One thing the Scandinavians are most proud of is their ship building heritage.

It’s true that the Vikings wouldn’t have been the Vikings without those long, sleek ships tumbling over the waves of the North Sea.

There are ship building museums and sailing activities and maritime books and movies and boat replicas all across Scandinavia. You can find amazingly well-preserved ships from not just the Viking Age, but from well before and after those helmet-wearing sailors ruled the sea.

And even if maritime pursuits aren’t your thing, a trip here may surely change your mind. It certainly has mine.

But one of the most interesting stories and exhibits about a famous ship doesn’t involve the Vikings at all. In fact, it’s not even a story of Scandinavian maritime success. It’s actually a story about utter failure — a failure that would prove to one day bring quite a bit of joy to modern people all over the world.

It’s a story about the ship Vasa — a ship that was built in Sweden in the early 1600s during the country’s great period of power.

Gustav ll Adolph, the king of Sweden at the time, ordered that a warship be built to further his plans for military expansion in an effort to control the Baltic Sea. And this wasn’t to be just any ship. This ship was built to be one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world, with 64 bronze cannons, two gun decks, 13,720 square feet of sails and intricately carved oak and pine sculptures adorning her that depicted mermaids, sea monsters, wild men and tritons — all painted in vivid, bright colors.

She was a magnificent ship, but with one slight problem: she wasn’t seaworthy. The builders probably sensed this from the get-go, but no one wanted to tell the king.

It became apparent she wasn’t seaworthy when before setting sail on her maiden voyage, 30 men had been ordered to run up and down her decks to test the ship’s seaworthiness, and then ordered to stop after three laps when it was feared the ship would capsize.

And still, no one wanted to tell the king. (It went something like this: “You tell the king!” “No, you tell the king!”)

So, on Aug. 10, 1628, the captain ordered Vasa to depart on her first voyage through the harbor in Stockholm to great fanfare, the guns firing a salute as she sailed.

It must have been apparent to all 300 sailors inside the ship that something was very wrong.

And, as the story goes, when a gust of wind filled her sails, “she heeled heavily to port,” pushing the lower gun ports under and allowing water to inundate the lower deck.

And then, sadly, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, the Vasa sank in front of a crowd of thousands, and 30 men lost their lives.

The inquest didn’t reveal the true cause of the ship’s failure, but modern minds believe it boiled down to several mistakes, including a different form of measurement used by the Danish builders and the Swedish builders, creating a variation in timbers. It has also been discovered the top deck was much too heavy to support her.

The ship rested in the harbor for more than three centuries, almost forgotten, but fortunate to be in the cold, brackish water that would help to preserve her while the rest of the world carried on.

In the 1950s, it was found by divers and from there a dedicated committee was formed to retrieve it.

But that was no easy task.

The recovery was an intricate and delicate undertaking, and it took nearly five years before Vasa was finally raised from her watery grave. Today, she stands in an impressive museum in Stockholm that was built and designed to show her off, with six stories allowing the visitor to view the restored ship from every level.

More than a million people a year visit the museum, and while it’s been a boon for tourism, archaeologists have also been able to discover what life was like in the 17th century by examining the more than 1,000 well-preserved artifacts on the ship and the skeletal remains of the crew members who died on board.

Many call the raising of the Vasa “Sweden’s Apollo mission.” People here remember where they were when the ship was brought up from the depths of the sea.

And while the sinking of the ship had embarrassed a country with a unbridled pride of their maritime history, one can’t help but speculate that today, even the king would be proud.