Goteborg of Sweden - The Modern East Indiaman

Welcome ladies and gentlemen to this video kindly sponsored by a returning sponsor for the channel Magellan TV. Now you may remember that Magellan hosts a wide variety of curated documentaries covering a huge range of topics but relevant for viewers of this channel and for the topic of this video I thought we'd look at this documentary series World's Greatest Ships. Currently there are two seasons each of six episodes covering a whole range of famous ships from different time periods all the way back to Drake's Golden Hind and coming right forward into the Second World War with HMS Ark Royal in the last episode of season two. Some of these ships still survive today, others the wrecks have been found and still others such as the Golden Hind, the Endeavour and the Mayflower have had replicas built which of course greatly assists with the visual learning component of watching a documentary. 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Imagine if you will you're in the Bay of Biscay not the world's most friendliest stretch of sea you've lost your rudder you're out of control this is probably not going to end well for you unless you can get assistance but it's 2023 you have radios you have satellite communications and so you send out a distress call now of course in 2023 you're expecting maybe a helicopter or a maritime patrol plane or a coast guard unit maybe if you're lucky a French warship and at the very least maybe a passing freighter or passenger ship will show up put down a nice motorized launch and you'll be safe maybe they'll even take you in tow and then you receive word a ship is nearby they're coming to assist you you look out on the indicated bearing and out of the mists appears this thing a fully rigged under sail east indiaman from the 17th century no you're not hallucinating and no you haven't drunk quite all of the ship's spirits to preserves this is real you are being rescued in the 21st century by a sailing trade vessel with a full broadside of cannon and there's the proof taken from the rather bemused disabled modern vessel in as the 17th century east indiaman replica gothenburg took them into tow and to safety and that is the ship that we're going to be looking at today but before we step aboard the ship that's around now let's take a quick dive into her history the original gothenburg or gotheborg i think that was pronounced by swedish is not great was a ship of the swedish east india company because you know back in the 18th century everyone had to have an east india company because that's how you made an awful lot of money founded in 1731 the swedish east india company was no exception to this and made a number of highly profitable voyages of trade to and from china and the general east indies which if you go to gothenburg itself resulted in quite a number of very fine buildings amongst other things it's just the buildings are the ones that have mostly survived between the time of its founding and 1813 when the company went bankrupt due to changing economic conditions 37 ships bearing the flag of the company and of course of sweden managed to complete over 130 voyages the gotheborg was one of the earliest of these vessels launched in 1738 at the terra nova shipyards in stockholm she would manage to make a total of three voyages to china the first went pretty much without incident and made a great deal of money the second was almost without incident albeit when she emerged from cardiz in spain she was captured by a british frigate who presumably thought that she was a hostile trading vessel but she was eventually released to go about her way and completed that voyage as well but her last voyage which started in march 1743 did not go well she was already sailing late she'd been delayed by packer she really should have sailed in the autumn and she still had to fight the remainders of ice as she made her way out of gothenburg she then headed for spain because although sweden had many trade goods that were considered quite valuable by a lot of people china only wanted to be paid in silver and sweden was not particularly rich in silver and so she took more regular swedish trade goods including a lot of supplies that were useful for making and maintaining ships and would trade them in spain for silver as well as provisions and then head out to do the next stage of the voyage which was to pick up all those wonderful silks and porcelains and so forth in china but then things went wrong still further she was driven by strong winds almost to the western side of the atlantic and then fighting her way back east around the southern tip of africa she was forced to wait for six months in java as the delays meant she'd missed the monsoon season which provided the best winds to reach china itself and so it wasn't until 1744 that she actually reached china began her trading mission and then loaded with tea silk porcelain zinc spices and various other bits of cargo she headed home the return voyage passed with much fewer incidents than the outward bound voyage but unfortunately she fell at the last hurdle in september 1745 two years after she'd left port she was approaching gothenburg under the control of local pilots but they managed to run her aground near the alfsborg fortress on the outer edges of the approach to gothenburg unfortunately she was stuck on the rock so hard and with so much damage that it was impossible to get her off of the rocks but luckily she was close enough to gothenburg itself that boats came out and everybody on board