the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg

Nov 25, 2006

A bridge over the Atlantic Ocean

We visit the Martime Museum ("Sjöfartsmuseet), a museum with history about Gothenburgs harbour, Shipping agencies, the colony New Sweden, East India company and more. We attended a guided tour called "A brigde over the Atlantic Ocean - the "American ships" as an agent of the "new stuff" to Gothenburg.

Guide: Örjan Slätte

We also have some interest for the "American ships" as you probably already have seen on our homepage about the Swedish American Line.

What could be more suitable then to take a guided tour about these fantastic ships, that
sailed over the Atlantic Ocean with passengers between Sweden and the US. It is really a pitty that these ships don´t sail to New York any longer. It would have been a great trip to travel with one of these ships from Gothenburg harbour and arrive to see the New York skyline.

We really think that these trips had worked even today, even though you now can go by plane over the Atlantic Sea and arrive in New York after a few hours. Of course these trips would have been much more expensive.

We enter the museum

This day started with rain... again... we have hade rain for a couple of weeks now, when will it end? We still wonder when we will have some snow, Christmas is soon here.
When we entered the "Sjöfartsmuseet" the smell of waffles filled the entrence. OH ! it´s today they have waffles with cream at the cafe. Kids and parents nearly ran us down at the wardrobe space.....we wonder if they were there for the guided tour or for the waffles. I think you can imagen by yourself, why they were there.

Time to start the tour

When we got to the starting point and to our guide, Örjan, there were no other people there than my sister and me. This will be a good guided tour for only two persons.... but when we started around 1PM it had arrive some more persons.

The group consisted of approx 10-13 persons. Örjan also told us that we can have a dialog during the tour so please ask questions if you want. And on sometimes we got some history questions to answer.

On the tour

On the tour he talked about the different ships that sailed the Atlantic Ocean between the years 1915-1975. There were Kungsholm, Stockholm, Drottningholm etc.

Örjan also informed us about what Sweden and US had exchanged with each other (county governor houses (landshövdingehus) to Sweden, blockhouses to the US, mail order companies to Sweden).

There were a whole lot of trips with both famous persons like Greta Garbo who travelled with these ships. Also several well known business men travelled between the countries.

These trips was really important at this time both for Sweden and the US. The tour lasted in approx 1 hour and we also took a short walk around the museum. When the guided tour was over we continued to walk around in the museum and read more about different Ship agencies in Gothenburg - Johnson-Linien, Rederi AB Nordstjerna and Concordi-Transatlantic.

Did you know that also Swedish ships went with "slaves" during 1700s to our colony S:t Barthelemy. In the museum there were a picture about how they best could "pack" the slaves to get as many as possible aboard the ship.

After the tour

After the tour we talked a little to the guide, Örjan Slätte. He told us that he had worked on the Swedish Amerika Line ships during 1970-1975, both onboard Kungsholm and Gripsholm. He worked as an "Information officer" (he handled all the contacts and paper work with foreign authorities when they arrived to a foreign country.)


He also told us that he has arrived to the New York harbour, approx 35 times. And as we have, he also has American relativies since the immigration period, but sorry to say he still haven´t visited them.

What about the coffee

You probably wonder, how about our coffee brake....we never went to the cafe with waffles, or as a matter of fact, we couldn´t enter due to all the people. Instead we went to a cafe further in city.

Thank you !

More information about the Marine Museum in Göteborg


Picture: Kungsholm - www.norwayheritage.com