Tag: Gothenburg

This is a bottle of red wine that was on the Vega sailing vessel which was kept as something of a memento. As indeed were quite a lot of things from the ship.

The Vega Expedition (1878–1880) was a Swedish-led Arctic voyage, named after the steamship SS Vega and commanded by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, that became the first expedition to navigate the Northeast Passage and the first to circumnavigate Eurasia, collecting a fair chunk of scientific material along the way.

Vega sailed from Karlskrona in June 1878, stopped at Tromsø, reached Cape Chelyuskin in August and then pushed east along Siberia’s coast until it was trapped in pack ice near the Chukchi Peninsula in late September, just short of the Bering Strait, forcing the crew to winter there and making first sustained contact with the Chukchi people. Freed in August 1879, Vega passed through the Bering Strait, paused in Japan for repairs, then returned to Sweden via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, arriving in Stockholm in April 1880 to huge celebrations, an achievement later framed as a high point of Swedish scientific exploration.

The above painting is of the Vega when it was parked up in Naples where it arrived on 14 February 1880 and remained for two days amidst some considerable celebrations.

Always good to have a menu from on board, this one is from 18 November 1878.

Incidentally, back to the wine, the museum notes that:

“During the winter the crew drank much more alcohol than the annual average for a Swede at the time”.

I’m not entirely sure that this would be a surprise to very many people…

And here’s some wood from the keel that was kept when it was turned into a whaling vessel.

The exterior of the Maritime Museum.

Some of the slang used by sailors, although it was the lime-juicers bit that interested me. I was aware of the phrase ‘limeys’ for British sailors because of the lime juice (although it was initially lemon juice which actually has much more vitamin C, so the switch wasn’t entirely ideal) that was used to prevent scurvy.

It transpires that the term was originally lime-juicers and this came to be used from around the 1850s to describe British sailors. The shortening to limeys took place around the 1870s and then it became to be used to describe British people in general in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

There were lots of maritime related items at the Maritime Museum (obviously) and this is what might be more expected by visitors…

This was a more unusual exhibit, they are porcelain dogs from Staffordshire although that’s not the important bit. The museum notes:

“According to legend, the arrangement of the dogs in the windows could be used by sailors’ wives as a signal for secret friends. When the dogs were turned away from each other, the women were alone and could receive visitors”.

Looking into this whole rumour, it appears to be something that was common to the UK, Norway, Sweden and Finland, although I’m sure that the habit spread to other countries. There we go though, I learn something new every day.

Richard at first thought that this tram driver was annoyed at his driving…. I’m pleased to note it’s just a suburb of Gothenburg.