxygen floor of the harbor for over 300 years, which paradoxically preserved her wooden hull almost perfectly. She was raised in 1961 and is now one of the best-preserved 17th-century ships in the world.

Investigations later found that the king himself had personally overruled engineers’ concerns about the ship’s stability — a reminder that even obvious warnings can be ignored when a powerful enough person wants a different answer.

How often do you think engineering warnings still get overruled by people who simply outrank the engineers?