NARRATOR: The wild seas of Europe's far north.
For centuries, a global centre of trade.
And home to wealthy, powerful nations.
Their success relies on one thing above all others:
mastery of these storm-tossed waters.
Through astonishing seamanship,
and groundbreaking design,
it begins with a people
whose name strikes terror across all Europe:
The Vikings.
From their heartlands in Scandinavia, the Vikings build extraordinary
sailing ships and use them to raid and conquer,
reaching even the shores of North America.
So revered were these ships that the Vikings buried their great kings inside them.
What was the secret of their success?
This quiet field in Southern Norway may provide an answer.
A huge burial mound, hinting at a deeper history.
DR PASSCHE: It's so exciting.
It's one of the biggest we have in Scandinavia.
And that's why we wanted to go into this area.
NARRATOR: Previous excavations here have found little.
Now, armed with the latest scanning technology, archaeologist Knut Paasche,
and his team, probe the site.
As the ground starts giving up its secrets, they identify 11 more burial mounds.
And then the motherlode.
DR PASSCHE: But there's no doubt what it is.
We have the shape.
It's definitely a ship.
NARRATOR: Very little is known about the Viking Longships
of the eighth and ninth centuries.
Just a few images past down, and a handful of archaeological relicts.
DR PASSCHE: Our main problem today is that we have so few left,
so we don't know what did they actually look like.
NARRATOR: Of the thousands of Viking ships that once sailed the oceans,
just four have been found in Norway.
Knute hopes this could be another.
DR PASSCHE: Well you don't find things like that every day.
When we recognised, whoa, this is actually a ship, then it was wow!
NARRATOR: And now armed with his scanning data, we can remove the soil,
peel back the sediments of time and reveal what lies beneath.
Hidden one and a half feet below ground, an unmistakable outline.
Almost 65 feet long.
Large enough for a crew of 30 men.
Made up overlapping oak timbers, joined by nails.
And this a flat, rectangular structure towards the centre of the ship.
The burial mounds are in the south east of Norway,
close to where other buried Viking ships have been found.
Those are roughly the same size and design.
DR PASSCHE: It's very comparable to the others.
Then you have the length, the width and the depth of the ship as well.
NARRATOR: For Knut, it can mean only one thing.
DR PASSCHE: There's no doubt, it is a Viking ship.
NARRATOR: Knut wants to learn more about this 1,000 year old vessel,
to understand the secrets of Viking ship design,
and learn how this race of seafarers mastered the wild seas of Scandinavia.
First, he recognises the overlapping plant construction.
It's a style known as clinker built.
Oak planks fastened together with iron rivets.
A design that's water proof, and gives Viking ships the flexibility they need
to stand up to the power of the Northern seas.
DR PASSCHE: This construction, first of all it's flexible.
That's very, very important.
It's not as stiff as you can see at other wooden boats or ships further south.
Not fighting the weather, but actually go with it.
NARRATOR: Knut turns his attention to the flat rectangular structure,
sitting in the heart of the vessel.
Its location at the centre of the ship is a clue.
It must have once supported a large mast and sail
key breakthroughs in ship design.
A simple rowing boat could never traverse these seas.
Knut also notes the shape and position of the flat structure,
cleverly placed to distribute the huge forces on the sail
down into the frame of the ship,
allowing Viking expeditions to withstand even gale force winds.
DR PASSCHE: They have all these details in the ship that they have used hundreds
of years to learn how to build them,
and that's why they actually could survive out there.
NARRATOR: But these details alone can't explain the Vikings legendary ability
to navigate the stormiest oceans and even the wild Atlantic.
A piece of the puzzle is missing.
And to find what that is, Knut's come here
to study the most beautifully preserved Viking ship ever found.
Discovered close to the Oslo Fjord, at 70 feet long,
it's similar in size and construction to his own discovery.
DR PASSCHE: You have these beautiful lines going downwards.
They're not only beautiful.
This is actually really important.
NARRATOR: And beyond the strength and flexibility of the ship's unique
wooden construction, there's something else.
Its hydrodynamic profile.
The Vikings were centuries ahead of their time
in understanding the principles of streamlining
and how to keep a ship riding on top of the waves.
DR PASSCHE: When you meet the waves,
the ship should actually swallow the waves with it.
The water should go underneath and lift the ship in the middle and the water
should be pushed out in the back.
