Book Review | Was Gustav Vaasa’s daughter a hijacker or a pirate? – Only security and technology made the Baltic Sea a trade route

Culture|Book review

Nonfiction book

Mikko Huhtamies: The seventh zone. Northern maritime history (1200–1600). Siltala. 320 s.

Prayer and the singing of hymns were an integral part of early shipping when no better navigational aids were available. Navigation was not very successful, which is why ships were often destroyed on trade routes in the Baltic Sea in the Middle Ages and the beginning of the new age, docent points out. Mikko Huhtamies in his book The seventh zone.

The book is named after a geographer Claudius of Ptolemy. A couple of thousand years ago, Ptolemy divided the world into zones, the seventh of which included the Baltic Sea region, including Finland.

There was demand for Zone 7 products outside the region as well, but security and technology were barriers to trade expansion. Poor navigational aids, rough maps and weak ships were an unfortunate combination in the autumn storms in the Baltic Sea. After all, merchant ships were persecuted by pirates.

Insecurity pushed freight rates, which at worst nearly doubled the price of cargo.

More accurate maps, navigational aids and better ships, as well as the decline in piracy as states strengthened, made the Seventh Zone a safe sea route. As a result of deforestation in the Mediterranean, large-scale foreign trade in Finnish forest products also began, and continues today.

Shipwrecks the surviving remains and wrecks are today a key peek into ancient shipping. The shipwreck of Hanneke Vrome in 1468 was the worst maritime accident of its time. The ship drowned a couple of hundred passengers and valuable cargo.

There is an exceptional amount of documentation left over from the shipwreck, although the exact location of the shipwreck is not clear – not even the name of the ship. Hanneke Vrome was the captain of the ship, according to which the ship was named in the documents.

The ship was exceptionally large, carrying 1,200 barrels of honey, precious fabrics, leather goods, spices – even saffron – and gold coins, among other things. Among the passengers died the mayor of Raseborg Axel Tottin wife Katarina Viffert with his three sons.

Huhtamies describes the ship’s trip from Lübeck to Tallinn during the exceptionally late autumn. Ten miles before the destination, the ship was subjected to a strong headwind, which led the captain to take a course towards Finland. According to Huhtamaki’s assessment, the ship ran aground in the Jussarö area, part of the cargo drifted off the coast of Finland.

The ships were not only chased by storms, but also by pirates, including Finns. Twenty years before Hanneke Vrome’s fatal journey, 70 pirates were executed in Danzig: one of the main perpetrators was a Finn Hans Hinricksson.

One pirate was another hijacker. The hijackers were supported by, among others, the early rulers of the Vaasa family. One of the best known hijackers – or from the point of view of pirates – was Gustav of Vaasa daughter Cecilia, which carried out large – scale hijacking activities in the Baltic Sea. One of the beneficiaries of state-run piracy was Helsinki, where the hijacked ships were towed.

Eventually, the strengthening of the states in the region put an end to the activities of both pirates and hijackers.

Stronger and ships with a higher carrying capacity were a prerequisite for the growth of trade. Huhtamaki describes how the Viking lima-lined boats, dragons, and knars developed into a cogg of Hanseatic merchants who ruled the Baltic Sea as a type of ship for three hundred years.

The box-shaped cog developed into a sleeve, which in turn was a precursor to the fully-weighted three-masted ships in use until the end of the sailing ship era.

Many other maritime innovations also developed slowly and persisted for centuries. For example, the shapes of the nautical signs, the ball and the cone, remained virtually unchanged from the 16th century to the 1970s. The cross is still on the maps as a sign of the reefs – as it was hundreds of years ago.

The seventh zone writing would have been almost impossible, or at least considerably laborious, only a decade ago: the digitization of material has made it possible to combine archival material from different countries.

However, you still need to be able to interpret texts in different languages ​​written in old handwriting. Most of the material is time consuming lingua francaaOld Low German, interpreted by Huhtamies as one of the best experts in Finland.

Mikko Huhtamies has risen in recent years Yrjö Kaukiainen Finland’s most significant maritime historian.

Where Kaukiainen’s magnum opus Out to the world draws the great curves of the history of Finnish shipping, Mikko Huhtamiehi’s wonderfully illustrated The seventh zone offers detailed, albeit somewhat fragmented, accounts of the past of Finnish shipping.

The author is a professor of history at the University of Jyväskylä.