She was a hulk, the workhorse hull form of the late medieval Hanseatic trade, and she sailed from Lübeck in a convoy of four bound for Stockholm, with two of them carrying on to Reval — the Hanseatic name for Tallinn. Sailing the northern Baltic in late November was a calculated risk taken by people who knew exactly what they were risking.

She carried 180 passengers, among them members of the Zirkelgesellschaft, a Lübeck fraternity of long-distance merchants whose business ran the length of the Baltic. Also aboard were the wife and young son of Laurens Axelsson Tott, who held Raseborg Castle in fief and whose lands lay along the coast they were making for. Sweden and Denmark were at war, so the ship was heavily armed and carried around forty sailors and soldiers to work and defend her. Counting everyone, well over two hundred people were aboard.

Almost within reach of the far end of the voyage, a hard gale came up and pushed the convoy north, off its line, toward the Finnish coast and its skerries. On the evening of 20 November, Hanneke Vrome capsized.

What makes the loss unusually vivid for a fifteenth-century wreck is that it was watched. A smaller escort vessel was sailing alongside, close enough that her crew saw it happen. In the dark and the sea state there was nothing whatever they could do. Their account, passed on afterwards, was that the ship went down in the blink of an eye. The escort reached Reval carrying the news, which is how the story entered the written record instead of vanishing with everyone who could have told it. Nobody came out of the water. Two hundred–odd merchants, sailors, soldiers, a noblewoman and her child went down together in a few seconds of confusion.

In the days that followed, a great deal of cargo came ashore on the Raseborg coast, and the people who lived there gathered it up — which is what coastal communities across medieval Europe did with flotsam, and what medieval lords across Europe objected to.

Laurens Axelsson Tott, who had just lost his wife and son on the ship, claimed the salvaged goods as his property. What followed was a long correspondence between Lübeck, Stockholm, Reval and Axelsson himself, conducted in the patient, furious register of Hanseatic commercial law. It is from these letters that specifics survive: local peasants sold some of the cargo at Hitis and were arrested for it. To press their own claim, the Lübeck merchants sent the ship's manifest to Reval, hoping to recover what they could identify. That single document outlived the dispute, the merchants, the Hanseatic League and the castle. It is still in Tallinn.

Grief on this scale demanded something permanent. At Lübeck a large stone cross went up at the harbour on the Trave, a memorial in the ship's home port, though it no longer exists. Two centuries later the story was still being told there: in the late 1600s or early 1700s it was inscribed onto four pillars inside the Marienkirche, the great brick church of the Lübeck merchant class.

On the Finnish side, Axelsson answered the loss the way a fifteenth-century magnate would. He dedicated a stone church at Karis to St Catherine in memory of the wife who had drowned within sight of his own coastline. The building stands. It is the closest thing this shipwreck has to a marker, and it is several kilometres inland from a wreck site nobody has located.

In May 2015 that seemed to change. An archaeological diving team led by Rauno Koivusaari — who had earlier found the Vrouw Maria, an eighteenth-century Dutch merchantman lost with artworks bound for Catherine the Great — announced they had found Hanneke Vrome south of Jussarö. The debris field looked right: oak planks, keel, mast, anchor and smaller finds, lying in shallow water.

That autumn the Finnish Heritage Agency surveyed the site and took wood samples for dendrochronological dating. The timbers came from a tree felled after 1715. The wreck was a real wreck, just the wrong one by two and a half centuries. So the search continues along the coastline between the Hanko and Porkkala peninsulas — a long, broken shoreline of granite islets and channels where a hull could lie undisturbed indefinitely. Somewhere under that water is the ship that goes with the paperwork.