was saved as was around one-third of the cargo between insurance the salvaging of some of the cargo and various other measures the voyage still made a profit despite losing the ship itself and two-thirds of the cargo which gives you some idea of just how valuable the china trade was after a few more 18th and 19th century commercial salvage operations the wreck was just left until in the 1980s archaeological salvage operations and dives were conducted to see what was left of the ship as you can see here some of the broken porcelain was actually recovered and you can even buy fragments of it today then in the 1990s as the dives came to an end they came up with the idea of what about building an exact replica this work was duly undertaken and the ship was launched in june 2003 she then commenced a series of voyages including replicating the original ship's expedition to china albeit without striking rocks on the way back and then this has been followed up pretty much since that which concluded in 2007 with a series of cruises around the baltic scandinavian waters the mediterranean the atlantic and generally all around europe a planned second voyage to china in 2022 had to be turned into a grand european tour due to covid restrictions still in force in china at the time and it was during that altered tour that she rescued the rudderless yacht as mentioned at the she then headed back to gothenburg where after two decades at sea she's undergoing a refit to try and ensure that she will have many more decades at sea and it was here in stockholm in june 2024 that i caught up with her so who wants to go aboard an actual working east indian i know i do i did and now you get to as well this is the site that will greet you as you approach her you then head into the main admin building on the left where you can purchase your tickets for your guided tour they have regularly scheduled tours i believe it's four or five in swedish during the day and two in english there's also a gift shop which while small is actually one of the best curated gift shops i've ever seen for a museum ship with a variety of things from the regular stuff for the kids through to very interesting books some in swedish some in english some in both and for those of you who want to go on more nautical theme you can get sailors shirts as the same as the crew actually wear when the ship is at sea of course a variety of hats ships models and as i mentioned earlier bits of porcelain from the wreck of the original now with all that said they also let me aboard to do some filming hello everybody and welcome aboard the museum ship dash active sailing ship dash indium and gothenburg now she is a replica of a swedish vessel of the same name from the 1700s the original gothenburg made a trip to china for trade and then came back again didn't quite make it sank outside the harbour but they were able to recover the crew and the cargo so it all worked out in the end now this is a replica vessel but although she is in refit she is an active sailing vessel and that means we're going to see a few things that you're not going to see on pretty much any other active or museum ship in the world there's one or two active sailing replicas but gothenburg is probably the biggest and the one that's gone the furthest of at least 17th 18th century ship design and that means that what you're going to see is a ship that's inordinary you've heard me use that term before it's a period term that essentially means in between voyages she's having a refit which is what gothenburg is having done now and there's therefore going to be a lot of unique stuff that you won't see on a museum ship like victory trincomalee constitution unicorn constellation jylland if you're down in denmark etc etc and one of the first things that's very obvious is the ropes and the deck because on a museum ship you don't want every other person complaining that they're all covered in black sticky substances because of all the tar so they'll use cleaner ropes but on gothenburg you have to have that tar on the ropes because it helps preserve the ropes that's why it was applied originally in the first place and it also means to be honest in a storm you've got a lot more grip than you would on a more conventional especially a modern rope which might become very very slick so as we go around it's going to look a lot if you like dirtier than a museum ship but that's because she is an active working ship as much as anything else now we're going to come around i'm going to spin the camera around and this is one of the first things so this is the bow sprit but as you can see up top the jib has been taken off so it's just the main bowsprit going on and as you can see it is also a composite rather than a single bit of wood so this is one example of what a ship would look like in ordinary she doesn't have her forward sails and the jib boom out etc etc what you'll also notice is these little steps and these ropes and yes that does mean while she is in active service while she's sailing around people do actually have to go up out there to have a look and see what's going on which could be slightly unnerving another feature from the period which has been accurately replicated as you can see here are these caps this is a soft metal would historically have been lead there's probably white metal or pewter but this helped preserve the wood because of course you can paint the wood but the ends of the wood where the grain is visible are very susceptible to weathering and swelling so you cap it off and that main means that the