IRON SHIPS AND IRON MEN: NAVAL MODERNIZATION IN THE OTTOMAN

EMPIRE, RUSSIA, CHINA AND JAPAN FROM A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

1830-1905

Emir Yener

Boğaziçi University 2009

i
 IRON SHIPS AND IRON MEN: NAVAL MODERNIZATION IN THE OTTOMAN
EMPIRE, RUSSIA, CHINA AND JAPAN FROM A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
1830-1905

Thesis submitted to the

Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts
in
History

by

Emir Yener

Boğaziçi University

2009

ii
 “Iron Ships and Iron Men: Naval Modernizaton in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, China and
Japan from a Comparative Perspective 1830-1897,”
a thesis prepared by Emir Yener in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of
Arts in History degree from the Atatürk Institute of Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi
University.
This thesis has been approved and accepted on 15 September 2009 by:

Prof. Selçuk Esenbel ------------------------------------------------

(Thesis Advisor)

Prof. Zafer Toprak -------------------------------------------------

Assoc. Prof. Cengiz Kırlı --------------------------------------------------

September 2009

iii
 An abstract of the thesis of Emir Yener, for the degree of Master of Arts from the Atatürk
Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University to be taken in September 2009

Title: Iron Ships and Iron Men: Naval Modernization in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, China
and Japan from a Comparative Perspective 1830-1905

The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century dramatically transformed navies from

fleets of wind-driven wooden ships into steam-propelled ironclad squadrons. The industrial

framework, administrative competence, personnel training and financial capability necessary

to maintain an up-to-date navy skyrocketed. The Ottoman Empire attempted to maintain a

modern fleet throughout the nineteenth century with a varying degree of success. In this

thesis, the naval modernization strategies of the Ottoman administration during the years of

Industrial Revolution are examined in comparison with those of the Russian, Chinese and

Japanese Empires, which shared social and administrative structures similar in many ways by

using detailed monographies and various other works related to the topic.

iv
Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü’nde Yüksek Lisans derecesi
için Emir Yener tarafından Eylül 2009’da teslim edilen tezin özeti

Başlık: Demir Gemiler ve Demir Adamlar: Mukayeseli bir Perspektiften Osmanlı

İmparatorluğu, Rusya, Çin ve Japonya’da Bahriye Modernleşmesi 1830-1897

On dokuzuncu yüzyıl’daki Endüstri Devrimi donanmaları çarpıcı biçimde değiştirmiş; rüzgâr

gücüyle hareket eden ahşap gemilerden kurulu filolar buhar gücüyle işleyen zırhlı kuvvetlere

dönüşmüşlerdir. Çağdaş bir donanmayı ayakta tutmak için gereken endüstriyel altyapı,

yönetim becerisi, mürettebat eğitimi ve finans kapasitesi kat kat artmıştır. Osmanlı

imparatorluğu Endüstri Devrimi seneleri boyunca etkili bir donanma kurmak için çaba

göstermiş ve değişen bir başarı oranına sahip olmuştur. Bu çalışmada Osmanlı yönetiminin

donanma modernleşme stratejileri, gerek yönetsel gerek sosyal yapıları pek çok yönlerden

Osmanlılarla benzeşen Rus, Çin ve Japon İmparatorlukları ile mukayeseli olarak incelenmiş;

detaylı monografiler ve konuyla ilgili çeşitli diğer eserler başlıca kaynakçayı oluşturmuşlardır.

v
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Considering both the methodological and medical problems I encountered in the writing of

this thesis, I probably would never have managed to complete it had there not been a rare

wave of patience and generosity that certain individuals showed towards me. I thank my

thesis advisor, Professor Selçuk Esenbel, who, with her never ending optimism, patience,

encouragement and guidance helped me turn this complex topic into a coherent and hopefully

useful study. My thanks are also due to Professor Zafer Toprak and Associate Professor

Cengiz Kırlı, who generously agreed to be members of my jury. I also thank to Associate

Professor Şakir Batmaz from Erciyes University, who generously shared a wealth of

invaluable academic material with me and always encouraged me, Kahraman Şakul from

Georgetown University, who similarly shared great amounts of invaluable academic material

and always provided genuine points of view during all stages of my writing process, and

Melis Şeyhun who lent me invaluable help for some Turkish to English translations. The

Boğaziçi University ATA institute staff always showed greatest understanding and patience to

the various problems I encountered during an arduous three years. Kathryn Kranzler from the

ATA institute editing office shaped my text into a serious academic essay. Above all, my

loving mother and sister never ceased in giving every kind of moral and material support in

the completion of my quest.

vi
 CONTENTS

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………….……………………………...1

II. THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE NAVALWARFARE 1815-1905…………..…….9

The Last Wooden Navies…………………………………………………………….12

Steam Power Revolution……………….……………...………………………..……19
Shell Gun, Iron and Steel…………………………………………………………….29
The Jeune Ecole……………………………………………………………………...39
Mahan and the Rise of Japanese Naval Power 1887-1905…………………………..48

III. THE OTTOMAN QUEST FOR NAVAL RENOVATION 1830-1897………………...76

A Navy in a State of Chaos 1827-1847……...……..………………………………...78

Steam, War and Iron: The Transformation of the Ottoman Navy 1847-1877……….96
The Prisoner Fleet: Abdülhamid II and the Ottoman Navy 1877-1897…….……....108

IV. THE IRONCLAD STEAMS EAST: THE RUSSIAN AND CHINESE NAVIES…...130

The Imperial Russian Navy 1828-1878…………...…………….………………….132

The Russian Battlefleet 1878-1905………………………………………………...138
The Birth and the Death of the Imperial Chinese Navy 1862-1895………………..143

V. CONCLUSION………………………...……………………………………………….159

APPENDIX………………………………………………………………………………...169

A. PRIMARY NAVAL FORCES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY….……….169

B. OTTOMAN NAVY ORDERS OF BATTLE 1853-1897…..…………………....171
C. TORPEDO COMMISSION’S REPORT ON THE TORPEDO SCHOOL….…..177
D. MAPS AND PICTURES….…………………………………...…………...........178

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………...…………...187

vii
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

“War is the father of everything”

Herakleitos

“It is on the navy, under the good providence of God, that our wealth,
prosperity and peace depend.”
Charles II, King of England

When king Charles II ascended the throne in 1660 and made the

remark above on the importance of British naval power, he could not foresee

that the starting date of his reign would be taken also as the start of the true

influence of seapower upon history by a certain Captain Alfred Thayer

Mahan some 230 years later. Mahan was an officer of the United States of

America; a country which was just being colonised by Englishmen during the

reign of Charles II. In fact, it would be upon this concept of colonisation that

Mahan would develop his theory, binding the wealth of overseas possessions

and great power status with a strong navy. His arguments fuelled the

ambitions of not only the emerging new great powers on the world scene, like

Japan and Germany, but also every country with a seacoast and regional

rivals, from South America to the Mediterranean. The “long” nineteenth

century in which Mahan lived and wrote was the time of the greatest

transformation that the world had ever seen since the rise of agriculture in

pre-historic times: the Industrial Revolution.

1
 Few other institutions reflected the transformation more than the

navies. The wooden, sail-powered warships firing relatively short range

ammunition were transformed into steam driven, armorclad leviathans with

an unimaginable destructive power. These armored warships altered the

nature of the relationship between the West, which developed them, and the

rest of the world. In 1815, Western European countries and USA possessed

35% of the world. In 1914 this percentage had become 85%.1 The superiority

of firepower, logistics and mobility that the Industrial Revolution warships

provided was one of the main factors in determining the outcome of a century

of colonial power struggles. Naval power emerged for the first time as the

main arbiter. In such conditions it is not surprising that the first studies about

the nature and role of the seapower started in the nineteenth century.

Since Mahan’s publication of The Influence of Seapower Upon

History 1660-1783 in 1890, navies have been classifed into two categories or

“school”s. The first category is the “Bluewater School,” which indicates a

navy organized with a view to long range power projection, using heavily

armed and armored seagoing battleships arrayed in battle squadrons. The

tasks of a bluewater navy is to provide the safety of the trade, destroy any

enemy naval presence, snatch command of the sea and choke the enemy trade

by relentless blockade. The archetypical bluewater navy is the British Royal

Navy (hence will be referred only as “Royal Navy” in the text).

On the diametrical opposite stands the “Brownwater School,” tailored

for the primary task of coast defense and blockade breaking. Commerce

raiding often becomes an important element in brownwater navies when

1
Geoffrey Parker, Askeri Devrim 1500-1800 (İstanbul: Küre Yayınları, 2003), p. 7.

2
 fighting with a bluewater navy which most probably belongs to a nation with

a sizeable merchant fleet. Brownwater navies often employ a symbiotic

combination of fortified ports and specialist warships like coast defense

gunboats, torpedoboats and cruisers. It is difficult to find a navy built solely

upon brownwater school principles in the timeframe of this study but the pre-

Spanish-American War (1898) U.S Navy and the post-1872 Austro-

Hungarian Navy are the best examples.2

Upon this Mahanian scheme, countless scholarly studies have been

made about the primary naval powers of the world since the early twentieth

century. However, the Ottoman navy, which was one of the primary naval

powers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and thereafter

kept its status as a foremost second rank naval force, curiously had been left

out of such serious monographical study until recently. However, with the

pioneering studies of Colin Imber, İdris Bostan and Salih Özbaran,

monographies about the Ottoman navy have proliferated in the last two

decades. Understandably, these early studies were focused on the classical

era, and the groundbreaking comparative study of Ottoman seapower in the

sixteenth century by Palmira Brummett crowned the analyses of the classical

era. However, the attention shown to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

wanes considerably when the later Ottoman history is concerned.

Monographs and comparative studies of the Ottoman naval power still are

mostly lacking for especially the eighteenth century. The critical nineteenth

century is also less analysed compared with the classical era, however in the

2
The terms “Bluewater Navy” and “Brownwater Navy” does not have an exact counterpart in Turkish
language; however they can be most closely translated as “Açık Deniz Filosu” and “Sahil Müdafaa
Filosu” respectively. (Author’s note)

3
 last decade first class monographical studies which extensively rely on the

Ottoman archives have started to come out.

The first in-depth monography was Bahriye’de Yapılan Islahat

Hareketleri ve Bahriye Nezareti’nin Kuruluşu 1789-1869 by the late Ali

İhsan Gencer.3 This study was his Ph.D thesis, in which he analyzed the

administrative modernization of the Ottoman Navy in the nineteenth century

as primary topic, an episode which was marked by the increasing

centralization of naval assets4 until they became a single ministry in 1867. In

the background, Gencer studies the modernization in the methods of levying

sailors and introduction of steam power into the Ottoman navy.

Gencer’s synthesis was followed by Tuncay Zorlu’s Innovation and

Empire in Turkey: Sultan Selim III and the Modernisation of the Ottoman

Navy, and Şakir Batmaz’s İkinci Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması,

both Ph.D dissertations.5 Zorlu examines the dramatic Ottoman naval reforms

during the Nizam-ı Cedît (New Order) reform period with a particular focus

on technological advances and the role of the foreign engineers in the

initiation of these changes, while Batmaz draws a complete panorama of the

Ottoman naval assets in one of the most controversial epochs of the Ottoman

seapower. Both studies draw extensively upon archival material.

As far as is known, currently there is a similar monography in process

by Bill Blair from Princeton University under the supervision of Bernard

Lewis on the massive naval expansion during the sultanate of Abdülaziz.

