Crowded into a small dinghy, the crew rowed over to a small island, not much bigger than a rock, and spent a cold night. When help arrived the next morning, Lorentz and his men learned that they were stranded off the southern coast of Finland in the Turko Archipelago, a maze of twenty thousand islets, islands and rocks. The ship, surprisingly, was still afloat, though there was little chance of saving her as the decks were close to the water. But some of the cargo might be saved, so Lorentz ordered the crew back to Vrouw Maria. For the next three days, they worked the pumps to keep the rising water in the hold from swamping the ship. The sugar cargo was certainly ruined; when Lorentz tasted the water pouring out of the pumps as the men labored, it was sweet. His dismay deepened when each stroke of the pumps brought up gouts of coffee beans. The crates, bundles, bags and boxes in the flooded hold were banging and bumping around, and breaking up.
Lorentz’s luck held long enough for the crew to open the hatches and start pulling out the top layer of cargo. Taking their knives in hand, the sailors also cut down Vrouw Maria’s sails and some of her rigging, salvaging everything they could before the ship slipped into the deep. Finally, on October 9, as they rowed to the ship after spending the night ashore, they found the sea was empty. In the night, alone in the darkness, Vrouw Maria had finally sunk. There was no trace of the ship, not a scrap of floating debris, to mark her passing.
Count Nikita Panin, Russia’s foreign minister, sat at his desk, signing a confidential letter to the Swedish government. His letter asked the Swedes, who controlled the Turko Archipelago, to assist the Russians in an “unusual” matter. Vrouw Maria’s secret shipment had included not only silver, snuffboxes and art for members of the Imperial Court but also, Panin explained, “several crates with valuable paintings belonging to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.”
Empress Catherine the Great was in the midst of assembling one of Europe’s greatest collections of art and treasure for her small Hermitage (or retreat) in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. She had married Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to Russia’s throne, when she was sixteen. But Catherine soon grew disaffected with her husband, who was said to be weak-minded, indecisive and not conjugally interested in his passionate Prussian princess. After Peter was crowned tsar in 1761, his unpopularity grew. Catherine plotted with a group of nobles and army officers led by her lover, Count Grigory Orlov, to depose the tsar. When their coup toppled Peter from his throne in 1762, Catherine seized power. Her reign was a time of sweeping change in Russia. The empress, like her predecessor Peter the Great, was interested in modernizing and westernizing the nation, which was still a feudal state. Among her accomplishments was the introduction of smallpox vaccine to Russia in 1768. Under Catherine, the Russian court became a center for European culture. The empress invited prominent intellectuals to St. Petersburg, encouraged public building projects, and was a patron of the arts and literature both in Russia and abroad. An admirer of the French philosopher Voltaire, Catherine regularly corresponded with him. When Voltaire died in 1778, Catherine purchased his entire seven-thousand volume library and had it shipped to St. Petersburg.
In her lifetime, Catherine the Great amassed collections so diverse and magnificent that she had to build an addition to her Winter Palace to house the paintings, sculptures, porcelain, antiquities, exquisite furnishings and silver. The secret cargo of Vrouw Maria had come from one of the most famous art collections of its day, making the loss all the more painful.
When wealthy Dutch shipping merchant Gerrit Braamcamps died in Amsterdam on June 17, 1771, he left behind a home filled with that his contemporaries called a “treasure cabinet” of more than three hundred paintings, porcelain, silver and other valuables. But the heirs of Braamcamps wanted cash, not the collection, so they sold it at auction. Catherine ordered Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Prince Galitsyn, to “look after her interests” at the sale. On her behalf, he acquired a number of European Old Masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens.
Now, those paintings rested at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. “As these pictures are very sensitive to injury and need care,” Panin wrote, he was sending an officer, Major Thier, to co-ordinate a search with the Swedes. “I do not doubt that you will do your utmost as this matter concerns her Majesty the Empress personally,” Panin told the Swedish royal chancellor.
Thier’s trip to Finland was in vain. Winter was fast approaching, and little could be done. The Swedes sent a number of expeditions out to the archipelago to search for the wreck. Boats towed grappling irons to try and snag the hulk, but the vast area and deep seas made it an impossible task. An obstruction at 30 fathoms was repeatedly snagged by searchers, but it proved to be a rock. The Swedes and Russians abandoned their efforts to find Vrouw Maria, and the ship, despite the rumors of riches aboard, was in time forgotten.
We’re anchored above a small wooden shipwreck that Finnish researchers believe is Vrouw Maria. The story of the tiny Dutch ship with her secret cargo of precious paintings resurfaced in 1982, when Christian Ahlstro m, Finland’s leading shipwreck researcher and historian, discovered the tale while working through Swedish diplomatic records. Ahlstro m spent years meticulously reconstructing the tale of Vouw Maria, and his discoveries encouraged diver and researcher Rauno Koivusaari to start searching for the wreck in 1998. In June 1999, while towing a side-scan sonar behind his ship Teredo, Koivusaari finally located the intact wreck of a small wooden ship near Jurmo Island.
Under Finnish law, all such finds are the property of the state. Koivusaari reported the discovery to the Maritime Museum of Finland, which acts on behalf of the National Board of Antiquities. The museum conducted a two-week survey of the exterior of the wreck in the summer of 2000. Lying in a deep hole surrounded by rocks, the wreck was missing its rudder and the deck hatches were open. Reaching inside the main cargo hatch, archeologists carefully recovered three clay tobacco pipes, a metal ingot and small round lead seal. A clay bottle lying on the deck was also mapped and recovered.
Back in the laboratory of the maritime museum, analysis of the artifacts showed the researchers that they were on the right track. The pipes were Dutch, and one of them had a maker’s mark that indicated the pipe was made by Jan Souffreau of Gouda, Holland, whose factory was in business from 1732 to 1782. The ingot was zinc, and Vrouw Maria was known to have been carrying nearly forty “ship pounds” of that metal. The lead seal, probably from twine that wrapped a bale of cloth, was marked “Leyden,” from the Dutch town of the same name. The clay bottle, no older than the 1760s, held mineral water from the German town of Trier.