NARRATOR: The design that lies behind the Viking legend is now clear.
Brilliantly engineered to skim across the most violent waters.
A sleek, ocean raider built for exploration and conquest.
Capable of taming the wild oceans, wherever they may be.
Knut has cracked the DNA of his buried ship's design,
but there is still one final puzzle.
Like the Ancient Egyptians before them, ship burial was an old Viking custom.
Sending a dead king along with all his most treasured possessions
on a final journey to the Afterlife.
Other burial ships have been found close to the sea, but this one is different.
DR PASSCHE: I mean we are more than a kilometre away the sea here.
Why on earth have they brought the ship all the way in here?
NARRATOR: Marine archaeologist Knut Passche wants to find out
why a buried Viking ship has been found so far from the coast.
DR PASSCHE: That has been a mystery.
It's not easy to carry more than 2 tons maybe of oak in here.
NARRATOR: Norway's coastline of small inlets and deep Fjords is the result
of millions of years of geological change,
especially the long Ice Age, when glaciers covered this land.
As Knut studies the pattern of that geological change,
he makes a surprising discovery.
During the Viking era, the coastline here looked very different,
with the sea much higher than it is today.
And that means these fields were part of the Fjord,
and this narrow stream running all the way up
towards the burial site,
was a river.
Norway's changing geology explains why Knut's vessel lies so far inland.
DR PASSCHE: You could actually row it into the river and up the creek.
NARRATOR: It's now possible to understand exactly
what happened here 1,000 years ago, as the Vikings
bring their most hallowed possession to be buried along with their fallen king.
With their Longships designed for raiding and crossing oceans,
the Vikings reach ever further.
Could the discovery of these circular stones hold the key to the next chapter
in the evolution of Viking society, and of their ships?
Here close to the Southern tip of Norway is an ancient shipping route
used for centuries by seafarers to travel along the coast
protected from the worst of the weather.
DR PASSCHE: This landscape is quite dramatic.
Something could have happened while they came in,
because it's very narrow through this Sounds here.
NARRATOR: It's here that the chance discovery of some strange looking stones
could help explain how the Viking way of life began to change.
PAL: A diver called and said yes, seen a lot of rounded stones with a hole in it.
Yes, I think that we have to check this.
NARRATOR: With the stones just a short distance from the harbour,
the archaeological team sets out to make a thorough investigation of the channel.
DR SOREIDE: We are going to a really advanced scanning of the sea floor
to look at the stones in more detail today.
NARRATOR: Now, with those high resolution scans,
we can drain the shore of Southern Norway
to discover for the first time what lies beneath these waters.
A cluster of at least 26 stones, each one is made of hard rock,
is almost a foot in diameter and weighs around 75 pounds
Perfectly round and with a hole drilled in the middle.
The team soon realizes they must be grindstones.
DR SOREIDE: They came in pairs. You have one on the bottom
and you rotate the other one and you then can make flour.
NARRATOR: Studying the site, the team notices something important.
The stones are strewn in a definite pattern, lying the length of a narrow ditch
at the bottom of the channel.
PAL: The way it looks is it tells us quite obviously that this has to be a wrecked ship.
NARRATOR: A wreck whose wooden remains have completely rotted away.
DR SOREIDE: The total extent of the site is about 18 meters,
probably something has shifted so but it indicates
that this has been a fairly large ship.
NARRATOR: The team now wants to discover what kind of ship it was.
With the hull missing, that's going to be difficult.
Then, they find something.
A reindeer antler, often traded from Norway and used to make combs or needles.
To the scientists, it's an important clue.
PAL: This is the antler that we managed to pull out from the wreck site.
As we can see, it's the thickets part of the reindeer antler
and this is chopped off in both ends.
NARRATOR: By carbon dating the marrow inside the bone, they're able to date it
to the final decades of the Viking golden age.
You don't need grindstones for raiding and pillaging.
Why so many?
The team realizes they had to be some form of valuable cargo.
DR SOREIDE: This was definitely a part of the cargo and probably an item
that was for sale, that they were going to deliver to somewhere.
NARRATOR: Using the footprints of the stones,
as they reconstruct the shape of the vessel,
it becomes clear this was wider than the traditional Viking Longship and deeper.
Large enough to carry those stones.
A new direction in Viking design: a Viking cargo ship.