wood stays intact a lot longer so looking down at the decks here you can see we've got nice sticky lead as the sticky tar and it is sticking to my feet as we go now you'll hear maybe in the background a slight buzz that is the they're cleaning the deck further off now here you can see this is the main mast and the mizzen mast again you can see it's been cut down because the ship is in ordinary you can actually see the upper portions of the masts next to the lower portions and then right up at the top you can see the hole where those upper portions would go through so these masts have been stepped down so a minimal amount of rig is there just to keep the lower portion up because of course the lower portion goes all the way down into the hull so you can't really take that out unless you're turning the ship into a hulk but in this way you don't have to maintain the rigging and worry about the top weight of having the ship fully rigged but you can put it back together in a relatively swift time and you can see some of the rigging coming down here to the foremast and here just ahead so you can see just here's my finger there there's the upper portion of the mast there's a lower portion of the mast and there you can see going up there to the crow's nest spotting top and if the ship absolutely has to fighting top as well although hopefully there aren't so many pirates around these days now one thing you'll notice compared to a warship is that we were just on the bow there and we're just walking along the main deck there is no focsal now the focsal has kind of as a raised structure gone away to a certain extent already by the time a ship like gothenburg was historically built but on merchant ships although they do still carry defensive armament it's gone away pretty much completely because it doesn't serve a huge amount of purpose for their merchant role on a warship the focsal sticks around a bit longer because it's a good place to put bow chaser guns it's a good place to try and hold the ship against boarding actions or to fire down into an enemy ship during boarding actions although it's a lot reduced compared to the period of mary rose or vassa just coming a little bit further back of course we have the ship's bell which we shall of course ring and that's still in use you can see it's made in 2004 when the ship is at sea that's rung every half hour during the watches so let's head a little further off and see what we can find so we're just a little bit off of the bell and one of the things you're going to see as we go down is this long dark piece of wood this is one of the ship's yards so this is where the sail with one of the sails would be hung normally i have a feeling this is the main sail yard but currently of course it's being stored down here whilst the ship is in refit again because it having it up there is just a maintenance and safety nightmare when you don't actually need it but as you can see from the status of this and the status of these housings you can house pretty much all of the ship's yards and yard arms when the ship is not in active duty as we come along here what do we see here well this is an arm that's going out here and it's holding one of the ship's boats so this is fairly typical of how ship's boats would have been deployed in the time period and it's just sitting riding there and of course when a ship historically was at anchor they would usually anchor outside of a harbour or at the edges of a harbour or in the main roadstead and then the boats would actually go back and forth taking crew and supplies to and from in some harbours especially riverine harbours like london you could of course get a ship up to a quayside or a pier side but that was a lot more difficult back in the day before steam tugs and stuff started to show up at the beginning of the 19th century and so it was less commonly done you could get pulled in by your own boats or by hired boats from the port you could kedge the ship along with your anchors and if you got close enough to a pier side of course you could send over lines but it was a lot more of an involved process a more dangerous process and a more expensive process so a lot of the time ships would tend to just anchor a little bit away from shore and let their boats do their their work going back and forth rather than risk getting too close unless there was a pressing need on a warship for example if they had to offload the guns. Up here we're on the quarter deck and you get a nice good view down the length of the ship but also you get a critically a much better view of what's going on forward of the ship compared to if you're down on the main deck and that means that the ship's pilot if it's coming into or out of harbour would be standing up here but they could direct the ship down here so this is a skylight this comes out if you need to and you can see down there there is the ship's wheel the ship's wheel is connected down to the teller via a rope and that rope is made of elk hide rather than the more regular rope that's elsewhere on the ship because this rope has to be incredibly strong given the strains it's under and you cannot afford for it in any way shape or form to break so the ship's wheel is down there underneath the quarter deck but a pilot during the coming into an out harbour or coming to an outport will be up here yelling instructions down there now we mentioned the ship's wheel before looking down from the pilot position that's looking up into the same skylight so here is the ship's wheel as you can see we've got a double wheel with