3 Ali Ihsan Gencer, Bahriye'de Yapılan Islahat Hareketleri ve Bahriye Nezareti'nin Kuruluşu 1789-1869 (Ankara:
Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2001)
4
“Naval assets” are all elements which together form a navy, which means ships, naval bases,
personnel and framework. Karl Wilhelm Darr (master’s thesis, University of Lousiville, 1998), p. 3.
5
Tuncay Zorlu, Innovation and Empire in Turkey: Sultan Selim III and the Modernisation of the
Ottoman Navy (New York: I.B Tauris, 2008), Şakir Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı
Donanması (Ph.d diss., Erciyes University, 2002)

4
 Another important monograph about the Ottoman Navy of the nineteenth

century is 1822-1922 Osmanlı Donanması (The Ottoman Navy 1822-1922)

by Bernd Langensiepen and Ahmet Güleryüz, an invaluable databank for

every single steam ship which was part of the Ottoman Navy in the given

period and supported by a wealth of photographs and drawings.6 This

proliferation of studies about the Ottoman navy of the reform age is a very

positive development; however so far there has not been a comparative study

similar to Professor Brummet’s dissertation. This void gave me impetus to

attempt at least a little start in that direction.

This study, settles the Ottoman navy of the nineteenth century into its

place among the world navies, with a special focus to the pattern of

modernization it followed compared with the other terrestrial and non-

western empires of the time: Russia and China. What was the purpose of the

seapower for these empires during the age of industrial revolution? What was

the response of the imperial administrations to the rapid changes in naval

warfare? Which materials did they use and how did they procure them?

According to which strategies did they acquire their ships? How did they levy

and train their crews? How was the officer corps educated to cope with the

changing nature of war at sea? How were these imperial navies affected by

wars in which they fought?

A summary account is given of the rise of the Imperial Japanese

Navy, as it is the only example of a non-western country managing to build a

world class navy upon Mahanian principles; thus it provides a wonderful

opportunity for comparison. There exist many monographic studies about the

6
Bernd Langensiepen,and Ahmet Güleryüz, 1828-1923 Osmanlı Donanması (İstanbul: Denizler
Kitabevi, 2000)

5
 Chinese and Japanese navies. The ones utilized for this study were Richard

Wright’s well received The Chinese Steam Navy 1862-1945 and Kaigun:

Strategy Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887-1941

by David Peattie and Mark Evans, possibly the most important single volume

study about the Japanese seapower in the English language.7

It was difficult to find a similar study on the Imperial Russian navy.

Compared to a wealth of works in the Russian language, English language

monographies about the Russian navy of the nineteenth century seem to be

both meagre and rather out of date. One of the best current studies about the

Russian naval history is the three volume Tri Veka Rossiiskogo Flota (Three

Centuries of the Russian Navy) by F.N Gromov, Vladimir Gribovsky and

Boris Rodionov. As I am as yet unable to read Russian, I tried to made up this

deficit by relying on English sources which made extensive use of this

particular study.

To draw the global context, I used two first class single volume works

about the the nineteenth century naval warfare: Naval Warfare 1815-1914 by

Lawrence Sondhaus, and Handbook of the Nineteenth Century Naval Warfare

by Spencer C. Tucker.8 In the sections dealing with technological details,

extensive use was made of the Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship

1815-1905 from Conway’s acclaimed twelve volume History of the Ship

series, one of the main current reference material about naval technology.9

For the accounts of the nineteenth century naval battles, Herbert Wrigley

7
Richard N. J. Wright, The Chinese Steam Navy 1862-1945 (London: Chatam Publishing, 2000),
David Peattie and Mark Evans, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese
Navy 1887-1941 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997)
8
Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare 1815-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2001), Spencer C. Tucker,
Handbook of Nineteenth Century Naval Warfare (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000)
9
Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London:
Conway Maritime Press, 1992)

6
 Wilson’s classic two volume Battleships in Action 1850-1918 was the main

source of reference.10 As the scope of the study was broad and I was not

making a detailed monograph, I did not attempt to use archival material;

though I used a few contemporary publications and memoirs. I tried to

support the monographies cited above with as many other related works and

articles as possible. In no way can I claim that my study is a comprehensive

one, but if it shall make other scholars think about similar comparative

studies of the Ottoman seapower in the great adventure of the modernization

era, it will have served its intended purpose.

--

Chapter Two, “The Changing Nature of the Naval Warfare 1815-

1905,” summarizes the nineteenth century naval transformation, when the

wind powered wooden battlefleets reached the zenith of their evolution by

mid-century and then ultimately were eclipsed by the steam driven, iron or

steel-hulled battleships by 1890’s, along with the fascinating rise of Japanese

seapower between 1868-1905. Chapter Three, “The Ottoman Quest for Naval

Renovation 1830-1897,” traces the transformation of Ottoman Naval assets

throughout the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the

technology transfer, naval professionalization and naval production resources,

along with concise accounts of some key engagements. Chapter Four,

“Ironclad Steams East: The Russian and Chinese Navies,” summarizes of the

development of the Imperial Russian and Imperial Chinese naval assets to

provide the necessary background for the last chapter, “Conclusion,” where a

10
Herbert W. Wilson, trans. Lütfü Çekiç and edited by Emir Yener, Zırh Devrinde Deniz
Muharebeleri v.1 1850-1914 (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınları, 2006)

7
final assessment of the Ottoman, Russian and Chinese naval modernizations

is made.

8
 CHAPTER II

THE CHANGING NATURE OF NAVAL WARFARE 1815-1905

The Ottoman navy which started on its own long nineteenth century

only in 1830 saw its material transformation from wood and sails to iron and

steam just forty years later. At the start of the period, the Imperial Ottoman

navy was still built and manned essentially in the same way as it had been

when the great Kapudan Pasha Mezamorta Hüseyin promulgated the

regulation of galleons in 1701.11 Warship building was still a largely artisanal

enterprise, while crews were composed from a mix of volunteers and men

from occasional impressment.12 However, as a result of Sultan Selim III's far

reaching naval reforms in late 1790's, scientific shipbuilding methods were

introduced to Ottoman naval construction.13

Especially after the disaster of Navarino in 1827, Ottoman naval

architecture embraced modernization with a renewed vigor and the navy

which fought in the Crimean War was built just in the same way as the allied

navies of Britain and France, or that of Russia, the enemy. Manning the ships,

however, despite the significant introduction of western style drill, which was

critical for crew cohesion and discipline, did not dramatically change. In this

aspect the Ottomans were not alone though, the British Royal Navy along

11
For further information about Mezamorta Hüseyin Pasha and the transformation of Ottoman Navy from oared
warships to sailing man-of-war see İdris Bostan, Osmanlılar ve Deniz (İstanbul: Küre Yayınları, 2007), pp. 48-52.
A transcription of Mezamorta's regulations is on pp. 185-189.
12 Gencer, pp. 52-58.

13 Bostan, pp. 55-60.

9
 with all others was still crewed by a mix of voluntary service and

impressment (or in French and Russian cases, conscription), which was used

since the early eighteenth century.14

The first major manifestation of the industrial revolution in naval

warfare declared its arrival in the form of steam power by the 1840s.15

Despite the limitation of the first steam warships propelled by paddles due to

weak armament, the strategic impact of the emancipation from the wind was

so revolutionary that naval strategy makers in France and Britain immediately

dedicated themselves to discovering the full potential of the new energy

source, looking at possibilities to exploit it best. In the following decade, the

invention of the screw propeller, the perfection of the rifled gun and

explosive ammunition in the 1850s finally rang the death knell of the wooden

sailing navy by the end of the Crimean War. As one of the little known facts

of contemporary naval history, the Ottoman navy was among the first to

introduce auxiliary steam power officially. Suffering from the agile enemy

pioneer steam warships during the Greek War of Independence (1821-30),

Ottoman admirals first acquired auxiliary steamers on their own initiative by

the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29. Benefiting from the reformist atmosphere

of the Tanzimat era in the next decade, the steam warship became an

institutional part of the Ottoman navy.16 However, the more crucial novelties

of the screw propeller and the rifled gun were not adopted until after the

Crimean War.

14 Anthony J Watts, The Royal Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999), p. 23.

15 Sondhaus, pp. 22-23.

16 Ibid., p. 31.

10
 Accompanying the revolution in marine engineering, the seeds for an

equally significant change in crewing warships were being sown. To make

the new mechanical outfits work properly, an hitherto unseen component in

personnel was needed: the engineer class. However, in European navies, a

conservative reaction to and resentment of this new type of personnel, mostly

of positivistic mentality and well-versed in scientific knowledge but little

experienced about seamanship was to prolong the militarization of the

engineering class until late the 1860s.17

Ottoman navy interestingly seems not to have suffered from such an

inter-service reaction. In contrast, many regular naval officers were even

eager to be trained in machinery. In late 1830s a far-sighted student exchange

program was initiated to train selected young Ottoman naval officers in

Britain in steam machinery.18 The fact that during this period the Royal Navy

did not officially possess an engineer class may give an idea about the almost

futuristic approach of the Ottoman admiralty. But for some still unclear

reasons, the exchange program was stopped in the early 1840s and naval

administration went to the opposite extreme of hiring civil European

machinists in increasing numbers.19

The next step in the great transformation of naval warfare in the

nineteenth century was the installation of metal armor on warships. Although

this development was for a long time seen as the fundamental change, more

recent studies of industrial revolution era navies from the perspective of

17 Watts, p. 24.

18 Mücteba İlgürel. “Buharlı Gemi Teknolojisini Osmanlı Devletinde Kurma Teşebbüsleri” in Çağını
Yakalayan Osmanlı, edited by Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (İstanbul: IRCICA yayınları 1998), p. 142.

19 Sondhaus, p. 31.

11
 military revolution and institutional analysis have repositioned the ironclad

warship as an incremental but not so revolutionary development. Despite the

accompanying introduction of a fully new weapon, the torpedo, which

possessed the potential of creating a real revolution in strategy and tactics; the

big gun battleship and the traditional strategy of blue water naval superiority

managed to keep their primary status, along with the equally traditional tactic

of line ahead.20

Therefore, it is necessary to start our account with a review of the

nineteenth century naval revolution to understand the dynamics of change in

the Ottoman navy and place it in the international context.

The Last Wooden Navies

At the end of Napoléonic Wars, the main arbiter of naval might on the

high seas was the ship-of-the-line. Tracing back its origins to the early 17th

century, the ship-of-the-line was the most refined and excellent early modern

tool of war. Bristling with 74 to 120 cannons of heavy caliber, the ship-of-

the-line possessed a firepower which far surpassed a 30,000 men army corps

with 30-50 light calibre field guns. Only the most elaborate bastions of latest

design with thick masonry could withstand to the deadly broadside of such a

battleship. Indeed, the appearance of a small squadron of those floating

fortresses off a trouble point was often enough to compel the assailed side to

come to terms.

20
For a discussion of the full extents of nineteenth century naval revolution see Herwig, Holger. “The
Battlefleet Revolution, 1885-1914” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300-2050, edited by
McGregor Knox and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 114-
132.

12
 Ships-of-the-line were constructed of hardwoods resistant to saltwater

rot, such as oak, teak and cedar. The propulsive power was the wind and a 74-

gun ship-of-the-line should set up to some 4,500 square meters of canvas in

favourable weather. When pitted against each other, ships-of-the-line would

form a single file, called “line ahead” and try to batter their opponent into

submission by the sheer weight of fire while sailing on parallel courses.

Success thus relied on the rapidity and accuracy of fire which required

constant drilling, discipline and integrity of the crew.21

Besides the huge battleships, there were frigates, corvettes and sloops,

collectively called “cruisers.” These carried between 28-54 medium calibre

cannons and were used to patrol far flung seas, trade routes and colonies. In

the nineteenth century, the last surge of piracy which followed the

Napoléonic Wars was suppressed by patrols of British and American frigates.