So what can this cargo reveal about how the Vikings built
and secured their long term success?
NARRATOR: After 1,000 years at the bottom of a channel in Southern Norway,
this cargo of grindstones could reveal something new about Viking trade.
DR SOREIDE: I find this site really exciting
because it's the first sort of ocean going trade vessel
that we have found in Norway underwater.
So I'm really hoping to see where it had been, where it came from, where it was going.
NARRATOR: Careful examination of the grindstones reveals they had been deliberately
hewn from a very particular type of rock.
A kind of schist that carries a unique geological signature,
and using that signature, the team is able to trace it back
to here: Hyllestad, in Western Norway.
By sea, a journey of over 300 miles
A distance that only reinforces the theory
that these had to be valuable items for trade
And by following where these and other Viking goods have been found
an extraordinary picture emerges.
The unmistakable footprint of a vast trading network.
From the North Sea towards Great Britain, Ireland and Iceland, south to France,
Spain and into the Mediterranean Sea,
even reaching across the Atlantic, as far west as North America
and down the great rivers of Asia, as far east as the Black and Caspian Seas.
DR SOREIDE: It shows that the Vikings were really opening up their world
and being able to trade with areas they had never been to before.
The ship also had to evolve and that interconnection
is really what happened at that time.
NARRATOR: Just a few decades after the sinking of the cargo ship,
the spread of Christianity in the Nordic countries brings
and end to the Viking way of life.
But over the coming centuries, the Viking seas continue
to be a focus for trade and conflict.
How do the remains of a sunken giant reveal the battles
to control these vital trading routes?
Sweden in the 16th century.
An ambitious new king sits on the throne.
King Erik the 14th dreams of dominating the Baltic's lucrative trade routes.
But something stands in his way.
Sweden's sworn enemies in Denmark and Northern Germany.
DR RONNBY: He has the ambition to be a big European king really.
I mean he tries to be one of the big players in Europe.
NARRATOR: And so he commissions what in the 16th century
is the ultimate symbol of power.
A battleship, greater than anything the Baltic had ever seen.
Her name is The Mars.
RICHARD: Think of Mars like the Death Star in Star Wars.
It's a super ship.
It has more cannons than ever before.
It's more robust. It has more armour.
NARRATOR: The Mars is built for a new kind of naval warfare
Instead of getting up close and boarding an enemy's ship,
keep it at a distance and sink it with cannon fire.
RICHARD: That's the coming way of fighting and you're putting more and more guns
and more and more gun decks.
NARRATOR: King Erik's new super weapon is put to the test for the first time
in May 1564
At the head of a fleet of 37,
including 16 large warships, the Mars goes into battle off Sweden's eastern coast.
She damages the Danish flagship and sinks another enemy vessel in just minutes.
RICHARD: Bang, bang, bang and the ship sinks and everybody's like
"what happened here?"
NARRATOR: But then on just the second day of her military career
the Mars disappears somewhere into the icy depths of the Baltic
with over 800 men on board, vanishing from history
How could this super weapon of the Baltic have simply disappeared?
For marine explorers like Richard Lundgren, finding her becomes an obsession.
RICHARD: We spent the better part of our whole adult lives searching for this shipwreck
and I can't tell you how many times people was telling you, Richard, you're crazy.
Why don't you give it up?
NARRATOR: For over 20 years Richard's team scours the Swedish coast,
searching for the missing ship.
MEMBER 1: A few anomalies there, but that could be fish or something else.
NARRATOR: They find over 160 wrecks on the bottom of the Baltic.
Not one of them is the Mars
Then one day, they detect something truly massive on the sea floor.
RICHARD: I see up into the water, the only thing that tells you
that you're actually falling through space and actually falling back into time,
time travelling, is the fact that you see this line.
NARRATOR: As they dive down to over 230 feet a vast shape begins to appear
from the milky haze.
After searching for over 20 years,
Richard Lundgren has finally found what he hopes is the wreck of the Mars.
RICHARD: It's like a mist down there, a milky mist,
like a ghostly mist and that hull appear in front of you.
NARRATOR: With a wreck this large, a diver only ever sees part of the picture.
RICHARD: You can't compare with anything you've seen before in the water.
This is massive.
NARRATOR: Now, using the data from Richard's detailed scan of the wreck
we can drain the oceans to reveal a vast ship on the floor of the Baltic
Scattered over an area the size of a football field
the bulk of the hull remains intact with gun ports running along its upper part.
But the bow is entirely missing the victim of some unknown cataclysm.
Cannon are strewn across the site along with the twisted remains of huge timbers.
Over 55 yards long, and 15 yards wide, the Baltic had never seen anything like her.
RICHARD: The wreck site is a perfect time capsule.
There is very few wrecks on this earth that are in such a pristine condition.
It's almost like it sank yesterday, right, even if it's more 450 years ago.
But is it the Mars?
We didn't know.
NARRATOR: To find out, the divers search for evidence.
And find a bronze canon over 15 feet long
with a unique marker.
DR RONNBY: The real proof was when we saw the coat of arms on the guns.
Then we were 100 percent sure that this was actually the Mars we had found.
NARRATOR: The drained wreck site reveals that the Mars carried over
100 canon and other guns.
A huge number for a 16th century warship
Based on the evidence on the sea floor and from Swedish archives,
it's now possible to reconstruct what the Mars must have looked like
just before her final and fateful battle.
A true colossus.
DR RONNBY: This is a very big ship.
In the bow it was quite a high castle sticking up and the same in the stern
of the ship, it was also quite a big castle sticking up.
NARRATOR: To equip her for this new style of naval warfare,
the Mars had both upper and lower gun decks,
with canon ports spanning the length of the ship.
That kind of firepower demanded a crew of at least 600.
The population of a village.
Mars more than lives up to the myths surrounding her.
But for Richard and his crew, there is now a further question.
How does this invincible titan of the seas end up on the floor of the Baltic?
PAL: Welcome back from the Mars dive and I think today
it was a very successful day and very productive also.
NARRATOR: For the team, every piece of timber, every artefact on the sea floor
MEMBER 2: We have georeference of every single objet.
NARRATOR: is a clue to be deciphered in the quest to understand what sank the Mars.
DR RONNBY: When you see Mars on the sea bottom,
you can actually understand what happened on the surface.
NARRATOR: Examining the drained wreck, the team begins to see
what must have happened.
RICHARD: When you get down to Mars, you can see that this is a battlefield.
You can see that something powerful and very dramatic has happened here.
NARRATOR: The bow is entirely missing and appears to have been blown clean off.
The hull is cracked open, while along the port side,
these ballast stones have been blasted right out of the ship.
And there is also evidence of a significant fire.
RICHARD: You can actually smell the fire and that's really eerie.
I've never experienced that before in my life.
NARRATOR: The drained wreck reveals that somehow
this impregnable ship has a weak spot.
What is it?
The team believes a grappling hook found on the side of the wreck
could hold the answer.
Its location suggests it belongs not to the Mars,
but to an enemy ship that has managed to get close enough to board her
After the success of the first day's battle, the Mars finds herself alone.
A change in wind direction leaves her vulnerable
and isolated from the rest of the Swedish fleet.
RICHARD: Mars alone is a giant, but it needs bodyguard.
Without those bodyguards, the other ships can come very close and
they can throw grappling hooks and they can tie themselves into the ship
and then you simply overwhelm it.
And that's exactly what happens.
NARRATOR: Incendiary bombs start fires on board the Mars,
and soon the two sides are struggling in hand to hand combat.
DR RONNBY: Just in that moment, there is an explosion on board.
RICHARD: One of the canons mid deck caught fire
and exploded and then it went to the gunpowder and then boom
[explosion]
When she explodes she goes down quick.
NARRATOR: The crew of the Mars and the enemy sailors
who board her vanish to the bottom of the ocean.
Perhaps as many as 1,000 men.
King Erik's gambit to seize control over the Baltic sea has failed.
But the historic rivalry between Sweden and Denmark continues.
How does this pile of stones reveal the enormous stakes in another epic battle
for control of these contested waters?
By the beginning of the 18th century, Sweden's King Charles the 12th is battling
to dominate the great seas of the north, but he has many enemies.
JENS: The suggestion that we have in 1714, 15, is that basically Sweden
is facing a huge allied axis of Denmark, Prussia, Poland, Saxony and Russia.
So Sweden against everybody else.
NARRATOR: Charles is forced to retreat to his coastal stronghold in what
is now Northern Germany.
The city of Stralsund.