the rope and a bag to keep water off all there and you can in theory do this one manned but typically because this is connected up as it would be historically there's no power assisted steering it's purely just reduction ratios you typically have two people on here but of course you can double up to four or possibly more in really rough sea conditions because remember being a historically accurate vessel if the ship is trying to turn and it's really rough weather then all the force that's acting on that very large rudder aft is going to be transmitting back through here trying to turn the rudder back to dead straight so you might need quite a bit of strength to prevent that from happening and correct and then coming around here we have the pin compass you might be wondering how does this work there's no magnetic parts to it this is just all wood well that would be correct you would need a magnetic compass as well but this is a way to help you work out where you're going in terms of what kind of course you've been setting so i do have permission to do that so this obviously is your compass rose and what would happen is you've got your eight hour shift and every half hour when the bell is rung someone would look at look at the compass and they would put the appropriate pin in because there are eight holes and so let's say we're sailing and on the first half hour we're sailing dead ahead great so we put well we're trying and put one in there the next half hour comes along and now we look at the compass and we're actually going north by northeast so put compass in there a point in there the next half hour we're still going north by northeast fantastic the next half hour oh now we're going northeast so that goes in there and then in the next half hour oh no we're going fully west maybe we've made a turn maybe the wind has turned against us so we count five along and then that goes west and then as we try and bring the ship back on course maybe by the next half hour we're west by northwest and by the next half hour let's do another pin we've managed to get ourselves back to north by northwest and then in the last hour we're actually back on course north and now we can trace by following the lines what kind of course we've most likely been following so obviously if you were at the start and end and you thought oh okay we were just heading north we might you might think you've gone straight but by looking at this you can tell that actually plot this against time and you're actually on a very meandering course you probably haven't gone as far north as you think you have so a very handy device once you get to use and this is just one little extra bit of equipment that you just find randomly lying around here so obviously we have some modern stuff as she is a still a modern vessel but this is a sounding line so this is a big lump of lead and you can see there's a little indent on the bottom now historically that indent would be filled with tallow the kind of animal fat and then you would chuck this over the side obviously you've got the rope so you can bring it back in but then this would hit the bottom and you'd know from the length of rope therefore how deep the water is in the vicinity of your vessel and when it comes up the tallow lump that's on the end of this lead weight would hopefully have snagged some of the seabed so was it silty was it sandy was it rocky you'd be able to tell hopefully by examining what was stuck in the tallow now of course we are at the mizzen mast the aft most mast and we have some of the rigging here which allows you to climb up now of course back in the day there was no safety equipment if you fell off you fell off and that was pretty much the end of you you can use safety equipment to climb this section but in more typical operations climbing this part of the ship's rigging you usually wouldn't use too much in the way of safety equipment but you'd have it with you for when you actually start going out onto the ship's yard arms to deal with the sail the ship is of course flying the correct flag and once again we get a good view of what a ship's masts look like when she's in ordinary obviously now we're back on the poop deck you can see the main mast and the foremast there just the lower portions and you can appreciate just how much less rigging is necessary even when compared to this relatively small tall ship just over there on the other side of the harbour now as you can see in her case the rigging that's holding up the lower portion of the mast just consists of essentially two lines with a set of steps in between as opposed to over here where you've got four lines with steps in between lower down and and that's just on the mizzen mast on the main mast you've got eight lines of which seven have steps between them but you can see all the additional rope that's there plus all the additional lines that are holding up the full extent of the bow sprit and those upper sections of the mast as compared to this much larger much more complicated ship where we just have the additional lower rigging now here we have the ship's capstan or at least the upper part of the capstan the capstan goes below deck so there's an additional point on the gun deck so you can have multiple crew sections working all at once there's a dozen points on this one i think there's six on the lower one and the they're all got these capstan sections which go in like so and then you have two up to two people one if one normally but maybe up to two so with this you can have up to 24 people and they can push the