The Swedish navy is in poor shape.…
November 1628 CE
The Swedish navy is in poor shape.
Sweden is embroiled in a war with Poland, and looks apprehensively at the development of the Thirty Years' War in present day Germany.
The war has been raging since 1618 and from a Protestant perspective it is not going well.
The king's plans for the Polish campaign and for securing Sweden's interests require a strong naval presence in the Baltic.
The navy has suffered several severe setbacks during the 1620s.
A squadron cruising in 1625 off the Bay of Riga had been caught in a storm and ten ships ran aground and were wrecked.
In the Battle of Oliwa in 1627, a Swedish squadron had been outmaneuvered and defeated by a larger Polish force and two large ships were lost.
Tigern ("The Tiger"), which was the Swedish admiral's flagship, was captured by the Poles, and Solen ("The Sun") was blown up by her own crew when she was boarded and almost captured.
Three more large ships have been lost in 1628 in less than a month; admiral Klas Fleming's flagship Kristina was wrecked in a storm in the Gulf of Danzig, Riksnyckeln ("Key of the Realm") ran aground at Viksten in the southern archipelago of Stockholm and, perhaps most inopportunely for the Swedish crown, the warship Vasa, built top-heavy and with insufficient ballast, founders a few minutes into her maiden voyage.
Gustavus Adolphus is engaged in naval warfare on several fronts, which further exacerbates the difficulties of the navy.
In addition to battling the Polish navy, the Swedes are threatened by Catholic forces that have invaded Jutland.
The Swedish king has little sympathy for the Danish king, Christian IV, and Denmark and Sweden have been bitter enemies for well over a century.
However, Sweden fears a Catholic conquest of Copenhagen and Zealand (Denmark), which would grant the Catholic powers control over the strategic passages between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, which would be disastrous for Swedish interests.