340 VASA
and sink two of its ships. Fortunately for them, the Swedish flagship, the Vasa,
was overturned by a squall in Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage on 10
August 1628. She never reached her intended destination in the Southern
Baltic. Built by a Dutch shipwright, Henryk Hybertsson, she would have been
one of the great vessels of the age, and was certainly superior to anything in
the British, not to mention Polish, service at the time. Her displacement weight
was 1,300 tons, and she carried sixty-four 24-pounder cannons on two gun
decks. (The wreck was salvaged intact in 1961, and is now on display in
Stockholm.)^12 Another freak disaster almost overtook Gustavus Adolphus
himself. Outside Marienwerder (Kwidzyn), on 27 June 1629, the Swedish King
was surprised in open country and surrounded by the Polish cavalry. His
swordbelt and scabbard, which he desperately unbuckled during the skirmish
to free himself from the grasp of a Polish trooper, were later presented to
Koniecpolski, and gave the Hetman one of the few satisfactions of the war.
The Swedes were finally bought off at the Truce of Altmark, on 26 September
- They were to keep all the Prussian ports, both royal and ducal, except
Danzig, Puck, and Konigsberg, and to take a 3'/ per cent toll on the Vistula
trade. With this, they could finance a large part of their expenses in the Thirty
Years War, in which they now intervened in earnest. Peace was signed at
Stumdorf (Sztumska Wies) on 12 September 1635. Sweden then returned the
Prussian ports in exchange for the confirmation of her hold on Livonia.
Wiadyslaw IV undertook to withhold his claim to the Swedish throne during
the currency of the Peace, which was fixed at twenty-six years.
The last great Swedish War proved equally ruinous to both sides.^13 In 1655,
the nephew of Gustavus Adolphus, Charles X, invaded the Republic without
warning from two directions at once. Alarmed by the advance of the
Muscovites, who in the previous year had taken the Dnieper Cossacks under
their protection, he was determined to deny them any further scope. In the
process, he provoked the Potop, 'the Deluge' - six years of the most deplorable
confusion and destruction in Polish history. Without any clear advantage to
himself, he broke the Republic's last resistance to its enemies in the eastern
provinces, and made her the prey of a stream of foreign invaders, who promptly
descended to pick up the bones. At first the Swedes carried all before them. On
25 July, at Ujscie, the Wojewoda of Poznan, Krzysztof Opalinski, capitulated
with the entire levee-en-masse of Wielkopolska. One month later, at Kejdany,
the Grand Hetman of Lithuania, Janusz Radziwill, accepted a Swedish protec-
torate over the Grand Duchy. The Polish Vasa, Jan Kazimierz, took refuge in
imperial Silesia. The greater part of his army entered the Swedish service.
Warsaw was occupied; Cracow was taken by siege; a large number of smaller
towns and estates were burned and plundered. Resistance was reduced to the
uncoordinated activities of peasant bands and to the miraculous defence of the
fortified Pauline monastery of Jasna Gora, on the 'Bright Hill' of Czestochowa.
At this, the Polish chronicles waxed very eloquent: