In the 1970s, while researching sunken ships in the court archives of Turku, once the capital of the Swedish province of Finland, historian Christian Ahlström came across a sea protest by Reynoud Lourens, captain of the merchant ship Vrouw Maria. The affidavit was dated December 23, 1771. The Dutch two-master had sunk a few weeks earlier. “A few of the cargo owners,” reports Ahlström, “had insured their goods for sea transport to St. Petersburg, but unfortunately there was no information as to what happened next.”
In addition to this transfiguration report, he was also able to see the captain’s log. the Vrouw Maria got lost in a storm on its way from Amsterdam through Øresund and headed straight for the Finnish archipelago south-west of Turku, with its tiny islands and treacherous shoals. On October 3, a shock shook the hull, but the water lifted the ship off the bottom again. Then a breaker fell on the rudder and the ship was unguided, now hitting the ground harder. The crew worked on the pumps for four days. “Then,” the Transfiguration Report continues, “coffee beans blocked the pumps.” The sailors gave up. They brought what they could carry ashore, and minutes later the ship sank.
The works of art were missing from the Danish customs list
In the spring of 1772, a Petersburg newspaper reported on the sale of the saved coffee stocks. Count Nikita Panin, foreign minister of the Tsarist Empire, then turned to the Swedish court on an “unusual matter” in a letter that Ahlström found in the Finnish state archive: “It was about the fact that a Dutch ship with works of art belonging to the Russian tsarina and to be delivered to St. Petersburg, had capsized in a storm in the archipelago south-west of Finland, taking with her ‘numerous cases of paintings belonging to the Empress’ which she had had auctioned.” The news that valuable artwork had been on board sparked a discussion about the wreck that lasted until 1773. At that time, the Swedish king ruled over Finland, his ambassador in St. Petersburg and Christoffer Johan Rappe from the Finnish district of Turku and Pori also made claims. In addition, the ship was Dutch – there was also covetousness.
Ahlström found references to the paintings on the ship in Amsterdam auction lists and in a Dutch dissertation. Catherine II had it auctioned off by an ambassador in Holland from the estate of the Dutch art collector Gerrit Braamcamp: by Paulus Potter the popular motif of cattle in front of a landscape (for 9050 guilders), by Gerard ter Borch a woman at her toilet (1870 guilders) , a triptych by Gerard Dou (14,100 guilders), other paintings by Gabriel Metsu and also works by Philips Wouwerman, whose work was in demand throughout Europe in the 18th century.
But the ship could not be found. Ahlstrom examined the customs registers of Elsinore. In the Danish port, customs demanded a duty from the ships that sailed here on the shortest Baltic Sea route, the Sound Duty, and therefore regularly checked the ships. And indeed the cargo was the Vrouw Maria meticulously noted: among other things, 5562 pounds of sugar, 4700 pounds of Brazilian wood, 1220 pounds of cotton, 3250 pounds of indigo, half a barrel of herring, a hundredweight of zinc and more. Ironically, however, the paintings were missing from this list. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t on board. Royal owners were exempt from the Sound duty. The boxes with Katharina’s works of art were probably able to pass through customs unchecked.
Finding the wreck was a sensation
In 1999, more than two centuries after the sinking, the wreck of the Vrouw Maria discovered with the new technique of side scan sonar at a depth of 41 meters, near the small island of Jurmo. A sensation, and because the water of the Baltic Sea has a particularly strong conservation effect, the ship was surprisingly intact. Divers inspected the wreck, but didn’t dare go in for fear of getting tangled up in the jumbled cargo. Barrels, crates and swirling racks could be seen. The boxes with the paintings were also supposed to be here.
The discussion immediately started again as to who should own the ship and its contents. The SZ reported in 2008 that Marian Paschke, a professor at the Hamburg Institute for Maritime Law, was of the opinion “that the Russian state remained the owner. On the other hand, it also depends on the extent to which the ship was neglected by the captain and crew and given up as property . Then Finland might at least have financial claims”. The President of the Russian Foundation for the “Rescue of National Cultural and Historical Values” campaigned for the salvage. But he died in 2017.
But in the meantime the finders also wanted to share in the spoils when the ship was raised. They complained through all instances up to the European Court of Human Rights – in vain. The Finnish Ministry of Culture stipulated that the ship should remain “in situ”. An interdisciplinary underwater research project “Vrouw Maria” was launched. Samples of the cargo were recovered and analyzed: they confirmed the Elsinore customs list.
Next, the Baltic Rim Project developed principles and guidelines for dealing with maritime cultural heritage, which resulted in the Maritime Cultural Heritage Management Project in 2017. There is no longer any talk of salvaging the ship or the cargo, but rather the “underwater landscape” of the Vrouw Maria. So will probably, as Allison McNearny 2018 in Daily Beast wrote that Paulus Potter’s “Große Rinderherd” will continue to graze on the bottom of the Baltic Sea – if it is really there.