Stockholm – Ingliando

On this day, the luxury transatlantic Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria was struck in thick fog by the Swedish passenger liner Stockholm as she approached the coast of Nantucket in the USA. Struck on her starboard side, the top-heavy Andrea Doria immediately started to list severely and take on water, which left half of her lifeboats unusable. Fortunately, the calm, appropriate behaviour of the crew, together with improvements in communications, and the rapid response of other ships, averted a disaster similar in scale to that of Titanic in 1912. While 1,660 passengers and crew were rescued, 46 people on the ship died as a direct consequence of the collision. The evacuated luxury liner capsized and sank the following morning. The accident remains the worst maritime disaster to occur in United States waters since the capsizing of the Eastland in Chicago in 1915.

looking back

On this day, after two years of complex and dangerous salvage operations, the Swedish warship Vasa, which sank in Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage on 10th August 1628, was finally brought back to the surface 333 years later. Built on the orders of the King of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus as part of his military expansion in his war against Poland and Lithuania, the richly decorated ship, heavily armed with bronze cannons, was potentially one of the most powerful vessels in the world at that time. Vasa sank only about 120 metres from the shore and in full view of a crowd of hundreds, if not thousands, who had come to see the ship set sail. The ship is now on display in the Vasa Museum in Stockholm where it has been seen by over 45 million visitors since 1961.