In times of war, frigates also proved to be excellent craft to raid and disrupt

the opponent’s trade. Most of the second or third rank navies opted to acquire

frigates as the backbone of their navies instead of costly ships-of-the-line,

which was not versatile either.22

By 1815, the undisputed command of the seas was in the hands of the

British. Honed to perfection by constant warfare in every part of the world’s

oceans from 1793 to 1815, the Royal Navy was quantitatively and

qualitatively the unsurpassed master of naval warfare. It is no coincidence

that the nineteenth century was called “Pax Brittanica,” guarded by the

“wooden walls” of the Royal Navy. Despite the immediate demobilisation

and discharge of thousands of seamen and officers, Britain’s emergent

21
Philip Haythornwaite, Nelson's Navy (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1993), pp. 4-6.
22
Ibid., p. 5; Sondhaus, p. 5.

13
 position as the global economic hegemon forced it to commit to the duties of

policing the oceans against slave traders (slave trading in the United

Kingdom and its colonies was prohibited by act of parliament in 180723) and

suppressing the piracy which had boomed in South American waters and in

the Mediterranean due to the breakdown of authority during more than two

decades of warfare.

An accurate quantitative consideration of sailing fleets after 1815 is

difficult. The sources disagree over the true numbers in the major fleets. Also,

a great number of the ships included in the naval rosters were in a dilapidated

state, unable to ever take to the sea in any circumstance. Also, many ships

were either incomplete or were “in ordinary,” which means they had been

stripped of their armament and masts, and were lying in harbor devoid of

crew. How many of these ships would have been fit or worthy to be fit for

service in an emergency is likewise subject to debate. The best estimates for

the Royal Navy in 1815 give a number of 218 ships-of-the-line, 309 frigates

and 261 smaller cruisers. However one source indicates a number just half of

this. In 1830, the number of ships-of-the-line was down to 106, with only 71

considered suitable for war service, while frigates were down to 144 units. As

the warships shoddily built of green wood rapidly rotted, new ships of

reduced numbers but of superior construction replaced them. Thus, British

shipyards launched a total of 58 new warships between 1815 and 1849.24

Britain’s chief naval rival, France, having suffered a continuous series

of smashing defeats during the Napoléonic Wars, had abandoned all hopes of

challenging Britain ever again in a fleet battle and did not try to maintain its

23
Sondhaus, p. 2.
24
Ibid., p. 2.

14
 ships-of-the-line. In 1815 France had 69 ships-of-the-line and 38 frigates. By

1835, French navy had just 35 ships-of-the-line fit for duty, but the number of

frigates had risen to 67 after a post-war construction program. This was the

result of a national strategy change which emphasised commerce raiding

instead of fleet battle.25

The Russian Empire was the primary Baltic power after the defeat of

Napoleon and had the third greatest fleet in the world. Unlike the British and

French navies, which gradually grew after 1800 and sharply diminished after

1815, the Russian navy reached a full mobilisation number of more than 80

ships-of-the-line and 40 frigates in 1800 and maintained a constant peace

cadre of 47 ships-of-the-line and 27 frigates from 1815 to post-Napoléonic

Wars years. Approximately two-thirds of this number were stationed in the

Baltic and the rest were in the Black Sea. The Russian ships were of

extremely low quality, having been built of fir, and they seldom remained

serviceable for more than a decade.26

The once great naval power of Spain was mauled in the Napolenic

Wars; the battle of Trafalgar being its swan song. Nevertheless, in 1815,

Spain was the fourth greatest naval power, with 21 ships-of-the-line and 15

frigates. With the country ravaged by rampaging armies from 1808 to 1814,

South American colonies declaring independence and civil wars erupting

after the retreat of the French, the Spanish navy quickly vanished from the

scene. Despite a desperate attempt to bolster the numbers by purchasing

(mostly half rotten) five ships-of-the-line and six frigates from Russia in

25
Sondhaus, p. 3.
26
Ibid., p. 3.

15
 1818-19, the Spanish Navy was down to four ships-of-the-line and five

frigates in 1830.

Denmark, the old hegemon of the Baltic, saw its great fleet destroyed

twice by Britain in the Napoléonic Wars and by 1830 had just three ships-of-

the-line and seven frigates left; while its rival, Sweden, had a fleet of eight

ships-of-the-line and five frigates in 1830. However, the nature of warfare in

the Baltic necessitated a reliance on oared, shallow draft gunboats as the main

weapons system for what was presumed to be an amphibious and coastal

campaign against Russia, the most likely adversary for both countries.27

The most significant development on the post-Napoléonic naval

balance of power, was the emergence of United States as a rapidly expanding

naval force with ships of superior construction and manned by highly

efficient personel. During the War of 1812 against Britain, the lackluster

performance of the U.S army was in total contrast with the string of its navy’s

successes in ship-to-ship or small squadron actions, thus ensuring public and

senatorial favor to the service. Britain was only able to overwhelm the U.S

navy by using its huge numerical superiority to impose a close blockade of

American shores.

A bitter lesson for the U.S on the effects of losing command of the sea

was the burning of Washington D.C by British landing parties in 1814. This

combination of earlier tactical successes and later organizational failures

created a resolve in the American public to construct a navy which could

defend the shores of the republic even against major naval powers. An

accelerated wartime construction program approved in 1813 authorized five

27
Sondhaus, p. 5.

16
 ships-of-the-line, though before the war’s end only one had been completed.

In 1816, nine more battleships were approved. However, the construction of

those 14 ships-of-the-line proceeded at a slogging pace and in the end, only

seven were completed as warships; three became storeships and the

remaining four were cancelled. Among the seven completed, not more than

one was in active service in any given year until the start of the Civil War in

1861.

U.S navy’s real workhorses were its powerful 50-gun frigates armed

with 24-pdr. guns compared to their 18-pdr. armed European counterparts.

Nine such cruisers were in service by 1815 and, following the war, with the

“gradual increase” program, the grand total was raised to 20 heavy frigates.

Usually, 10-11 of them were in service at any given time.28

The field of warship construction in the decade 1813-23 brought an

evolutionary line which had started with the development of galleon in the

early sixteenth century to a point of perfection and size limits allowed by

wood. Two defining novelties were the diagonal riders and closed bow-stern

construction by the Surveyor of the Royal Navy, Sir David Seppings.

Diagonal riders were extra ribs placed in trapezoidal order, giving

unprecendented sturdiness to the hull and completely solving the hogging29

problem which had plagued wooden warships since their first inception,

limiting their size.30 Seppings’ other novelty, introduced during 1820’s, was

fully planking the stern and the bow, which hitherto had been covered only

with weak bulkheads and broken with galleries; thus presenting an unopposed

28
Sondhaus, pp. 3-4.
29
Hogging, or hog, refers to the semi permanent bend in the keel, especially in wooden hulled ships,
caused over time by the center of the ship being more buoyant than the bow or stern.
30
Gardiner, Robert. “Design and Construction” in The Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840,
edited by Robert Gardiner, p. 122.

17
 entry to cannonballs aimed towards these parts of the ship.31 This traditional

structural weakness of wooden battleships at bow and stern had made the

raking fire32 position the ideal sought by every naval officer in a fight.

However, Seppings’ closed (also called round) bow-stern design greatly

reduced the vulnerability of wooden warships against raking positions. The

natural result of Seppings reforms into naval architecture was a complete

overhaul of the ship classification system. With the increase in size, number

of guns carried on two-deckers increased first to 84 and finally to 92, while

three deckers became standardised with 110-120 in almost every navy.33

Cruisers also were enlarged. Frigates first followed the American models and

rose from 40 to 50 and even to 60 guns in some navies, while corvettes

increased from 28 to 35 guns.34

Accompanying the size increase was an increase in armaments and

firepower. With the problem of hogging eradicated, decks being strenghtened

and with a new need for more firepower to penetrate closed bows and sterns,

the traditional way of arming warships with three different calibres of guns

(32 or 36 pdrs. on lower deck, 24 pdrs. on gundeck and 18 pdrs. on upper

decks) gave way to a uniform armament consisting of guns with a caliber no

31
Lavery, Brian; “The Ship-of-the-Line” in The Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840, edited by
Robert Gardiner (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1998), p. 23.
32
Raking fire is fire directed parallel to the long axis of an enemy ship. Although each shot is directed
against a smaller target profile than by shooting broadside and thus more likely to miss the target ship
to one side or the other, an individual cannon shot that hits will pass through more of the ship, thereby
increasing damage to the hull, sails, and crew. A stern rake is more damaging than a bow rake because
the shots are not deflected by the curved (and strengthened) bow. Tracy, Nicholas. “Naval Tactics” in
The Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840, edited by Robert Gardiner (London: Conway
Maritime Press, 1998), p. 182.
33
Sondhaus, p. 2.
34
Gardiner, Robert. “The Frigate” and Gardiner, Robert. “The Sloop-of-War, Corvette and Brig” in
The Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840, edited by Robert Gardiner (London: Conway
Maritime Press, 1998), pp. 42-43, 59-61.

18
 lesser than 30 pdr. and 60 pdr. carronades.35 The French navy took the lead in

rearming the warships during 1830s and other navies followed suit.36

Steam Power Revolution

The greatest breakthrough achieved in marine engineering since the

construction of ocean-going sailing ships armed with gunpowder artillery in

the late fifteenth century took place at the start of the nineteenth century. It

was the introduction of steam power to warships. Like the sailing ship

revolution which had taken place as the result of a major societal

transformation –i.e. the rise of capitalism- the introduction of steam was the

product of a transformation era which soon was to change all the world

forever: the industrial revolution. The first attempts to construct mechanically

self-propelled ships produced awkward results which, when retrospectively

assessed by later generations, seemed to offer no serious modifier to

established perceptions. The truth, however, was the complete opposite.

Naval policy makers and strategists were fully aware that something very

important was happening. A transformation which was to change traditional

strategies so painstakingly composed as the result of trial and error, setbacks

and cost, was at hand.37

35
The carronade was designed as a short-range naval weapon with a low muzzle velocity, and is said
to have been invented by Lieutenant General Robert Melville in 1759 and developed by Charles
Gascoigne, manager of the Carron Company. It was adopted by the Royal Navy in 1779. The lower
muzzle velocity of a carronade's round shot was intended to create many more of the deadly wooden
splinters when hitting the structure of an enemy vessel, leading to its nickname, the smasher.
Gardiner, Robert. “Guns and Gunnery” in The Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840, edited by
Robert Gardiner (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1998), p. 153.
36
Sondhaus, p. 22.
37
Ibid., pp. 22-23.

19
 Steam power itself was not a new invention. During Antiquity, there

had been many well recorded experiments with the power of steam.38

However, it was not until the late seventeenth century, with the huge

expansion of industry in Western Europe, that steam started to be considered

as a serious alternative energy source to supplement hydroforce and wind

power. The Huguenot mathematician Denis Papin developed and then

described the piston using steam pressure in 1690. Using Papin's

development, British inventor Thomas Newcomen built the first practical

steam engine in 1712. Newcomen's engine, although cumbersome, provided a

big boost to mining in Britain by pumping out underground water. Fifty years

later, another British inventor, James Watt, developed Newcomen's engine

further, turning the cumbersome and costly to operate machine into a potent

source of power. Watt’s steam engine effectively started the Industrial

Revolution.39

While steam power was being harnessed for use on land, there was the

almost simultaneous attempt to adapt it into use at sea. Denis Papin is

recorded to have built a steamboat in 1704 in the German city of Kassel. His

invention was propelled by oars linked to a steam piston. In 1774, the French

inventor Marquis Claude de Jouffroy built the first successful steamboat the

blueprints reached today; and sailed it in Doubs. Apparently de Jouffroy

designed the circular paddles used on later steamboats. In 1801, the Scottish

engineer William Symington built the Charlotte Dundas, a steam tug

designed to tow barges in the Clyde Canal; the first practical steamboat.

