Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 23, 2014

Kronan was the flagship of the Swedish navy in the Baltic Sea in the 1670s. When built, she was one of the largest seagoing vessels in the world. After four years of service, the ship foundered in rough weather at the Battle of Öland on 1 June 1676, with the loss of about 800 men (including the navy's acting supreme commander Lorentz Creutz and other senior officers), over 100 guns, and large quantities of silver and gold coin. This was a hard blow for Sweden during the Scanian War (1675–79), as besides being the largest and most heavily armed ship in the Swedish navy, Kronan had been an important status symbol for the monarchy of the young Charles XI. The inexperienced Creutz has been blamed by many historians for the sinking of Kronan, although recent research points to Sweden's general lack of a well-developed naval organization and officer corps at the time. Most of her guns were salvaged in the 1680s, but eventually the wreck fell into obscurity before its exact position was rediscovered in 1980. Yearly diving operations have since surveyed and excavated the site, and many of the artifacts recovered have been put on display at the Kalmar County Museum. (Full article...)

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