Sweden

Sweden’s early modern accounts are a trap for anyone converting sums, because the realm ran several currencies at once. The daler was a unit of account fixed at four marks from the 1570s, while the minted riksdaler held a stable 25.6 grams of fine silver, and the two drifted apart steadily as the account money depreciated. Gustav II Adolf put the country on a copper standard in 1624, and a decree of August 1633 halved the official value of the copper öre, splitting the reckoning formally into daler silvermynt and daler kopparmynt at two copper to one silver; a figure written simply as daler therefore means quite different things before and after that year. What compensates is an unusually complete central archive. The Kammarkollegiet ledgers and contract books, the admiralty and ordnance accounts and the Skeppsgården papers, held in the Riksarkivet and Krigsarkivet, record building and shipbuilding work by name, date and agreed price, so the men who drew the designs — shipwrights, masons, carvers — can often be read against the money actually paid out.

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The Swedish Crown Pays Henrik Hybertsson and Arendt de Groot for the Warship Vasa 1625–1627
On 10 January 1625 at Nyköping, Gustav II Adolf personally signed a four-year yard lease and building contract with the Dutch-born master shipwright Henrik Hybertsson and his partner Arendt de Groot: two great ships to be delivered afloat in 1626 and 1628 for 80,000 daler together, with a keel of 64 alnar and a beam of 17 alnar over the main deck, the dimensions Vasa was actually built to. The crown’s central ledger for 1628 records the contractors as having delivered Vasa during 1627 and charged it at 40,000 daler, the figure converted here; a separate undated costing puts the hull’s real outlay at 53,300. The sum buys the whole vessel, so it bundles the shipwright’s design judgement with timber, ironwork and the wages of the carpenters, joiners and sculptors who carved the ship’s several hundred figures. The daler here is the pre-1633 unit of account of four marks — the split into silvermynt and kopparmynt did not yet exist — converted through the riksdaler at the market rate of 6.5 marks then current, so the figure is an estimate with a defensible band of roughly 34,000 to 53,000 grams.
~42,570g
Kammarkollegiet, Generalbokhålleriet, Rikshuvudböcker vol. 29 (1628), and the contract of 10 January 1625 in the Kammarkollegiet contract book, Riksarkivet, Stockholm; Glete, Jan. “Kontrakt, bestick och dimensioner: Vasa och de stora skeppsbyggnadskontrakten under Gustav II Adolfs tid.” Working paper for Vasamuseet, 2002; Edvinsson, Rodney. “The Multiple Currencies of Sweden–Finland 1534–1803,” in Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics for Sweden, vol. 1. (Sveriges Riksbank, 2010).