38
The most famous example is no doubt Heron of Alexandria’s steam powered sphere, the Aeoliphile.
“The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography”, (Abingdon 2004) , p. 546.
39
James McClellan and Harold Dorn. Dünya Tarihinde Bilim ve Teknoloji (Ankara: Arkadaş
Yayınları, 2006), pp. 327-329.

20
 Finally, in 1807, the Irish-American businessman Robert Fulton started the

first commercially successful steamboat enterprise with his North River

Steamer in Albany.40

The military use of steam power afloat first ocurred during the Anglo-

American War of 1812. By that time, steamboats had been established firmly

in the major inland waterways of United States.41 It was again Robert Fulton

who built the first steam propelled warship, a 1450 ton catamaran hulled

floating battery propelled by paddles which were placed into the space

between double hulls. Christened the Demologos, the vessel was specifically

designed to provide a mobile defense for New York harbor. Its armament of

sixteen 32-pounder guns was shielded by a solid mass of oak framing for a

speed of 5.5 knots.42 The Demologos laid down in January 1814 and

completed in 1816. By then the war had finished and she never saw action.

However, in the New Orléans campaign of 1815, U.S Commander Andrew

Jackson used the civilian steamer Enterprise to ferry reinforcements, thus

demonstrating the first example of steam power's strategic mobility.43

Rapid troop ferrying would emerge as one of the two main functions fulfilled

by steamers in the initial era of steam warships.

Following these pioneering developments in the United States, it took

nearly two decades to refine the new technology and fully adapt it to the open

sea. Even then, steamships were not considered successful choices as first-

line warships as they were propulsed by large, unwieldy and vulnerable

40 Björn Landström, The Ship (New York: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 228-230.
41
Still, William, Watts, Gordon and Rogers, Bradley. “Steam Navigation and the United States” in
The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship before 1900, edited by Basil Greenhill (New Jersey:
Chartwheel Books, 2000), p. 63.
42
Sondhaus, p. 18.
43
Tucker, p. 53.

21
 paddles which occupied the space necessary to carry enough ordnance.44

Despite this structural failure, auxiliary steam warships started to enter into

the service of the major naval powers as a result of many action results in

diverse corners of the world in late the 1820s. Among these initial war

experiences, two merit being cited individually. The small paddle steamer

Diana of the East India Company (EIC) was the first armed steam warship

used in action, towing troop barges and bombarding the Burmese shore

fortifications along the Irrawady River with Congreve rockets in 1824 during

the First Anglo-Burma War.45 The Same year, Greek revolutionaries ordered

a pioneer specialist paddle warship from Britain. Completed in 1825, the 400

ton vessel was christened the Karteria. She was armed with four 68 pdr. guns

and an oven in which to prepare red-hot incendiary shot. With a speed of 7

knots, under the command of Frank Abney Hastings, RN, the Karteria

operated in the Aegean archipelago and caused serious headaches to the

Ottoman naval command.46 Both cases are demonstrative of the two principal

functions assumed by early steam warships: providing strategic mobility to

the unmechanised main battle fleet and using tactical mobility to conduct an

effective raiding campaign. In case of the Diana, she was instrumental in

moving EIC troops upriver and providing fire support. The Karteria became a

constant thorn in the Ottoman side by menacing transport ships of the

Ottoman army, forcing the Porte to shift its seaborne troop movements onto

neutral flagged Austrian ships with extra financial cost. As a result of the

44
Landström, p. 235.
45
Roff, W.J. “Early Steamships in Eastern Waters” in The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship
before 1900, edited by Basil Greenhill (New Jersey: Chartwheel Books, 2000), p. 29.
46
Tucker, pp. 53-54. Tucker argues that Karteria achieved little but reports from commander of the
Ottoman Constantinople squadron, Çengeloğlu Tahir Bey, imply otherwise. See Fevzi Kurtoğlu,
Yunan İstiklal Harbi ve Navarin Muharebesi (İstanbul: Deniz Matbaası, 1944), pp. 152-154.

22
 further experiences in the British intervention to the Portuguese Civil War in

1828 and the French invasion of Algiers in 1830, auxiliary paddle warships

became regular components of the battlefleet by the 1830s.

In design terms, civilian paddle steamers and their naval counterparts

were structurally almost indistinguishable. Thus, when the need arose, it was

possible to commandeer or charter civilian steamers and turn them into

auxiliaries by fitting a few heavy shell guns. Equally, admiralties were often

in co-operation with civilian design bureaus and most of the larger steamships

were built according to naval construction regulations. A typical product of

such co-operation was SS Great Western, the first steamship to cross the

Atlantic under steam power alone.47 In a way, it can be argued that this

intertwining of civilian and military shipbuilding industry foreshadows the

pattern of the “military-industrial complex” which was to become the

defining feature of late nineteenth century international relations.

While the paddle steamer was a very useful auxiliary which had

revolutionised the concept of naval strategic mobility, it was not without its

disadvantages. The greatest of them was cost. Maintaining enough auxiliary

steamers to tow ships-of-the-line in major fleets caused a serious drain on the

already tightened peacetime naval budgets. As paddle steamers grew in size

to accept more coal and more powerful machines, their building and

operating costs rapidly overtook those of ships-of-the-line although their

firepower did not change and remain constante around thirty guns in the

biggest specimens.

47
Greenhill, Basil. “Steam Before the Screw,” in The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship
before 1900, edited by Basil Greenhill (New Jersey: Chartwheel Books, 2000), p. 16.

23
 By the end of 1840s; it was clear that paddle warship had reached the

limit of its development. The answer to the limits posed by the paddle came

in the form of the screw propeller. The screw's advantages over paddles were

obvious and without doubts. Situated underwater abaft of the ship, the screw

did not interfere with gundecks, was incomparably more effective in

hydrodynamic terms and because it could be detached and hoisted into a well

inside the poop when the ship was to move by sail, it did not cause drag.48

The concept of the propeller goes back to antiquity. The Sicilian

Greek engineer Archimedes was the inventor of the spiralling action screw in

the third century B.C. At the dawn of the practical use of steam at sea in the

early nineteenth century, the idea of screw propulsion was resurrected. The

American inventor John Stevens built the first screw propelled experimental

steam boat in 1804. In reality, Stevens’ propellor was nothing but an

Archimedes screw laid horizontally in the screw box. It was the Czech

inventor Josef Ressel who designed the basic shape of the modern ship

propellor with a conical hub with multiple blades. He tested his propellor

successfully in 1827. Finally, in 1835, the British inventor Sir Francis Petit

Smith developed the basic propellor design into a relatively practical

mechanism.49 In 1837, the great Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson

independently developed a similar screw propellor and successfully

demonstrated it with his steam launch, the Francis B. Ogden, to the British

Admiralty. The following year, Petit Smith patented his own design and built

the 200 ton experimental ship, the Archimedes. As with all prototype

inventions, Ericsson’s and Smith's screws had some capability problems: both

48
Sondhaus, p. 38.
49
Andrew Lambert, “The Screw Propeller Warship” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship
1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), pp. 31-32.

24
 experimental vessels were significantly slower than paddle steamers.

However, it is clear that there was no obstacle for the development of screw

as the main propulsive mechanism of steamships.50

In 1843, John Ericsson launched the 1050-ton screw sloop of war, the

Princeton for the U.S Navy; and the Royal Navy comissioned the 888-ton

screw sloop, the Rattler. Both were the first technically successful screw

warships. In April 1845, the Royal Navy made a trial to test the paddle versus

the screw propellor. The Rattler was tied by the stern to the paddle auxiliary

Alecto of the same horsepower and both two ships made flank speed in the

opposite directions. The Rattler dragged the Alecto without any difficulty;

thus dispersing the last doubts about the efficiency of the screw. Then,

between 1845 and 1852, the Admiralty fitted screws to four old 74-gun ships-

of-the-line with reduced rigs to convert them into slow “blockships” for use

in the blockade of Cherbourg in case of war with France.51 Meanwhile, the

French navy first experimented with screws on small despatch vessels and in

1845 fitted two frigates with the new propulsive system. In 1847, Stanislas

Dupuy de Lôme, the foremost French naval architect of the era, laid down the

first purpose built steam powered battleship. But it could only be completed

in 1850 due to the disruption caused by the 1848 Revolution. Christened the

Napoléon, the 5120-ton ship-of-the-line was armed with 92 guns and was

capable of a respectable 13 knots at full speed.52 The British response to the

Napoléon was the 90-gun Agamemnon, which was completed a few months

later, a 5080-ton design capable of 12 knots under steam. The Napoléon was

built primarily as an escort to short range convoys between Algeria and

50
Sondhaus, p. 37.
51
Tucker, pp. 58-59.
52
Sondhaus, pp. 40-41.

25
 Marseilles and the sail was the auxiliary motive force; while the Agamemnon

was built with an eye to worldwide service in the British Empire, with sailing

characteristics as the primary motive and steam engine was auxiliary.53

The building of the Napoléon and the Agamemnon effectively marks

the end of the purely sailing battlefleet. The critical freedom of movement

provided by steam engine meant a far greater chance of success for a French

fleet attempting a landing in Britain. Following the unsuccessful republic of

1848-52, Napoléon Bonaparte's nephew, Charles Louis Napoléon proclaimed

himself Emperor by plebiscite and resurrected the aggressive policies of his

uncle. In the increasingly tense diplomatic atmosphere of the 1850s, Britain

had good reason to fear a new war against France. Under the able

administration of Admiral Baldwin Wake-Walker, the Royal Navy began

building a steam battlefleet, by fitting screws to suitable sailing battleships or

constructing new ones from the keel up. Imperial France followed the same

way. By the time of the Eastern Crisis and the outbreak of the Crimean War,

over seventy percent of British and French main battleships were either

equipped or were planned to be fitted with screws. By 1852, no other country

had started to build steam battleships.54 While most of the second rank naval

powers (Russia, Austria, Italian kingdoms and Ottoman Empire) had acquired

at least one steam ship-of-the-line in the following decade, the US Navy built

a series of enormous frigates armed with extremely heavy artillery instead of

screw battleships.55

Thus, in the four decades between the end of Napoléonic Wars and the

Crimean War, steam power first supplanted and then rapidly replaced the

53
Lambert “The Screw Propeller Warship,” pp. 39-40.
54
Ibid., p. 41.
55
Ibid., pp. 42-43.

26
 wind power which, for three centuries, had been harnessed to propel

warships. The revolution in naval affairs triggered by the strategic mobility of

steam engine was immediately recognised. As early as 1822, Colonel Henri

Paixhans from the French artillery, who invented the explosive shell gun,

prophesised that the future belonged to swift steamers, armed with incendiary

ammunition and protected by metal armor, exploiting tactical mobility and

superior technology to set lumbering wooden battleship afire.56 Paixhans was

certainly ahead of his time and his ideas remained out of the mainstream

policies. However, when the able career seaman Prince de Joinville of France

published his influential treatise De l'état des forces navales de la France

(About the State of French Naval Forces) in 1844, a reorganisation of the

French navy centered on the opportunities presented by the steam power

commenced. According to Joinville, British superiority in the Mediterranean

was based clearly on steam power as there were just three ships-of-the-line

stationed in this region against nine big paddle steamers. As the steam

warships were so crucial to British naval might and as there was not such a

big disparity between the number of French and British steam warships yet, it

was possible to concentrate on building new technology warships, closing the

gap in a short time. A fleet of sailing frigates would be enough to protect

French interests worldwide. Joinville's report shaped the naval program of

1846, which constituted the essence of French naval strategy until the disaster

of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71, when the French military system

faced total collapse.57 In 1848 however, due to the revolution and the

economic hardship of the new republic, the naval program seemed to be in

56
Sondhaus, p. 23.
57
Ibid., pp. 37-38.

27
 danger of ending before it even was put into effect. The Republican

government sought a way to agree to a naval arms limitation treaty with

Britain in 1849 but this diplomatic move failed and the new imperial

government re-invigorated the naval program. The battlefleet of Napoleon III

was to become the most powerful that the French nation had seen since the

days of Louis XIV.58

The British reaction to the shift in French naval strategy was one of

alarm. In 1845, Lord Palmerston had warned the House of Commons that the

English Channel was rapidly becoming a “steam bridge” from which the

French would launch an invasion.59 However, the naval policy makers in

Britain were assured that the far greater industrial capacity at their disposal

would allow them to outbuild the French navy at will. They were proved right

when in the 1850s, the Royal Navy achieved a marked numerical and

qualitative superiority in screw battleships over its rival across the channel.60

