Remarkably, six of Vasa's original sails and two smaller boat sails were found folded on the orlop deck. Made of hemp and flax, vegetable fibers that would not normally survive, the sails were extremely fragile, the fibers disintegrating when touched. To remove the sails from the storage locker on the ship, the archaeologists were forced to cut the pile in half and slide iron sheets under each pile to allow them out to be lifted of the hatches.

Conservation began in October 1962. As the sails were so fragile, they could not support their own weight and had to be cleaned and straightened under water, in large, shallow trays. Gradually the silt and dirt were removed and the various layers were separated.

Like wood, the fibers of waterlogged textiles can also collapse through the surface tension of water, causing uneven drying and shrinkage. Vasa's sails were dried through changes of alcohol and then xylene, a solvent with very low surface tension, but they were still extremely fragile and required strengthening.

A new method was devised by Vasa's conservators, whereby a close-weave fiberglass fabric was painted with a number of layers of an acrylic solution, with the same refractive index as the glass fiber, which made the backing fabric almost invisible. The fragile sails were then attached to this backing support using a lower concentration of the same acrylic solution. Conservation of Vasa's sails took over a decade to complete. Today at the museum, we have the remains of 650 square meters of sails, most kept in drawers in our store rooms and one sail on display in the ship hall.

Regards

Alan