capstan around now of course in the old days you would have a capstan for the anchors on the gothenburg on this replica ship they have an electric hoist forward for the anchors but one of the other things you need to use a capstan for is actually putting the ship into and out of ordinary so we've got the one end of the yardarm here and of course we've got the masts now these days obviously you can employ a dockside crane if you want but if you don't want to or you can't you can sling a rope around the capstan and have it taken up there and you get everyone on here and turn it around and as it turns around obviously the rope gets tightened around the base of the capstan and you can actually bring up a good chunk of the ship's masts rigging and yards purely under muscle power and then once all that's set up you can also use the capstan again with rope around it run up to the upper portion of the rigging to help raise and lower the sails if you need to you obviously would only do that in extreme circumstances where you need a huge amount of effort because normally obviously you'd have people up there on the yardarms dealing with the sails but if you need a little bit of extra help this is available and there's also these little ratchet blocks you can see their arc of movement there and that means that whilst the capstan is being wound you can at any point lock it off so if people need to stop pushing for whatever reason maybe they need a break maybe they're called off to do something else the whole thing isn't going to just suddenly unwind spool out probably clock everyone in the head with those arms and then unfurl whatever it is you've been trying to furl but let's head below decks and see what's down there well we're now one deck below so this is the first continuous covered deck of the ship and this is where the man known as the super cargo would live and do business because of course he's in charge of the cargo he needs to make sure it's sold for the best price and so forth so he would have the very fancy brocade and this would be where people be brought to conduct their trade deals so it's all very fancy and unlike a warship so again if you've been in victory of constitution as that so forth if this was a warship even a frigate you'd have a gun port here a gun port there all of this would be very quickly removable for chase guns here the walls are solid you probably in theory might be able to bring a chase gun through but very unlikely because all of this is much more solid much much slower it would be much slower to convert all of this and you have a lot more furniture rather than just one table you've got three tables you've got storage cabinets and the ship's cabins continue forward of us so i'm just going to grab you and we're going to spin around so of course you have a library because it is a ship for modern people but you have little cabins here all of this would be as per historical so much more enclosed but much feeling much more here like a small apartment suite than on a warship but reminding you that you do live in interesting times we have the gun deck so the lower capstan just here so this connects directly to the capstan up top and as you can see slightly fewer capstan points then we have a little bit of the original Gothenburg which has come with her new replica namesake we've got some ropes being stored here and i'm just going to pop you down yeah and flip you around fantastic and as you can see we've now got the ship's one of the ship's marks coming down for through the decks we've got more rope here because of course when ropes snap and they inevitably will you need plenty of spares so there's rope all over the place on a big warship of course all this rope either on a frigate would be down in the hold but on a merchant ship the hold is needed for cargo so it's up here and on a first rate the rope would be partially down in the hold and partially up front although on the lower gun deck but again it's a merchant ship not a warship so it can be stored up here because you wouldn't store too much cargo on the gun deck firstly because you need it to fight secondly because this would be where most of the crew slept and which is actually similar to a warship and thirdly of course because most of your cargoes can be down in the lower holds because it's hopefully nice and heavy which means it's nice and valuable but as you would find on a typical ship of the line you've got hammocks you've got mess tables which are removable of course they're suspended mess benches and of course you have cannon now a ship of this size if it was a warship would obviously have more cannon and heavier cannon but the threat of piracy is ever present and so Gothenburg which is relatively large for her period as far as merchant ships go because she's supposed to go across the world for trade does have a number of fairly heavy guns for a merchant ship they're not 32 pounders or even 24 pounders but they'll see off most pirates and perhaps even small raiding craft unrated stuff like brigs and schooners and maybe a sloop or two but so if we count we've got one there this is number two three four five and then we've got a similar number on the other side plus two more gun ports which are currently occupied with rope so that would give us six per side and i'm just going to go forward and see if there's another gun port there is so that would be seven and then we run out of space because that is the medical area so seven guns per side 14 guns total on the main gun deck and as you probably saw while we were up top there's a couple of additional piercings on the main deck for guns so if she was in full active service you'd be talking about 18 to 20 guns not including if you had any bow chasers or signal guns so Gothenburg wouldn't quite be a rated ship but she would be relatively heavily armed as far as an unrated ship is concerned at least if you were using the military measure of things hence why she could potentially see off brigs and sloops and schooners and so forth because she has a similar amount or superior armament to them assuming they're not that much larger which is going to make boarding actions very difficult the flip side of course is of course a military ship would have a higher rate of fire because they have trained gunners they'd have proportionally more crew which makes things a bit more difficult for a ship like Gothenburg but it gives her a reasonable fighting chance and most pirates would have a ship that is far less well equipped and far smaller than this so it keeps her crew and her cargo secure against pretty much everything other than a full rated warship but as far as military ships go there isn't really much they can do if a full rated warship shows up so that's not really a mark against her one of the other things you might notice while i'm walking around is that i can walk around so yeah i have my protective hat but i haven't actually smacked my head on any of the beams and that is where this ship differs slightly from her namesake she's got the same proportions the same lines the same depth the same rigging etc but she the original ship the original Gothenburg of the 1700s did actually have double gun decks so whereas this Gothenburg as we said would not quite make the rating system the original ship we had two debt levels of gun decks which actually would make her a theoretically rated ship if she was taken into active naval service but in a concession to more modern concerns you can imagine fitting two gun decks in the space where this ship has just the one plus crew accommodation below because of course she's not hauling massive amounts of silver to china meant that well those two gun decks would have been very small like you would see on a frigate or on HMS Victory so you would be smacking your head so instead of putting in two unnecessary gun decks they put one in which gives you the feel the historical accuracy of it but then gives you a the space to walk around the gun deck and enjoy it and two the space to walk around and actually enjoy being on board if you happen to be the crew further below rather than everyone losing their brain cells every five minutes because of low beams now the other thing we're just going to show you while we're down here is this section so we're in the forward part of the ship and as you can see again a working ship we've got all sorts of tools for rope and wood and so forth but what you have here as well as some sections of rope is some of the tools the ship the crew actually use so this is a device i'm left-handed so i'm doing it completely wrong but like so so this is to help you sew sails if they rip or whatever because of course this is a very thick very heavy canvas so if you use a normal thimble you will not have the finger strength so instead you have effectively a hand thimble so you can get the needle in there and push with your whole body strength to sew up that you've got a caulking hammer to make sure all the cork between the decks is put in place and you've also got these things so this little wedge shaped tool that's for hammering the tarred caulking into the between the decks and then this marlin spike which comes in this particular case metal but you can also get them in wood so this has a lot of uses i mean in a boarding action you just clock someone with it but when you're working with rope it has two primary uses when the rope is still usable but perhaps is getting a bit loose you can work it in between the the sections and then twist to tighten the rope up but when the rope is dead either because it's partially rotted or it's snapped and it's no longer long enough or for whatever reason you can also use this to unpick the rope so you untwist it because of course each rope is made up of strands which go into a single cord which is then wrapped into multiple cords which goes into the total rope and this is actually where one of the origins of the phrase new money for old rope because old rope was not useful for a ship so it would be discarded but if you had nothing better to do on a ship or if you were in a port and the ship had discarded all its old rope you could use one of these to unpick the rope and eventually if you unpick the rope enough you'll end up back with the original cordage that the rope was made of in the first place the fibers that were originally bound together and this could be treated with tar and then this would then be hammered using this into the gaps between the ship's planking to keep the ship watertight and of course because you put a lot of work into it you could sell the product of your labor hence new money for old rope so this is just forward of the gun deck so you can see again we've got a mix of old and new because she's a ship that with modern safety standards and so forth so we've got the small ship's carpenter section again on a warship this would be lower down below the waterline because all of this section would be still full of guns bow chasers and the forward guns of the port and starboard battery but on a merchant ship this forward section can be used for other purposes which as you can see