JENS: This was one of the main fortresses the Swedes had along the coast here
and this is where the king was, the Swedish king,
Charles the 12th and this is what they wanted to protect most.
NARRATOR: Stralsund is very well defended.
For the forces led by the Danish to reach it, there's only one way
through this bay to the East of the city.
And now a new gas pipeline being laid across that bay
is about to collide with the region's history
Maritime archaeologist Jens Auer is asked to investigate the proposed route.
JENS: We found a number of anomalies.
There were loads of places that looked suspiciously
like manmade objects on the seabed.
NARRATOR: And then he finds something unusual
right in the proposed path of the pipeline.
JENS: We see loads of rocks on the seabed, just a big mound.
It looks a bit out of place.
NARRATOR: Removing the waters of the Baltic,
reveals the strange scene that confronts Jens and his diving team
At first, it appears to be no more than a pile of stones,
but it becomes clear there's more.
Timbers sticking out from beneath the stones.
JENS: You think, okay this is a shipwreck.
It's a shipwreck under a heap of stones, a mound of stones basically.
NARRATOR: How had a wrecked ship ended up at the bottom
of the Baltic buried under those stones?
JENS: This is where the detective work starts.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists in Germany are investigating
a wreck buried under a pile of stones.
They begin by carefully recovering the timbers from the sunken vessel
Tree ring tests date them to the turn of the 18th century
The very moment when this bay was at the centre of the war between Denmark and Sweden.
JENS: We're at the entrance to the Bay of Greifswald.
This is the bay here.
Between the island of Rugen and the mainland.
NARRATOR: The only way to reach Sweden's King Charles in his fortified city
of Stralsund is via the bay.
For approaching enemy ships,
there's only one access channel deep enough and out of range of Swedish canon.
JENS: That was the scary thing, the week spot, the one place where you could come through.
NARRATOR: The buried wreck lies exactly on the weak spot,
right in the middle of that vulnerable channel
For Jens, the wreck's position cannot be a coincidence.
And returning to the drained wreck reveals why
At first glance, the rocks covering the wreck appear to be stones used as ballast
by the sunken ship, but there's something odd.
JENS: Normal ballast stones are small and these were like massive rocks.
NARRATOR: And that isn't the only thing.
Instead of lying within the wreck, as you'd expect with ballast stones,
these rocks were sitting on top of it.
There is one possible explanation.
JENS: They looked like they were used for sinking it on purpose, intentionally.
NARRATOR: It means the ship must have been deliberately scuttled.
Then, Jens finds something else
The scuttled ship is not alone.
There are others lying in a straight line right across that narrow channel.
It had to be a deliberate barrier designed to block the channel to enemy ships.
JENS: When you look in the area, you see that this is not the only ship.
There's actually 15 mounds of stones over a distance of about 840 meters
stretching across the whole shallow entrance to the bay.
NARRATOR: Strengthened with anchors and other debris between each ship,
it was almost impossible to get through.
JENS: They made a good job of really blocking this off.
NARRATOR: And so, blocked by the barrier, and unable to invade via these forbidding
cliffs, for almost two months, the Danish fleet remained stuck outside the bay
But then, in September of 1750 something happens
and the fleet makes it through.
JENS: So you have to imagine 495 vessels, boats out here,
so the whole water is covered with vessels coming to the shore taking soldiers,
infantry, cavalry to the beach here.
NARRATOR: This monument commemorates the moment when over 14,000 Danish
and Allied soldiers surge onto the island.
A force three times the size of the Swedish army.
JENS: And that's really the turning point in this conflict.
NARRATOR: By December, Stralsund has fallen
So how did they get through the barrier?
Only the Swedes know there's a secret entry point.
JENS: They left an opening, but that opening was invisible from the surface.
If you don't know where the opening is, it's very hard to get through.
NARRATOR: But one man is ready to betray the location of the opening.
JENS: A pilot in Swedish service ran away
and joined the Danes and he knew everything about this barrier.
NARRATOR: Going over to the Danish side,
he shows them the way through the barrier
As for the scuttled ships,
they remain for hundreds of years underwater and forgotten.
Hidden ghosts from another battle to control the Baltic.
Today, Scandinavia is peaceful and still an important hub
for international trade,
while thousands of shipwrecks silently recall the genius,
the courage and the sacrifice of those who sought to tame
the Viking seas.
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