MARY ANN was built in wood 1838 and loaded about 150 tons. Her length was 32 m, breath 6.4 m and depth 2.5 m. There are no drawings preserved, only a sketch with her name. From this sketch, the Swedish marine artist Folke Sjogren, made a lovely watercolour for the stamp. MARY ANN, under her master captain Nils Wemgren, left Stockholm bound for Australia August 30th 1838 on speculation, loaded with building material, windows, doors and farm tools. This might have been seen as a very hazardous task, but the owner of the little ship was a well known Swedish wholesaler, who through British Business connections had heard that it was a good market for such things in Australia and Captain Werngren was an experienced man, who before had sailed to the Far East and America. There were only eight men in the crew, and except from the master, only one hand, the only AB, had before served in deep water ships.
MARY ANN first sailed to Cowes on the Isle of Wight for further business negotiations and to complete the equipment. December 16th 1839 MARY ANN
left Cowes bound for Sydney, where she arrived May 1st 1840 after a hard voyage. Captain Werngren wrote about the astonishment when he told the pilot that his little ship came from Europe and Sweden. The pilot at first did not believe him and he had never heard of Sweden (and that country was not in his signalbook, so he signalled: "Unknown ship" to the harbour. Captain Werngren who was not only an experienced sailor and master but also an energetic businessman, immediately sold all the cargo and looked for another. He soon found that in the young town of Newcastle, NSW, a cargo of coal for Valparaiso, South America. So the little MARY ANN left Newcastle and sailed westwards over the Pacific Ocean. After having arrived in Valparaiso safely and been unloaded, Captain Werngren managed to get a cargo of copper ore for Swansea, Great Britain. On November 25th 1840 MARY ANN left the western coast of South America, rounded and arrived at Swansea on March 9th 1841. In Swansea Captain Werngren got a cargo of salt for Stockholm, where MARY ANN arrived May 3rd 1841. The first Swedish circumnavigation of the world was made. This event anyhow did not attract any attention in Stockholm or Sweden. In the Stockholm newspaper "Aftonbladet" under the head‑line "Shipping‑News", May 6th 1841 one could read: "With Captain Werngren, 1050 barrels of salt from Swansea for Wholesaler Mr.C.F. Liljewalch." That was all! Anyhow, as a result of the voyage and captain Werngren's skill, both as a sailor and businessman, the ship owner made a good profit and captain Werngren got much credit for the way he had managed. Captain Werngren made two more voyages to Australia and circumnavigations of the world for his shipowner, but with another and larger ship, but the little MARY ANN never did again see the "Seven Seas" She sailed for many years as a "coaster" in the Baltic.
Sources: De forsta varidsomseglingarna under svensk flagg (In English: The first circumnavigations of,the world under the Swedish ensign). Told by Captain Nils Werngren and edited by Carl Axel Ostberg.
Log Book April 2003
Sweden SG2021
Mary Ann (1838)
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aukepalmhof
- Posts: 7790
- Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2009 1:28 am
Re: Mary Ann (1838)
MARY ANN's last resting place.
Her name on the stamp is given as MARY ANNE but all the Swedish sources give her name as MARY ANN.
Most people know where the royal ship WASA in Sweden is located. But very few know where Sweden's first sailing ship that sailed around the world got its last resting place. The traces of MARY ANN led me from Luleå to Stockholm, around Africa to Australia, across the vast Pacific Ocean to South America, around Cape Horn and north across the Atlantic back to Sweden.
Where does the journey end? Yes, in Väddö canal in Roslagen!
When Nils Werngren returned from his world voyage on May 3, 1841, MARY ANN was sold by the owner Carl Gustaf Liljewalch to the trading company Pauli & Son in Stockholm. Until 1856, MARY ANN sailed for Pauli & Son, until she was sold to mill owner Carl Johan Pira at Ortala mill in Väddö in Roslagen.
During a trip from Umeå to Flensburg with a load of boards, MARY ANN was hit by a severe storm off the coast of Langeland in Denmark. The masts were broken and the whole rig ended up in the water, but the ship and the crew could be saved. She was repaired in Luleå and continued to serve as one of many anonymous freighters in Roslagen.