is and just in there around there in the darkness would or is the modern ship's galley so this is where all the food is prepared there's you've got the door there both in English and in Swedish and we're just next to the ship's wheel so this is some of the examples of what they would have been wearing so there's no particular uniform because of course this isn't a military vessel and even on a military vessel uniforms post-date the original Gothenburg by quite a bit but here on the left you can see what a slightly lower ranked member of the crew might be wearing but they've still got a decent jacket so not an everyday sailor would have some kind of skill or specialization and then of course the captain would be wearing something very fancy because after all that's how you know he's the captain and he gets paid more so he can afford it so that wraps up our visit to the well museum and actual live sailing ship Gothenburg now if you want to come and see it yourself I highly encourage you to do so obviously she's in Gothenburg in Sweden at the moment and during the summer she's open for tours between 10 and 4 there are quite a few Swedish language tours but they're also at one o'clock and three o'clock there are English language tours if you don't happen to speak Swedish and I can confirm the staff here speak very good English they're certainly a lot better than my Swedish and depending on the time that this video goes live there may be a link in the video description below they're also starting a friends of the ship Gothenburg association so if you want to help them with the costs of refitting the ship and help her get back into service then of course you can go and do that and if that hasn't gone live by the time this video is released then it will do in the future so maybe keep an eye out for that because of course I said she is in ordinary at the moment she's been to China and back she's been all around the Mediterranean the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea and she needs a bit of work as any typical ship of her time would to get her all the way back into full sailing condition and they're working on at the moment they do have sponsors but every bit helps and the good news is that website is now up as part of the ship's overall site so there will be a link in the description below but if you don't want to go there you can go to gotheburg.se that's g-o-t-h-e-b-o-r-g.se and that's where you'll find all the information about the ship that you need so for example at the moment during the summer she's open seven days a week between 10 o'clock and five she's located in the Eriksberg portion of the city of Gothenburg which is the north side of the river and you can get there from the main city centre by bus by ferry by car by taxi or as I did by a little hireable electric scooter you can book your tickets online which will obviously reserve you a slot at a particular tour period or you can turn up and just hope that there are enough tickets on that particular tour they're usually quite flexible but obviously if you have a large party it's best to book ahead tickets cost 150 swedish krona which is about 10 or 11 british pounds 12 13 dollars and 75 swedish krona for kids between 7 and 14 so that's about 5 english pounds and about six six dollars fifty and if children are under seven then they get a board free and if you'd like to become a supporter of the ship then on the same site at the top bar you've got the visitor section the news section where you can read more about the rescue of that yacht and then the join us section and under the join us section you've got volunteers so you can become part of the volunteer ship's crew if you happen to be in the area and then there's friends of the of sweden and that is the bit where you'll want to go so what you get as a member aside from obviously the fact that you get to support such a wonderful ship well you get access to their newsletter well they'll keep you up to date with the ship's maintenance and overhaul and any future voyages you get a 10 discount at the shop and cafe there in ericsburg as well as if it happens to visit a port near you you get a discount there as well you get a discount on your bookings if you want to go and visit the ship and you can hire the ship for private and corporate events by the way which you know that's another way of supporting the ship if you happen to be a bigger company or you want to get married on an east indian for some reason the ship's crew also maintain a series of lectures and other educational activities so as a member you get priority access to those and of course you can attend the annual general meeting if you happen to be in sweden physically or i suppose by a zoom or something if you happen to be overseas for an individual that membership is 160 kroner per year so only 10 kroner more than a tour of the ship which again for those of you who need currency conversions that's 11 to 12 british pounds 13 to 14 dollars really not bad value for membership and of course when the ship is back in service and out on voyages you can actually become part of the crew for various legs of those voyages something which i plan to do in the future as well as of course being a supporting member because i'm not just saying you should do it i am officially a member of the friends of gothenburg as well so thanks very much to the exceptional crew who showed me around let me film let me fly my drone around or generally very friendly hope you enjoyed the video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions