History of Research

The very first documents about the history of Vrouw Maria were found by Dr. Christian Ahlström in the Finnish National Archives as early as in the 1970's. Ahlström gathered up pieces of information from different archives and he published them for the first time in 1979 (Sjunkna Skepp, Lund). The most important source for researchers is the ship's protest, which was found in the municipal archives of Turku. The document consists of an extract of Vrouw Maria's logbook and a list of the things that were salvaged. In the Diplomatica Collection in Riksarkivet, the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm, there is diplomatic correspondence concerning the attempts to search and salvage the ship.

For years, amateur divers tried to find the wreck. Mr. Rauno Koivusaari and other members of a society called Pro Vrouw Maria managed to locate the wreck using a side-scan sonar in the summer of 1999. At the instigation of Dr. Christian Ahlström, an honorary member of the Pro Vrouw Maria Society, and by the help of the Dutch Ambassador to Finland, the personnel in the Notary Archives in Amsterdam assisted in tracing documents on Vrouw Maria. As a result of the search, documents about the ship's earlier phases and the insurance of the cargo were in fact found.

In the autumn of 1999, the Finnish Maritime Museum, being responsible for the underwater cultural heritage in Finland, engaged a researcher to co-ordinate investigations concerning the wreck of Vrouw Maria. The Museum started field research on the wreck in the summer of 2000. Researchers, who were aided by a group of voluntary divers, documented the wreck by photographing and videotaping it.

The work in different archives goes on. As a result of the studies in different archives, we know about the quality of Vrouw Maria's cargo, the events of the shipwreck, the attempts to salvage the ship, and about the subsequent phases of some of the things that were salvaged. In addition to this, certain auction lists and Clara Bille's doctoral theses De tempel der kunst of het kabinet van den heer Braamcamp (Amsterdam 1961) tell us roughly what the works of art in Vrouw Maria's cargo were.