MARY ANN's last owner was a shipping company with three co-owners. When one of them, the fisherman and farmer Jan Ersson in Veda on Väddö died in 1868, he bequeathed his third of MARY ANN to his two young daughters Greta and Karolina. In the will you can read that MARY ANN was valued at 1700 riksdaler, a very large sum at that time. Since the daughters were minors, a relative in the village, Eric Olsson, was appointed good husband and guardian.
Erik Olsson traded with MARY ANN for ten years but confiscated the income himself. In a trial, he was sentenced to replace his daughter's profit of the ship, but he never did. The fact that the two girls were deceived by their guardians has been a wound in the family to this day. This is what one of the girls' descendants, Inger Amberfält-Larsson, says when Carl Axel Östberg and I visit her in Elmsta at Roslagen's Maritime Memory Association, where she works in her spare time researching Roslagen's maritime history.
- Throughout my upbringing, MARY ANN has been a dark secret in our family. Eric Olsson seized MARY ANN and stole the inheritance from their father. As a result, Greta and Karolina were forced to live their lives in poverty instead of as owners of a sailing ship that could have given them a good income and a better life. No one in the family had talked about it before I started digging into it.
During the ten years that Eric Olsson ran MARY ANN, she became increasingly dilapidated, and in 1878 she was cut up. Some of the timber from the old sailing ship was used to build a house. Around 1940, parts of the foreship were blown up by some people who wanted to make money on the copper in the bolts from MARY ANN's hull. In Roslagen, Inger Amberfält-Larsson had started researching her own family's history and she had found documents that indicated that the family had owned a schooner named MARY ANN.
In Malmö, Carl Axel Östberg had found a box that contained Captain Nils Werngren's diaries from his world voyage with MARY ANN. Based on the diaries, he wrote the book "The first world voyages under the Swedish flag".
In Luleå, the shipyard owner Kalle Wallgren had started planning the construction of his copy of MARY ANN. I started sailing with Måsen to map and describe the coastal culture in the Gulf of Bothnia. Among other things, I had started looking in archives and books for the history of shipbuilding in Norrbotten. There I had found the story of how MARY ANN was built at Oscarsvarv in Luleå in 1838. None of us knew the others. No one had seen the whole picture. When we stand at the place where MARY ANN is by the Väddö canal, Carl Axel Östberg says:
- I'm glad we came here. It feels as if we have finally found the whole story of Sweden's first-world sailing ship.
More important than the royal ship Wasa?
In 1990, Inger Amberfält-Larsson requested that the Maritime History Museum inspect the old wreck. In May and June 1990, marine archaeologists Bert Westenberg and Magnus Faxén from the Maritime History Museum came to the old wreck in the Väddö canal. Twice they dived and measured and photographed the remains of MARY ANN. We read from the inspection report:
"The ship section is partly sunk in the bottom, which consists of clay and sand. A keel hog with a continuous length of 22 meters is visible in its entire length. The frame is made of oak and has a thickness of 220 mm and a width of 150-180 mm. The board consists of pine and has a width of 130 mm and a thickness is 80 mm. The decorative planks are also made of pine and have the same thickness as the board. Their width was measured to 180 mm. The bolts are made of copper and the diameter is 20 mm. (... With a probe, we were
able to establish that larger contiguous sections remained under the sand and mud on both sides of the keel.)
The fact that large parts of the ship are missing may be partly explained by the scrapping in the 1870s and/or the blasting that was carried out around 1940, and partly by the shallow position that gives the ice-free access to the hull.
With the support of the ocular inspections as well as the written and oral information signed collected, the wreck's identity can be considered with certainty. As the ship remains are covered by the Cultural Heritage Act, no salvage may be carried out on the remaining remains of the convoy MARY ANN without permission from the county antiquary.
Stockholm 1990-05-09
Bert Westenberg Director
MARY ANN should therefore be safe in her grave in Väddö canal, protected by the Antiquities Act. But when Carl Axel Östberg and I visit the place at the beginning of April 2005 together with Inger Amberfält-Larsson and Roger Toll, who have written in the magazine Rospiggen about MARY ANN's history, we get a shock. Someone has tied a rope around the front of MARY ANN's keel and pulled it up on the beach! Next to the log we see signs that there has been a fire. Has anyone driven the wreck with a motorboat and wanted to "clean out the old rubbish" from the water? Since MARY ANN was seriously injured last time when someone blew her bow to take copper bolts, Inger becomes worried and calls the Maritime History Museum. She is promised that the log will be protected and that it will be stored at the local museum Roslagens Sjöfartsminnesförening.
I actually think that MARY ANN is more important for Sweden's maritime history than the royal ship WASA, which did not even come out to sea but just capsized and sank. Little MARY ANN was actually the first Swedish ship to sail around the world. We are very proud that she served during her last years in Roslagen, and that she rests here.
Anyone who wants to read more is recommended to order the following books and writings:
Carl Axel Östberg: The first world voyages under the Swedish flag, 1989.
Ebbe Aspegren: The first Swedish world voyages. Forum Navale No. 37, 1983.
Rospiggen 1990. Roslagens Sjöfartsminnesförenings årsbok. Article about MARY ANN by Roger Toll.
Arvid Moberg: Sjöstad, Shipbuilding and shipping in Luleå for 350 years. Luleå municipality 1971.
Birger Steckzén and Henrik Wennerström: History of the city of Luleå 1621-1921. Luleå Municipality 1921.
Dorothy Shineberg: They Came for Sandalwood, Melbourne University Press 1976.
Dorothy Shineberg: The Trading Voyages of Andrew Cheyne, Australian University Press, Canberra 1971.
Minutes of the parliamentary session in Stockholm in the years 1840-1841. Page 298 and onwards.
https://bottenviken.se/050810-gamlamaryann (Google translated)
Her name on the stamp is given as MARY ANNE but all the Swedish sources give her name as MARY ANN.
Most people know where the royal ship WASA in Sweden is located. But very few know where Sweden's first sailing ship that sailed around the world got its last resting place. The traces of MARY ANN led me from Luleå to Stockholm, around Africa to Australia, across the vast Pacific Ocean to South America, around Cape Horn and north across the Atlantic back to Sweden.
Where does the journey end? Yes, in Väddö canal in Roslagen!
When Nils Werngren returned from his world voyage on May 3, 1841, MARY ANN was sold by the owner Carl Gustaf Liljewalch to the trading company Pauli & Son in Stockholm. Until 1856, MARY ANN sailed for Pauli & Son, until she was sold to mill owner Carl Johan Pira at Ortala mill in Väddö in Roslagen.
During a trip from Umeå to Flensburg with a load of boards, MARY ANN was hit by a severe storm off the coast of Langeland in Denmark. The masts were broken and the whole rig ended up in the water, but the ship and the crew could be saved. She was repaired in Luleå and continued to serve as one of many anonymous freighters in Roslagen.
MARY ANN's last owner was a shipping company with three co-owners. When one of them, the fisherman and farmer Jan Ersson in Veda on Väddö died in 1868, he bequeathed his third of MARY ANN to his two young daughters Greta and Karolina. In the will you can read that MARY ANN was valued at 1700 riksdaler, a very large sum at that time. Since the daughters were minors, a relative in the village, Eric Olsson, was appointed good husband and guardian.
Erik Olsson traded with MARY ANN for ten years but confiscated the income himself. In a trial, he was sentenced to replace his daughter's profit of the ship, but he never did. The fact that the two girls were deceived by their guardians has been a wound in the family to this day. This is what one of the girls' descendants, Inger Amberfält-Larsson, says when Carl Axel Östberg and I visit her in Elmsta at Roslagen's Maritime Memory Association, where she works in her spare time researching Roslagen's maritime history.
- Throughout my upbringing, MARY ANN has been a dark secret in our family. Eric Olsson seized MARY ANN and stole the inheritance from their father. As a result, Greta and Karolina were forced to live their lives in poverty instead of as owners of a sailing ship that could have given them a good income and a better life. No one in the family had talked about it before I started digging into it.
During the ten years that Eric Olsson ran MARY ANN, she became increasingly dilapidated, and in 1878 she was cut up. Some of the timber from the old sailing ship was used to build a house. Around 1940, parts of the foreship were blown up by some people who wanted to make money on the copper in the bolts from MARY ANN's hull. In Roslagen, Inger Amberfält-Larsson had started researching her own family's history and she had found documents that indicated that the family had owned a schooner named MARY ANN.
In Malmö, Carl Axel Östberg had found a box that contained Captain Nils Werngren's diaries from his world voyage with MARY ANN. Based on the diaries, he wrote the book "The first world voyages under the Swedish flag".
In Luleå, the shipyard owner Kalle Wallgren had started planning the construction of his copy of MARY ANN. I started sailing with Måsen to map and describe the coastal culture in the Gulf of Bothnia. Among other things, I had started looking in archives and books for the history of shipbuilding in Norrbotten. There I had found the story of how MARY ANN was built at Oscarsvarv in Luleå in 1838. None of us knew the others. No one had seen the whole picture. When we stand at the place where MARY ANN is by the Väddö canal, Carl Axel Östberg says:
- I'm glad we came here. It feels as if we have finally found the whole story of Sweden's first-world sailing ship.
More important than the royal ship Wasa?
In 1990, Inger Amberfält-Larsson requested that the Maritime History Museum inspect the old wreck. In May and June 1990, marine archaeologists Bert Westenberg and Magnus Faxén from the Maritime History Museum came to the old wreck in the Väddö canal. Twice they dived and measured and photographed the remains of MARY ANN. We read from the inspection report:
"The ship section is partly sunk in the bottom, which consists of clay and sand. A keel hog with a continuous length of 22 meters is visible in its entire length. The frame is made of oak and has a thickness of 220 mm and a width of 150-180 mm. The board consists of pine and has a width of 130 mm and a thickness is 80 mm. The decorative planks are also made of pine and have the same thickness as the board. Their width was measured to 180 mm. The bolts are made of copper and the diameter is 20 mm. (... With a probe, we were
able to establish that larger contiguous sections remained under the sand and mud on both sides of the keel.)
The fact that large parts of the ship are missing may be partly explained by the scrapping in the 1870s and/or the blasting that was carried out around 1940, and partly by the shallow position that gives the ice-free access to the hull.
With the support of the ocular inspections as well as the written and oral information signed collected, the wreck's identity can be considered with certainty. As the ship remains are covered by the Cultural Heritage Act, no salvage may be carried out on the remaining remains of the convoy MARY ANN without permission from the county antiquary.
Stockholm 1990-05-09
Bert Westenberg Director
MARY ANN should therefore be safe in her grave in Väddö canal, protected by the Antiquities Act. But when Carl Axel Östberg and I visit the place at the beginning of April 2005 together with Inger Amberfält-Larsson and Roger Toll, who have written in the magazine Rospiggen about MARY ANN's history, we get a shock. Someone has tied a rope around the front of MARY ANN's keel and pulled it up on the beach! Next to the log we see signs that there has been a fire. Has anyone driven the wreck with a motorboat and wanted to "clean out the old rubbish" from the water? Since MARY ANN was seriously injured last time when someone blew her bow to take copper bolts, Inger becomes worried and calls the Maritime History Museum. She is promised that the log will be protected and that it will be stored at the local museum Roslagens Sjöfartsminnesförening.
I actually think that MARY ANN is more important for Sweden's maritime history than the royal ship WASA, which did not even come out to sea but just capsized and sank. Little MARY ANN was actually the first Swedish ship to sail around the world. We are very proud that she served during her last years in Roslagen, and that she rests here.
Anyone who wants to read more is recommended to order the following books and writings:
Carl Axel Östberg: The first world voyages under the Swedish flag, 1989.
Ebbe Aspegren: The first Swedish world voyages. Forum Navale No. 37, 1983.
Rospiggen 1990. Roslagens Sjöfartsminnesförenings årsbok. Article about MARY ANN by Roger Toll.
Arvid Moberg: Sjöstad, Shipbuilding and shipping in Luleå for 350 years. Luleå municipality 1971.
Birger Steckzén and Henrik Wennerström: History of the city of Luleå 1621-1921. Luleå Municipality 1921.
Dorothy Shineberg: They Came for Sandalwood, Melbourne University Press 1976.
Dorothy Shineberg: The Trading Voyages of Andrew Cheyne, Australian University Press, Canberra 1971.
Minutes of the parliamentary session in Stockholm in the years 1840-1841. Page 298 and onwards.
https://bottenviken.se/050810-gamlamaryann (Google translated)