NORTH AMERICA
THE NORTH SEA
THE NORTH SEA | CADIZ | CAPE TOWN | ROARING 40's | BENGALA | BATAVIA | CHINA | CANTON | NORTH AMERICA
NORTH AMERICA
THE NORTH SEA
THE NORTH SEA | CADIZ | CAPE TOWN | ROARING 40's | BENGALA | BATAVIA | CHINA | CANTON | NORTH AMERICA
During 1731-1813 all ships of the Swedish East India Company called at several ports along their way to China. Some were carefully chosen. Other they ended up at by pure chance due to accidents or bad weather or by necessity due to lack of food or water.
In mars 1743 the unfortunate East Indiaman Götheborg - from which this site has got its name - started her last voyage to China from a protected bay close to Styrso in the Gothenburg archipelago. The name of this bay was Wargö håla or "Wolf's Island Hole".
Neither the excavation of the wreck site, which went on from 1986-1994 nor archive research have so far yielded any explanation of the foundering, which remains a mystery.
However, just recently things surprisingly turned to the better - a most surprising message arrived from a descendant to the missing Premier Supracargoe August Tabuteau - the highest commander on board - who had found these pages and through a friend let me know he knew a lot about this forefather of his.
We are right now comparing notes, and I can tell that the story is compliceted as reality often are, but - the mystery has by now gotten much closer to an explanation.
On the following pages you will find the sailing route of the Gotheborg during her last voyage to China and a few more places which were not visited - like North America - but still are closely related to the Swedish East India trade.
On the following pages you can follow the sailing route of the old Swedish East India Company, and visit their Ports of Call all the way to China.
Two years later - after sailing all the way to China and almost all the way back to Gothenburg, the voyage came to its surprising halt a mere 900 meters from land.
When this section of the Original Gotheborg III Project web site was designed for the First Virtual Tour of the East Indiaman Gotheborg show at the Swedish Trade Fair in 1998, the thought was that the links to the future sponsors and partners of the project would go in here. Since this was in the very beginning of the Internet and the world had hardly awakened to the existence of the Internet it was at this time hard to even find any sample links to put here at all, to some of the destinations. For the fun of it, some old links are still here. Plus one link to a site I set up to my own children's school a number of years back. Why are we starting projects at all, if we don't take the opportunity to have fun too? Beside, that goes for the cheesy music that is still up on some of these pages. Live with it or, turn down the volume. This was stunning 'high tech' back in 1998, as was the really cool web cam we hooked up and directed into the fair area, so any visitor could follow us, when we were looking at them. I figure this was the first public web even of this kind ever in the world. It was however unfortunately also a bit like Edison having invented the first telephone and then sits and wait for someone to call. Of course next thing to do for Edison would be to invent one more phone or he would have been sitting there still. Anyway around this time the Gotheborg III Project was well under way and we had globally made so much noise that even the heavyweight 'has beens' in Gothenburg got the message that this might be a good project to have, after which they muscled in and took over - the wood and nails part. Anyway, the good point is that the ship has eventually got built, and that it is ever so grand to watch.