Was Wasa aka Vasa painted WHITE below the waterline?

[Fever 4 the Sea]

Ahoy there mateys!

I'm still gathering information on the colouring of the Was ship.

I have the basic wood colour sprayed onto the hull and decks as well as the red. I've also drilled out ALL of the holes in the deck and forebeak gratings.

I'm wondering if the Was was painted WHITE below the waterline? Does anyone here know?

Cheers

 

[AndyA]

Seventeenth century ships are often depicted as whitish below the waterline. This was not paint but a coating of tallow and other stuff. The color might vary depending on the other stuff. With tar, darker. With lime, lighter. With sulfur, yellower. In any case, I would suggest that a model shouldn't be too white but look kinda dirty. Pictured is my idea of the schooner Sultana of 1767. Fair winds!

 

[Short John Bronze]

Very informative. Thank you. This resurrects the old chestnut of authenticity vs aesthetics! Dirty white vs bright white; Blackened vs shiny brass fittings; guns out (both sides) but courses not brailed and capstan bars in place etc. Let us all do what we are happy with and not bow to the approach (or reproach) of others.

 

[AllanKP69]

If you want to be 100% sure, these contacts may be helpful. The bottom was probably coated as described by Andy. Metal sheathing did not come about until about 150 years after Wasa was launched and promptly capsized in the harbor.
vasamuseet@smtm.se
Fred.Hocker@smtm.se I think this is his email
46 08-519 548 80 ( 10 am-5 pm, Wednesdays 10 am-8 pm)

 

[Greyfox]

This text is copyed from Wasa museums web-site. Translate from swedish with google.

In the years 1990-2002, the conservator and art historian Peter Tångeberg researched how Vasa was painted. Approximately 1200 paint samples from the ship were analyzed and the results are fascinating: Vasa was a very colorful ship when she set sail in 1628. The sculptures were painted in many and strong colors and some were gilded with gold leaf.

The hull was tarred and this gave it a reddish-brown hue. But a lot of Vasa was painted bright red: the gangway, that is, the upper parts of the ship's sides, the transom at the rear and the galleon. The upper part of the gangway, the railing, was pale yellow. Moldings and panels were often painted yellow.

Link (in swedish): https://www.vasamuseet.se/utforska/vasas-historia/skulpturerna-pa-vasa

 

[Van]

The Vasa museum has a very large, highly detailed model of the ship (as well as the actual ship). The paint is as Greyfox describes. The carvings in particular are exquisitely painted in many colors. The model has no paint below the waterline. There doesn't seem to be any visible paint on the actual ship below the waterline

 

[Van]

Just for amusement I asked chatgpt "Was the Vasa painted white below the waterline?"
Here is the answer I got...

No, the Vasa was not painted white below the waterline.

Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the hull below the waterline was treated with a mixture of tar, pitch, and possibly animal hair or other fibrous materials, giving it a dark brown or black appearance. This coating was common practice in the 17th century to protect wooden hulls from shipworm and rot.

The above-water parts of the ship, on the other hand, were richly painted in bright colors—reds, blues, golds, and greens—based on pigment analysis of the recovered ship and historical records. But below the waterline, white paint would have been highly impractical and uncharacteristic of the era.

If you’re working on a model or reconstruction, a dark, tarred lower hull would be historically accurate.

 

[AllanKP69]

If you’re working on a model or reconstruction, a dark, tarred lower hull would be historically accurate.

I think that depends on the country of the model. English ships were commonly coated with a mixture of horse hair and sulfur, bound together with tallow, not tar or pitch (which probably would have done a better job ) Felt was sometimes used by the British instead of horse hair.

Interestingly, Goodwin comments in The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War page 226 that regardless of the coating, a layer of board was nailed over it, I had never read this before or heard anyone comment about this. Do you or does anyone have any more information on this? While most contemporary models show no coatings or plating, those that I have found with payed bottoms are all whitish yellow in color with no sign of cover boarding.
Allan

 

[Ben Gilbert]

A layer of sacrificial planking was often laid over the paying stuff to protect the hull from teredo worms.

 

[fred.hocker]

We have looked pretty carefully at the bottom of Vasa to answer this specific question, since it comes up from modellers all the time. Here is the current state of the answer:

The hull both above and below the waterline was certainly coated with tar. When new, this gave the oak a reddish-brown colour. Had the ship remained in service instead of sinking 40 minutes into its career, the colour would have darkened due to more coats of tar, oxidation, and dirt, towards a brownish-black. In plenty of places, there is still gooey tar on the bottom of the hull (I know, I have gotten it on my clothes and in my hair).

The lower hull could have been coated with something else, such as a tallow mixture, on top of the tar, but we have not found any indication of this. Tallow does survive in a number of other, more protected places on the ship (in the pump boxes, for example), but it is fragile stuff. We know from the navy yard's account books (whch survive for 1625-1626) that the yard purchased tallow, and even had a particular person who travelled the country buying it (his name was Lapp Mas, which suggests that he was Sami, from northern Scandinavia). However, the amounts that the navy purchased do not look large enough for the navy to tallow the bottoms of all of its hulls, which needed to be done on at least an annual basis. English logbooks for the 17th century frequently mention ships careening to retallow the bottoms, often more than once a year if sailed hard, and the upper part of the bottom, near the waterline, was retallowed every couple of months by heeling the ship to first one side and then the other in a calm anchorage or when hove to (called giving the ship a new set of boot toppings). It does not look like the Swedish navy was buying enough tallow to do this.

There is no sign on the hull itself that there was a marked demarcation for the waterline or division between bottom and topsides. In some ships, this was marked with an incised line, although in others it was just the edge of the bottom coating.

Shipworm (Teredo) was not an issue for ships operating only in the Baltic, as the water is too fresh for them (they need at least 1.7% salinity, the Baltic is mostly less than 0.9%), but weed did grow on the bottoms of ships and had to be cleaned off by scraping or breaming, and the navy yard had a careening dock for bottom maintenance.

In short, the most likely colour for the bottom of Vasa is tarred oak (choose your favourite shade of dirty reddish brown), but a tallowed bottom in dirty white/grey is not impossible.

Fred

 

[Gaal130]

Szerintem ez a modell országától függ. Az angol hajókat általában lószőr és kén keverékével vonták be, amit faggyúval kötöttek össze, nem kátránnyal vagy szurokkal (ami valószínűleg jobban működött volna ). A britek néha filcet használtak lószőr helyett.

Érdekes módon Goodwin a * The Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War* (Az angol hadihajó építése és felszerelése) című művében a 226. oldalon megjegyzi, hogy a bevonattól függetlenül egy réteg deszkát szegeztek rá. Ezt korábban soha nem olvastam, és nem is hallottam senkitől ilyen megjegyzést. Van erről további információd? Míg a legtöbb kortárs modellen nincs bevonat vagy lemez, azok, amelyeket fizetős aljúnak találtam, mind fehéressárga színűek, és a deszkázatnak semmi nyoma.
Allan

View attachment 535621

 

[Gaal130]

A VOC BATAVIA hajótestét a vízvonal alatt 5 cm vastag vörösfenyő fával borították, hogy megvédjék a fúró lövedékektől.

 

[DARIVS ARCHITECTVS]

Letting the texture show through the white stuff retains the detail you worked so hard on while planking.