This “superiority complex” however, was to breed a dangereous

complacency in the later years of the century. The change of building policies

and strategic re-organization of French navy did not stimulate a similar

reform movement in the Royal Navy. The fleets sent to war against Russia in

1854 and 1855 were composed of warships incorporating all the innovations

of the preceding years but were commanded by an ultraconservative officer

corps and manned by crews recruited and accomodated little differently from

the days of Nelson.61 However, the flexibility offered by steam power was

starting to have a deeper effect on naval tactics. The foremost thinker of naval

58
Sondhaus., p. 41.
59
Ibid., p. 40.
60
Ibid., p. 74.
61
Clive Ponting, The Crimean War: The Truth Behind The Myth (London: Random House, 2005), p.
22.

28
 warfare under steam was French admiral Bouet-Willaumez, who wrote the

treatise Batailles de Terre et de Mer (Terrestrial and Naval Battles, 1856). He

prophesised that due to the independence in mobility provided by steam, the

naval battles of future would be decided by the craftiness, dash and boldness

shown by the personnel of individual ships.62 The naval battles which took

place between 1860-1895 would vindicate the veteran French admiral; until

advances in signalling and gunnery through the 1890s would once again

impose fleet discipline and line ahead as key to victory.63

Shell Gun, Iron and Steel

The incremental but dramatic change from wood to iron and steel in

the building of warships between 1860-1890 closed the loop of

transformation which began with the introduction of steam propulsion.

Altough it is often perceived as an independent development, the introduction

of armor was closely linked with the critical changes in naval artillery and the

emergence of reliable incendiary ammunition.

Just as steam power, neither incendiary ammunition nor metal naval

armor were new discoveries. In East Asian naval warfare use of rockets and

incendiaries was established by the twelfth century AD. During the Japanese

military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in 1596, Korean

admiral Yi Sun-Sin supervised the construction of geobukseon, the fabled

“turtle ships” covered with metal plates which protected the crew, and armed

with gunpowder artillery. They proved central in the defeat of the Japanese

62
Sondhaus, pp. 66-67
63
Tucker, p. 253

29
 invasion armada.64 In European naval warfare, however, the established norm

was forcing the surrender or retreat of the enemy warship, rather then

destroying it ultimately, so the use of incendiary ammunition was much rarer.

When used, it was generally an iron cannonball “baked” in fire until it

became glowing red. This was not a particularly successful or accurate

weapon and despite its psychological impact, red hot shot did not push

European navies to develop metal armor. It was only with the advent of a

reliable shell gun that incendiary ammunition became a threat, which

ultimately forced the adaptation of metal armor.65

Along with the advances in shipbuilding and propulsive power during

the 1820s and 1830s, there was an equally dramatic transformation in

artillery. As a result of the advances in metallurgy, it was now possible to cast

long and heavy guns which could resist heavier charges of explosives, thus

providing a longer range for heavy projectiles. In 1822, Colonel Henri

Paixhans, mentioned above, produced a new 68-pound gun which fired an

explosive ammunition that was able to doom any wooden warship. This

ammunition consisted of a hollow spherical case filled with gunpowder, and

was fitted with a time-set fuse ignited by the sparks produced by the

propellant.66 As reliable as the new ammunition was, the great expectations

were dashed when it was discovered that the gun was slow to load, inaccurate

and possessed only half the range of lighter conventional guns. Nevertheless,

the possibility of one or more well placed hits which could destroy a

battleship in the closer range gunfights was attractive enough to naval staff

64
Stephen Turnbull, Fighting Ships of The Far East, v.2 Japan and Korea 612-1639 (Oxford: Osprey
Publishing, 2003), pp. 16-20.
65
Lambert, Andrew. “Iron Hulls and Armour Plate,” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship
1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), p. 50.
66
Tucker, pp. 78-79

30
 and it became customary to load a few of those pieces on battleships and

frigates. But especially for auxiliary paddle steamers which had limited gun

space, the highly destructive heavy gun was the choice of weapon par

excellence.67

The vulnerability of wooden ships to shell gun was demonstrated

more than once during Crimean War (1853-55), the most famous example

being the destruction of the Ottoman Winter squadron at the Battle of Sinop

by the Russian Black Sea Fleet at the start of hostilities in November 1853.

Impressed enough by the performance of the Paixhans gun at Sinop and

against the allied fleet bombarding Sevastopol, Napoleon III ordered floating

armored batteries to assault the Russian fortifications at Crimea. Designed by

Dupuy de Lôme, the Dévastation, a class of three 1575-ton flat bottomed

craft, were ready for the assault on Kinburn on 17 October 1855. Protected by

a 4-inch thick wrought iron belt, equipped with machinery giving a speed of

just 4 knots and three light collapsible masts in case of emergency, French

floating batteries were not suitable for open sea service and had to be towed

all the way long from France to the Black Sea. However limited they were, at

Kinburn the three ships approached 1000 yards to the fortress and sent 3000

rounds into the fortification with impunity. By the end of the day, the fortress

surrendered.68 The armored warship had come of age.

Upon the success of his armored batteries, de Lôme resurrected his

project of building a fully seaworthy armored warship. In the rapidly

deteriorating diplomatic atmosphere between France and England after the

end of the Crimean War, Napoléon III agreed to let de Lôme proceed. In

67
Sondhaus, pp. 22-23
68
Ibid., p. 61.

31
 March 1858, the new ship was laid down in Toulon. By her measurements

and underwater hull shape, she was practically a copy of the traditional

looking Napoléon. However above the waterline everything was different.

The slab-sided vessel carried her thirty-six 6.4-inch rifled muzzle loading

guns on a single deck and the broadsides were covered with 4.5-inch thick

wrought iron armor. Although possessing three masts and a symbolic

barquentine rig, the 5630-ton armored frigate was clearly propelled by steam

power alone, cruising at the maximum speed of 13 knots. Christened with the

name Gloire, de Lôme commented about her creation that compared with

traditional wooden warships she would be like a “wolf among a flock of

sheep.”69

The Gloire created a stir across the Channel and the answer to this

threat to British naval supremacy instantly came: the Royal Navy laid down

the HMS Warrior in May 1859. Like her French rival, she was a broadside

armed armored frigate but superior in every respect to the Gloire. Designed

by Isaac Watts, the 9140-ton battleship was 125 feet longer than the Gloire,

carried 200 tons more coal and could set twice the surface of sail for a

maximum speed of 14 knots, a very important feature considering the limited

endurance of early steamships and the global commitments of the Royal

Navy. In fact, with a capacity to carry just 700 tons of coal and weak sailing

capability Gloire would be suitable only for service within French national

waters.70

The Warrior was armored with a 4.5-inch thick belt like Gloire, but

carried forty guns. Half of this armament consisted of a new artillery

69
Lambert “Iron Hulls and Armour Plate,” pp. 53-54.
70
Ibid., pp. 55-56.

32
 development: Armstrong’s 7-inch breech loading gun. The breech loading

system was without doubt the ideal sought for the ever growing sized

nineteenth century artillery, providing a vast improvement in accuracy and

rate of fire.71 However, the cast iron used to produce guns was not a suitable

material for breechloding artillery, not being tensile enough to stand the

shock of propellant. Also, Armstrong’s loading mechanism was prone to a

high degree of gas escape, which badly affected range and accuracy. As a

result of many accidents and insufficient performance, the Royal Navy

returned to heavy rifled muzzle loading guns in the middle of the1860s; other

navies followed suit. Only after Krupp’s perfection of high tensile steel

casting methods and the development of a reliable breechloading mechanism

in the late 1870s, did breechloading artillery replace muzzle loaders.

Accordingly, the Warrior was re-armed in 1865 with an all muzzle loading

armament.72

Besides superiority in endurance and weaponry, the Warrior was

superior also to the Gloire in perhaps the most important aspect: construction

material. Whereas the French vessel was a wooden hulled ship plated with

iron armor, the Warrior’s hull was fully constructed of iron.73 Unlike armor

and incendiary ammunition, the iron-hulled ship was a truly novel feature in

maritime history. Four centuries of increasing trade and increasing size of

navies and ships in the Western hemisphere had resulted in a serious

depletion of forests suitable for shipbuilding by the end of eighteenth century.

While the traditional naval supplies were thus becoming costlier to acquire;

71
Sondhaus, p. 75.
72
Campbell, John. “Naval Armaments and Armour,” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam
Warship 1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), pp. 158-
160.
73
Tucker, p. 70.

33
 with the advent of the industrial revolution iron was becoming a cheap and

widespread construction material for the first time in history.74

In the late eighteenth century there already had been iron barges in use

on the Thames River. In 1822, such a craft had been fitted with a simple

steam machine to become the Aaron Manby, the first iron-hulled ship of

history. In the 1830s, the Scottish shipyards that specialised in iron

construction commissioned a few experimental open sea steamers, the most

fabled being perhaps the Nemesis of the East India Company. Armed with

two guns and congreve rockets, the 700-ton vessel wrought havoc on the

Yangtze river during the First Opium War (1839-42).75 These first

experiments also served to pinpoint and solve the initial problems of iron

hulls, such as its adverse effect on the ship’s compass and rapid corrosion.

By 1845, iron ship construction technology had matured enough for

Isambard Kingdom Brunel to build the then gigantic merchant liner SS Great

Britain of iron, a vessel which is today preserved as a museum in Bristol and

is considered “the first modern ship.”76 After the success of the Great Britain,

iron rapidly spread as a major shipbuilding material. However, as iron hulls

required extensive dockyard facilities to maintain, they were deemed not

feasible enough to be used on ships which were to serve at distant stations

where there were not even basic docks. As a result, composite hulled ships

which had iron keel and frames planked with hardwood became widespread

74
Sondhaus, p. 67.
75
Lambert “Iron Hulls and Armour Plate,” pp. 47-48.
76
Corlett, E.C.B; “The Screw Propeller and Merchant Shipping 1840-1865” in The Advent of Steam:
The Merchant Steamship before 1900, edited by Basil Greenhill (New Jersey: Chartwheel Books,
2000), p. 89.

34
 both as merchantmen and cruising warships until durable steel hulls became

available by the 1880s.77

With the commissioning of the Gloire in 1859 and the Warrior in 1860,

the era of the ironclads had thus begun. The wooden ship-of-the-line which

had dominated the seas since the sixteenth century was now part of history.

By rendering the ship-of-the-line obsolete, the ironclad had created a tabula

rasa situation which equalised naval rivals throughout the world; just like the

Dreadnought would do 45 years later. Aside from the old naval powers in

North Sea and the Baltic, new naval powers in the Adriatic and Americas

started to place orders for ironclads in a new naval arms race. By 1870,

Britain had commissioned thirty-seven, France thirty-five, Russia ten, Spain

seven, Denmark three, Italy sixteen, Austria-Hungary eleven and Peru two

armored ships with open sea capability. The Sweden had three and Brazil had

thirteen small coastal ironclads. The United States had built a mighty armored

armada during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and by 1870 had some

fifty-one ironclads but all these were quite small coastal craft incapable of

open sea work.78

The appearance of the ironclad warship also started a technological

competition between armor and gun. In order to penetrate ship armor, naval

guns immediately started to increase in caliber and size. While the Warrior

was armed with cannons firing 7-inch shells, the Unionist ironclads of the

American Civil War were usually armed with at least one gun firing a 15-inch

77
Sondhaus,p. 84.
78
Ibid., p. 103. .

35
 shell by the end of the conflict. By 1870 the Armstrong foundry had produced

a 17.7-inch monster gun weighing over 100 tons.79

To counter this growth of firepower, first experiments were made with

“sandwich” armor consisting of wrought iron plates covering a teak core. By

the start of the 1870s compound armor was developed by covering the surface

of iron plates with steel and it became the standard protection used on

warships until the 1890s. In 1890, Harvey’s nickel-steel armor, developed by

the American inventor Hayward Augustus Harvey through a carbonization

process, was presented to the naval circles. The Harvey armor proved to be

almost indestructible compared to the compound armor. Meanwhile, the

German industrial giant Krupp was developing a “gas cementing” method to

produce steel armor plates. This method was perfected by 1894, and in trials

it proved to be twice as effective compared with Harvey plates of the same

thickness.80

In this race between the armor and the gun, it was early on obvious

that only artillery of great size could ever penetrate the ever-thickening armor

plates. But it was impossible to mount other than a few of such guns onto a

warship and broadside arming was not an effective method for using such

ordnance. The answer came in the shape of a revolving gun turret, capable of

all round fire. Two ingenious men developed their own designs on both sides

of Atlantic. The first was Captain Cowper Coles, RN, who fought in the

Crimean War and engineered a circular shaped artillery raft which was able to

turn 360 degrees at the spot where it was moored to bombard Russian shore

79
Tucker, pp. 158-159.
80
Sondhaus, pp. 164-165.

36
 positions in the Azov campaign. Upon this experimentation, Coles developed

an elaborate turret design which turned on rollers below deck level.81

In the U.S.A, it was the ever ingenious John Ericsson who developed

a turret design. This featured a circular armored box situated on deck and

turning on a central steam powered spindle. Upon the start of the American

Civil War, he managed to convince the Union Navy to proceed with his

design of a turreted ironclad gunboat. The 987-ton craft was a vessel of shape

never seen before; basically an iron raft with almost no freeboard, masts or

sails. Capable of 9 knots, she was armed with only two 11-inch guns in an

Ericsson turret.82 Christened the Monitor, Ericksson’s gunboat was barely

capable of even inshore cruising but her battle experience proved decisive in

the adoption of turret in world navies.

By March 1862, the Confederate navy built a mobile armored battery

out of the wooden screw frigate USS Merrimack’s scuttled hull. Re-

christened the Virginia, this awkward ship was expected to break the

blockade of Chesapeake Bay. The Monitor was ordered to join and bolster the

defenses of the wooden blockading squadron, but she could arrive only a few

hours after the Virginia sortied and wrought havoc, sinking two powerful

frigates with impunity on 8 March 1862. When the Confederate ship returned

next day, the Monitor challenged her and a four hour long artillery duel

between the two unusual vessels followed. This first battle between ironclads

ended indecisively, with both vessels retreating at the end of the day. The

81
Tucker, pp. 134-135.
82
Sondhaus, p. 78.

37
 Monitor’s turret, however, proved to be far more useful than the broadside

armed Virginia.83

Regardless of this ship type’s strictly littoral nature, a “Monitor fever”

gripped the Union navy and eventually all the fifty-one ironclads completed

by the end of the war were one or two turreted monitors, improved upon

Ericsson’s original design. The duel of the Monitor and the Virginia also

made a deep impact in Europe, especially among minor powers whose small

budgets would not sustain large seagoing ironclads and for landpowers who

were seeking an effective coast defense ship type.84

The integration of the turret was also the starting point for the

disappearance of masts and sails from battleships. As the turret needed an

unobstructed line of sight to be effectively used, masts and rigging were

obstacles. Another reason for the incompatibility of masts and turrets was the

strain to ship’s the balance caused by the combined weight of these two

design features. Ship designers, however, did not trust the capability of naval

machinery enough to omit masts and sails altogether. But, when the new three

masted turret ship the HMS Captain, designed by Cowper Coles, capsized

and sank during a gale with very heavy loss of life in September 1870, the

sombre lesson about the need for deleting masts and sails from turret carrying

ships was duly learned.85

In 1873, the Italian navy laid down two 11,200 ton battleships, the

Duilio and the Dandolo. Designed by the chief builder of the navy Admiral

Benedetto Brin, they carried four 17.7-inch Armstrong guns paired in two

83
Tucker, pp. 116-117.
84
For a case study of the Monitor’s effects on minor navies, see: Jan Glete “John Ericsson and the
Transformation of Swedish Naval Doctrine”, International Journal of Naval History, Volume 2-
Number 3, December 2003
85
Sondhaus, p. 87.

38
 turrets and were devoid of any masts and sails. The sisterships each had a

very high freeboard and an all steel armor belt, with considerable speed and

reliable machinery. The building of the Duilio and Dandolo marked the birth

of the true battleship. These came to be called pre-dreadnought after 1905.86

In the two decades following the building of the Duilio and Dandolo,

naval design bureaus experimented with various designs to find the best

balance between speed, armor and firepower in battleships. Against the threat

posed by the newly invented torpedo craft and modern cruisers, a battery of

quick firing medium caliber artillery was implemented in the 1880s.

Advances in boiler and machine technology raised the average speed. By

1895, as exemplified by the British Majestic class, a first class battleship

carried a main battery of four 12-inch breechloading guns on two turrets in

the centerline, a secondary battery of about a dozen 6-inch quick firing guns

divided into two broadsides, all steel hull and armor with an average speed of

16-18 knots.87

The Jeune Ecole

The 1880s witnessed the rise of a new and revolutionary new school

of strategy centered in France. Called “Jeune Ecole” (Young School) by the

press, the propenents of the new strategy envisioned the future of naval

warfare with the lumbering slow battleship wiped out by the swift, new and

revolutionary torpedo craft and the foe being brought to his knees by a

ruthless commerce raiding campaign.88 After the Napoléonic Wars, France

86
Tucker, pp. 144-145.
87
Watts, p. 65.
88
Tucker, pp. 151-152.

39
 had given up any hopes of challenging British naval supremacy on equal

terms, and instead turned to new technology to gain an advantage; pioneering

the use of steam power, shell gun and armor plating. Ironically, in this new

naval race against her traditional foe, France let itself down. The weakness of

French industry allowed Britain to exploit the technological breakthroughs

achieved by French ingenuity far more effectively. By 1880, the Royal Navy

had bested the challenge of France which started with the building of

Napoléon three decades earlier. In this psychological climate of defeat on

both land (Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) and sea, a cabal of new

generation French naval officers led by Admiral Théophile Aube turned to a

radical new weapon, the concept of which was even beyond the British

capacity to answer in the short run: the self-propelled torpedo.89

The development of an underwater weapon to sink warships was not

particularly new; the first ideas about them had been recorded in the

seventeenth century. During the American War of Independence (1775-

1783), Bostonian patriot David Bushnell made the well-acclaimed but

unsuccessful attempt to sink the flagship of the Royal Navy squadron in New

York harbor by placing a time fused cask of explosive under the hull from a

submersible boat. It was the steamship pioneer Robert Fulton who coined the

name “torpedo” for such underwater weapons, building a man-powered

prototype submarine boat and blowing up a hulked ship with a contact fused

torpedo towed by this craft in 1802 during a demonstration for the First

Consul Napoléon of France.90 After Fulton, the term “torpedo” came to mean

89
Ropp, Theodore. “Kıt’ada Ortaya Çıkan Deniz Gücü Doktrinleri,” in Modern Stratejinin
Yaratıcıları, edited by Edward Mead Earle (Ankara: ASAM Yayınları, 2003), pp. 371-372.
90
Wilson, Michael. “Early Submarines,” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-
1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), p. 147.

40
 what we call today “naval mine.” Such crude immobile “torpedoes” were

used in the Crimean War by the Russians, without success. It was in the

American Civil War that the “torpedo” came to its own. Especially used by

Confederates, “torpedo” fields were widely used to close southern harbors

and major rivers, causing the loss of dozens of Unionist ships. The first

successful offensive use of the torpedo was also in that conflict. Steam

launches and semi-submersible craft fitted with spar-torpedoes91 earned

widely acclaimed successes such as the sinking of the Unionist sloop

Housatonic by the Confederate submersible Hunley in February 1864, and the

destruction of the Confederate ironclad Albemarle by a Unionist torpedo boat

in October of the same year.92

The torpedo became the self-propelled weapon as it is understood

today in 1868. Four years earlier, Austro-Hungarian Navy Captain Johann

Luppis had developed a compressed air propelled, cigar shaped torpedo

which cruised on the surface. British engineer Robert Whitehead, who owned

a workshop in the principal Habsburg naval base of Fiume, took the concept

of Luppis and developed it into a weapon which cruised underwater with the

help of a hydrostatic depth regulator. First bought by the Austro-Hungarian

navy, Whitehead’s patented weapon was quickly sold to virtually all navies of

some efficiency by the end of 1870s, including that of China. However, this

early Whitehead torpedo had only a speed of 7 knots with a warhead

containing less than 20 pounds of dynamite, making its successful use to

depend on luck as much as skill. Therefore, spar-torpedoes of greater

91
Spar torpedo was the first offensive underwater weapon. It was a conical shaped explosive warhead
fitted on a two meter long pole and exploded with a lanyard from a safe distance after being pinned to
the hull of the victim. Campbell, p. 166.
92
Sondhaus, p. 81.

41
 explosive power remained in inventories until the mid-1880s, when self-

propelled torpedo became a truly reliable and powerful weapon.93

After the invention of the self-propelled torpedo, the next step was to

design a craft to use it in the most effective way. The answer came from the

Thornycroft Company of Britain, an expert in designing swift and small

yachts. In 1876, the Lightning was built at this shipyard, a 32-ton launch

capable of 19 knots and equipped with two racks on each side launching

Whitehead torpedoes. By the early 1880s, torpedoboats of modified Lightning

design were being mass produced for various navies.94 These early boats were

barely capable of operating in the vicinity of harbors, let alone littoral

capacity and soon a diversification of torpedo boats emerged for different

duties. The first class of torpedo boats were around 120-200 tons, designed to

accompany cruisers in the open sea forays of commerce raiding. Second class

boats were of 60-115 tons, built for coast defense and third class boats were

tiny 30-50 ton craft similar to Lightning; often carried aboard cruisers and

battleships as auxiliaries.95 With the development of the torpedoboat the

question arose about the tactics to use it to best effect. Various naval

maneuvers conducted in the 1870s and 1880s showed that flotillas of torpedo

craft working under the cover of darkness could litteraly wipe out a squadron

of battleships lying at anchor off an enemy port. The days of the close

blockade were over.96

93
Sondhaus, p. 110.
94
Watts, p. 55.
95
Lyon, David; “Underwater Warfare and the Torpedo Boat,” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The
Steam Warship 1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), pp.
139-142.
96
Tucker, pp. 169-170.

42
 Such was the state of naval technology when Admiral Aube returned

to France in 1883 from colonial duty, where he had passed all his career. In

conjunction with his experience, he had witnessed the ironclads rusting at

anchor for years and never firing a shot except in training maneuvers, while

the unglamorous cruisers assigned to far flung outposts were continually in

some kind of action to defend their nations’ interests. The only great novelty

promising a true breakthrough was the torpedo boat. His radical new ideas

about naval warfare were crystallised into two essays. When a journalist

named Gabriel Charmes was attracted to his views and began penning articles

to advocate Aube’s ideas, the French admiral found also a speaker to the

general public.97

According to Aube, the principal raison d’être of the battlefleet

throughout the history of the French Navy had been the protection of an

expeditionary force destined to make an invasion of Britain. As he argued, in

the days when ships were dependent to the untrustworthy power of the wind,

the necessity of battleship squadrons to protect transport convoys was

understandable. However, everything had changed with the strategic

revolution of steam power. The ships had now full freedom of movement.

Considering the success of the Confederate blockade runners in the American

Civil War, Britain could no longer contain suitably built French ships at ports.

But Aube was not interested much in an invasion of Britain. Such an

undertaking would be over-risky and costly. Nor there was need to invade

Britain anymore as ironically the Island Nation had become mortally

vulnerable because of its very own wealth. For the first time in history, the

97
Sondhaus, p. 141.

43
 British economy was totally dependent on food and raw materials that came

from aboard. Thus, once this lifeline was severed with the indiscriminate hunt

of every freighter heading for the British Isles, regardless of neutrality, the

United Kingdom simply could not survive. Moreover, thanks to the mine and

the self-propelled torpedo, the Royal Navy should no longer dare to mount a

naval assault on French ports harboring commerce cruisers. Reflecting the

Social Darwinist ideas in vogue during the epoch, Aube adopted the slogan,

“Attack to the weak unabatedly; run from the strong unashamedly !”98

Against those who condemned his theories with charges of immorality and

disregard of international laws, he replied “War….is a negation of law itself

!” Despite Aube’s radical perception, commerce raiding remained subject to

severe prize rules, but these vanished into history with the brutal

transformation of the commerce raiding into unlimited submarine warfare

during the First World War (1914-1918).99

According to Jeune Ecole advocates, the cruiser, the ship class which

was to conduct the commerce raiding operations, was to be completely

redefined as a multifunctional vessel propulsed only by steam, armed with

long range guns and torpedo tubes and protected by some armor. Until that

time, warships rated as cruisers had been the full rigged and broadside armed

frigates and corvettes not much different from those of the Age of Sail; only

assisted by an auxiliary steam plant. Ironically, the pioneer of the modern

cruiser was to be Britain. In 1881, Chile, which was at war with Peru, ordered

an “open seas gunboat” for its navy from the Armstrong Yard of Britain. The

3000-ton ship, created by chief builder George Rendel, revolutionised the

98
Ropp, pp. 373-374.
99
Sondhaus, p. 142.

44
 cruiser class. Completely constructed of steel, she had a 2-inch armored deck

protecting the vital sections like engines and magazines, was armed with a

main battery of two 10-inch guns in the centerline and a secondary battery of

six 6-inch guns divided into two broadsides. Possessing no rigging or sails,

Rendel’s cruiser was equipped with powerful and reliable machines capable

of providing a maximum speed of 18 knots. Completed in 1884 and named

Esmeralda, she was the first “protected cruiser”; the design principals of

which were imitated. Improved sisterships were built by her parent yard in

large numbers for various navies influenced by the Jeune Ecole.100 Always

eager to keep the technological edge over its arch-enemy, the French navy

introduced the armored cruiser, the Dupuy de Lôme of 1888, by adding an

armored belt sufficient to stop medium caliber shells to the protected cruiser

layout.101

Regardless of the context in which it was developed, the Jeune Ecole

created a major stir in navies worldwide. In Europe, Germany and Austria-

Hungary, states which had large coastlines to defend but geopolitically

landpowers with an imperative to spend the majority of defense budget for

the army, wholeheartedly embraced the new strategy as the perfect solution to

their naval defense problem. In Germany, where both navy ministers during

the Bismarck era were army generals, there was a unity of will to keep naval

spending at minimum in favor of the army. German maritime strategy was

built upon fortified ports which harbored squadrons of ships specifically

designed to break a blockade by a superior naval power. Thus, when the

torpedoboat emerged as the perfect seagoing battleship killer, it became the

100
Sondhaus, pp. 139-140.
101
Roberts, John. “The Pre-Dreadnought Age 1890-1905,” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam
Warship 1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), p. 128.

45
 natural weapon of choice for the German high command. Between 1883 and

1888, the year when the bluewater navy proponent Kaiser Wilhelm II

ascended the throne and Bismarck quit the office, the German navy had

comissioned seventy two torpedoboats, the majority from the Schichau yard

which became the world leader in designing torpedo craft.102

In Austria-Hungary, where the very existance of the navy itself was

jeopardized after Italy joined the Tripartite Pact in 1882, the Jeune Ecole

became a life saver. For the seventeen years between 1876 and 1893, Austro-

Hungarian navy virtually abandoned battleship construction, but between

1883 and 1891 commissioned fifty three torpedoboats, six torpedo gunboats

and five cruisers. Baron Maximilian von Sterneck, the Commander of the

Austro-Hungarian navy, developed elaborate tactics for using torpedoboats to

best effect.103

The Ottoman navy, due to the effect of Russian torpedoboats during

the War of 1877-78, political wrangling and lack of money, also turned to the

Jeune Ecole, while Russian and Italian navies took very different lessons

from their war experiences and went in very different ways. In the United

States, where the senate always hostile to defense spending had condemned

the navy to ridiculous budgets after Civil War, the naval buildup which had

slowly started with the “New Navy” program of 1883 included no battleships

but cruisers for commerce raiding.104 Even in Britain the Jeune Ecole had a

tremendous effect, with a lot of questions raised over the future of battleship

and building of cruisers to patrol and defend sealanes dramatically

102
Sondhaus, p. 146.
103
Ibid., p. 145.
104
Ibid., pp. 152-154.

46
 increased.105 In East Asia, where there was an escalating naval race between

China and rapidly modernizing Japan, the two countries followed different

courses as well. The story of the Ottoman, Russian, Japanese and Chinese

navies during the Jeune Ecole period will be discussed later.

The reign of the Jeune Ecole ended after about fifteen years, at the end

of 1890s. As mentioned before, developments in machinery and boiler

technology and of quick firing medium caliber guns were gradually applied to

battleships as well, increasing dramatically their maneuvrability and defense

capability to evade torpedo attacks.106 Meanwhile, the Royal Navy pioneered

a new type of warship to escort the battlefleet against torpedoboats in the

open sea. Called “Torpedo boat-Destroyer,” but soon called simply

“Destroyer”, this new ship type was considerably larger and far more

seaworthy with a weight of 250-300 tons and an armament of a couple of

quick firing guns and torpedoes.107 Finally, during the first Sino-Japanese

War of 1894-95, the Japanese warships which were built upon Jeune Ecole

principles won victory by traditional fleet battle, practically discrediting

teachings of the radical French naval circle.108 However, two legacies of the

Jeune Ecole proved to be long lasting: the idea of destroying battleships by

using cheap and swift torpedo platforms, and defeating a foe dependent on

maritime trade by ruthless commerce raiding. The first vision decisively

realised with the torpedo aircraft during the Second World War, while the

submarine emerged as the ultimate commerce raider during 1916-18.

105
Ropp, p. 372.
106
Sondhaus, pp. 156-157.
107
Watts, p. 60.
108
Tucker, pp. 240-241.

47
 Mahan and the Rise of Japanese Naval Power 1887-1905

In the early 1880s, during the heyday of the Jeune Ecole, Captain

Alfred Thayer Mahan, who commanded a U.S Navy gunboat off the Chilean

coast, liked to read history, especially German historian Theodor Mommsen’s

History of Punic Wars. Upon reading about Hannibal’s epic crossing of Alps,

he questioned why he did not had taken the far more secure and easy

maritime path. He concluded that as the Romans had controlled the sea, they

were able to deny the comfort of maritime transport to the Carthaginian

general. After his appointment to the U.S Naval Academy at Annapolis in

1885 as instructor, he further applied his analysis into the long struggle of

France and Britain throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to

develop the theory of naval warfare in world politics. His research culminated

in 1890 in the groundbreaking work: The Influence of Seapower Upon

History 1660-1783.109

Considering the rather limited perception of naval power by the

United States policymakers throughout the nineteenth century, the fact that

the first serious theory of naval power came from a rather obscure American

officer must have been surprising to many at the time. However, a closer

examination of Alfred Thayer Mahan shows that he possessed the necessary

blend of intellectual background and actual experience, both in war and

peace. Born on 27 September 1840, he was son of the influential U.S Army

historian and fortification expert Dennis Hart Mahan. Thus, it can be argued

that he was exposed to historical methodology from his family. Young Mahan

graduated from the Naval College in 1859 and took an active part in the
109
Sondhaus, p. 162. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Seapower Upon History 1660-1783
(Boston: Little and Brown, 1890).

48
 American Civil War as a lieutenant. After the war he spent time both ashore

and on cruising duty, witnessing various interventions of strong naval powers

in different parts of the world. It is possible that his observations led him to

think more seriously about seapower.110

In the Influence of Seapower Mahan put forward the idea that, it was

the possession of overseas colonies providing raw materials and markets for

produced goods which ensured the greatness of nations. The key to the

control of overseas trade from colonies was the navy providing command of

the seas. Any nation aspiring to become a world power needed a strong

battlefleet composed of heavily-armored, big gun warships to ensure the

freedom of its merchant fleet and to deny its foes the same.111

Mahan’s ideas were groundbreaking in many respects. First, he

became the first theorist to underline the correlation between geography,

economy and naval power. Secondly, he made clear for the first time that a

strong navy must rest on the coalition of various social groups in society who

had an interest in having a superior naval power, like merchants, heavy

industry magnates and shipping corporations.112 However, his ideas were also

fundamentally flawed in many ways. Above all, arguing that a battlefleet is

needed to acquire colonies was putting the cart before the horse. Britain had

not became a superpower because it possessed a colony hunting battlefleet; to

defend its already existing colonial empire did Britain built a strong navy.

Also, for Mahan, the armies were not of great of importance, what mattered

was the naval power. But this “navalism” could not answer the success of

110
Sprout, Margaret Tutle. “Mahan” in Modern Stratejinin Yaratıcıları, edited by Edward Mead Earle
(Ankara: ASAM Yayınları, 2003), p. 348.
111
Ibid., pp. 351-352.
112
Sondhaus, p. 163.

49
 territorial empires like those of the Ottomans, the Romanovs or the then very

recent example of the Prusso-German Empire.113

Mahan’s shortcomings are understandable considering his era and

motives. Just a few years before the publication of his book, a survey of the

Royal Navy’s actual fighting power had been conducted to assess its ability to

cope with the combined fleet of a possible Russo-French alliance. The result

which exploded like a bomb in the press revealed a total scandal: let alone

fight with such a coalition, the Royal Navy had barely enough power to

struggle with the French navy alone. The defensive preparations of the

colonies were virtually non-existent; if any enemy landed troops to Britain’s

overseas possessions, it could easily conquer them.

The outrage in Britain over the report led to the passing of the Naval

Defense Act in 1889. With this legislation, Britain re-affirmed the “two

power standard” and pledged to build ten battleships, nine armored cruisers,

thirty three protected cruisers and eighteen torpedo-gunboats.114 The scandal

revealing the Royal Navy’s complacency echoed worldwide. It seemed that

the power of Britain was waning and it was probably a good time to prepare

to raise challenges to its superiority at seas. The enormous scope of the Naval

Defense Act also prompted naval officers of the newcoming industrial powers

to raise their voices for a similar naval reinforcement worthy of their own

potential might. From that perspective, Mahan’s principal impulse in penning

Influence of Seapower was to provide a reliable theoretical leverage to

113
Charles London, Jutland 1916: Clash of the Dreadnoughts (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2000), p.
8.
114
Watts, pp. 61-62.

50
 convince policymakers and interest groups to rebuild the U.S navy as a

bluewater force.115

Coupled with the Naval Defense Act, Influence of Seapower was hailed

as the ultimate discourse about the role of the navy in international power

politics both in the U.S.A and in Britain, where the governments were ecstatic

to have a justification for the monstrous increase in naval spending to

taxpayers. Mahan had an even more profound impact in Germany and Japan.

With Mahan, both the over zealous pro-navy Kaiser Wilhelm II and Admiral

Alfred von Tirpitz, his right hand man in the development of Imperial

German navy, found the perfect pill to be swallowed by a population and an

elite which had so far no idea, experience or interest in possessing a world

class fleet.116 However, the rapidly modernizing Japan’s embrace of Mahan

and navalism far surpassed that of even Germany and had the longest and

most profound impact. This may be understood by the fact that Japanese and

German were the first languages into which Influence of Seapower was

translated (1895), and the Japanese went one step further by making Mahan

required reading at their naval academy in 1896.117

The rise of Japanese naval power constitutes a unique case in world

history. It is the only example of a global scale navy being created by a nation

which was non-European, and moreover had come out of the feudal age just

two decades earlier. Furthermore, neither the Japanese state nor society ever

had ever seen anything like the building of a specialist warship, let alone an

organized navy. Due to its unequalled story and to provide a necessary pivot

115
Sprout, p. 352.
116
London, p. 9.
117
Sondhaus, p. 164.

51
 point with which to compare the Ottoman example, a concise summary of the

birth and the rise of Imperial Japanese navy will be given.

Japan was a feudal, largely introverted, autarchic nation until

American “gunboat diplomacy” forced the country to open its doors to the

West in 1853. The Shogunate, the military dictatorship which had ruled Japan

for centuries, made a half-hearted attempt at modernization, but upon its

failure to resist, the Western powers flocked to Japan with their gunboats to

demand concessions. The shogunate was toppled by a coalition of powerful

feudal Samurai lords who wanted a more radical strengthening of the state to

restore the national power by re-establishing, at least nominally, the authority

of the long since symbolic emperor.118

The Imperial Japanese Navy (Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kaigun) was

formally established in July 1869 after the end of the Boshin War, a largely

maritime campaign conducted to root out the last pro-shogun opposition to

Emperor Meiji’s restoration. It was a ragtag collection of twelve ships which

had passed from the defunct Shogunal Navy and squadrons formed by feudal

domains which supported the emperor. The navy had no independent

administration at this stage, being directed by the Ministry of Military Affairs

along with the army. Avaliable warships included four sailing vessels and the

only armored ship under Japanese flag, the Adzuma. This small, 1360-ton, 3-

gun coast defense ironclad had been built in France for the Confederate navy

during the American Civil War, and subsequently sold to the Shogunate, but

delivered to the restoration forces. A larger ironclad, the 1430-ton, 12-gun

118
For a full analysis of the Meiji Restoration see Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 33-332.

52
 armored corvette Ryujo arrived from England the following year to become

the flagship.119

1870 became a turning point in the history of the imperial Japanese

navy for that year an imperial decree established the British Royal Navy as

the model for the institution. Three years later, a thirty four member British

naval mission under Commander Archibald Douglas was invited and stayed

until 1879 to teach at the Tsukuji Naval Training Center at Tokyo, itself an

institution dating back to the Shogun’s own modernization program.

Meanwhile, fourteen cadets were sent to Britain and two to the United States

in 1871 by the Ministry of Military Affairs; including Togo Heihachiro the

greatest of Japan’s future admirals, and Saso Sachu, the father of Japanese

ship designing.120 The adoption of Royal Navy as role model led to the

wholesale import and assimilation of British naval traditions by the Japanese

navy down to the officer-rating relationships, an unparalleled experience in

naval history. No other newly constituted naval power in the world achieved

such a cultural shift with success. It’s argued here that, Anglo-Japanese

tradition transfer is one of the strongest refutations to the “take western

technology but not its culture, like the Japanese did” misconception oft-cited

in Islamic countries.

The 1870s also saw debates on the status of the navy in the Japanese

grand strategy, and when the industrial basis of naval power really did start.

First came the establishment of the navy as a fully independent institution

with the instigation of the Navy Ministry in 1872. Debates about the role of

navy were spurred by both the foreign and internal affairs of Meiji Japan. In

119
Hansgeorg Jentschura, Dieter Jung, and Peter Mickel, Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy
1869-1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), pp. 11-12.
120
Peattie and Evans, p. 12.

53
 1871, the aboriginal tribes of Taiwan massacred shipwrecked Japanese sailors

from the Ryukyu islands. Japan demanded indemnity for its subjects from the

Chinese court, without success. As a result Japan mounted a punitive

expedition to Taiwan in 1874 and only retreated after receiving 500,000 Taels

from the Qing court.121 The Taiwan expedition showed the weakness of

China and opened Japanese eyes to the possibility of expanding in the

maritime direction. Another consideration was the re-awakened interest in

Korea, with many high-status policymakers dreaming of ultimate domination

over this country. All such ambitions required a strong navy to dominate the

seas around Japan for a secure passage to the coveted territories. In the same

year as the Taiwan expedition, navy minister Katsu Kaishu drafted a plan for

the establishment of a hundred ship navy divided into ten fleets. This over-

imaginative plan was refused immediately by the Imperial government for

lack of funds.122 Eventually, the debates are brought to a close by internal

affairs.

Throughout the early years of the Meiji era, the sweeping reforms

which destroyed the old society and the imposition of conscription along with

high taxes on the peasantry for the establishment of a modern state caused

widespread dissent. Many peasant revolts erupted but the most dangerous

reaction came with the Satsuma uprising of the disgruntled Samurai in 1877.

The rebellion turned into a virtual civil war and could only be repressed with

great difficulty.123 The lesson to everybody was clear: a strong army was the

only security of the government and the greatest of priorities should be given

121
Jansen, p. 423.
122
Peattie and Evans, p. 7.
123
Hyman Kublin “The Early Meiji Army”, The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Nov., 1949),
pp. 33-34.

54
 to its development. Therefore, an imperial defense policy was shaped

according to the Rikushu Kaiju (army first, navy second) principle; with the

navy being structured according to Shusei Kokubo (static defense) strategy

with a priority to defend Japanese coast. Accordingly, the Japanese naval

administration was organized around regional bases called Chinjufu, each

possessing the necessary docking, victualling and command facilities. The

whole fleet of sixteen ships was divided equally into two squadrons, one at

Yokohama the other at Nagasaki.124 In tune with the changes in naval policy,

a far more modest fleet program was initiated. During 1870’s, three

moderate-sized ironclads, the 3700-ton, 12-gun frigate Fuso, and the 2250-

ton, 9-gun corvettes Hiei and Kongo were bought from Britain. In 1883, the

Japanese navy commissioned the Naniwa and the Takachiho, the first real

modern warships of the fleet. Designed by Saso Sachu and built in Britain,

they were 3700-ton steel-hulled protected cruisers; shielded by a 3-inch deck,

armed with two 10-inch and six 6 inch guns, four torpedo tubes, with a

maximum speed of 18.5 knots.125

The 1880s were crucial years for the Japanese navy, for it was the

decade when the industrial infrastructure, doctrines and seeds for the future

transformation of the Japanese navy into a truly world class fleet were sown.

The first modern naval base of Japan had been established at Yokosuka in the

1860s by the Shogunate with French technical help and supervision.

However, it was only after the import of the necessary machinery and

employment of skilled workers from Britain in 1884, necessary for

knowledge transfer, that it was able to produce iron hulled warships of small

124
Peattie and Evans, pp. 8-9.
125
Jentschura, Jung and Mickel, pp. 13, 95-6.

55
 size. Further new yards were set up at Kure and Sasebo. As it will be seen in

the last chapter, Chinese arsenals were already building steel-hulled armored

ships. But there was a crucial difference which was just emerging: the

appearance of private shipbuilding companies in Japan, with heavy state

subvension. The future’s industrial giants like Mitsubishi and Kawasaki were

first set up as humble enterprises in the 1880s but they rapidly started to

develop due to considerable governmental contracts for guns, torpedoes,

machinery and spare parts.126

The Taiwan expedition resulted in an immediate increase in Chinese

naval spending, culminating in the acquisition of two battleships from

Germany in 1885. Suddenly, Japan found itself totally outclassed by its

principal adversary in the region. The strengthening of the Chinese navy

provided a suitable pretext for the defeated proponents of a blue water navy

to rekindle the discussion about the place of naval power in Japanese imperial

defense. Pro-navy spokesmen launched a propaganda campaign in various

Japanese cities to promote the cause of a strong navy and the building of a

large merchant fleet to free the rapidly increasing Japanese trade from foreign

shipping, with the slogan Kaikoku Nippon (Maritime Japan). Gradually they

built up enthusiastic popular support, which proved to be decisive in the

transformation of the Japanese navy into an open seas fleet.127 The Kaikoku

Nippon campaign clearly shows why Mahan had such an immediate and

lasting effect on the Japanese navy, as his main argument for the necessity of

seapower was almost the same as that of the pro-navy Japanese, who also

shared the same defensive position with him on internal politics.

126
Peattie and Evans, p. 5, 14.
127
Ibid., p. 19.

56
 Although Kaikoku Nippon was to be decisive in the long run, in the

1880s it failed to press the politicians for a true battlefleet. Minds in the

government were still dictated by economy measures. Not surprisingly, the

Jeune Ecole, which was enjoying its high water mark, had instant appeal

during the preparation of the first naval expansion bill in 1882. No doubt, the

naval ministry term of Enomoto Takeaki (1880-85), who was the ally of

France on behalf of the Shogun during the Boshin War, had also influenced a

temporary superiority of French influence in the 1882 naval program.128

According to this legislation, twenty-two torpedo boats and twenty six other

types of warships were to be built.

The majority of these ships were built under the supervision of the

famous Jeune Ecole naval architect Emile Bertin. The first major warships to

be ordered wer the Naniwa and Takachiho mentioned above. In 1885, the

surplus Chilean light cruiser Arturo Prat was bought and commissioned as

the Tsukushi. The 1370-ton ship was armed with two 10-inch and four 4.7-

inch guns for a maximum speed of 16.6 knots. The following year, the first

native-built steel hulled warship, the 1700-ton unarmored cruiser Takao, was

laid down, followed by the slightly smaller 1500-ton semi-sistership

Yaeyama. They were completed between 1889-1892. The 3600-ton protected

cruiser Unebi was ordered from France the same year, but because of faulty

design she capsized in the South China Sea during transfer in 1887. Her loss

raised the first doubts about the validity of Jeune Ecole designed warships.129

At the center of the 1882 naval expansion program were the four

4200-ton units of the Sankeikan class specialist cruisers. Ordered in 1888 and

128
Peattie and Evans, p. 15.
129
Jentschura, Jung and Mickel, pp. 92-93, 96.

57
 designed by Emile Bertin, these lightly armored protected cruisers were to be

equipped with a single 12.6-inch Canet monster gun, but a large secondary

battery of eleven 4.7-inch quick-firing guns was also added upon the far-

sighted Japanese insistence. The logic behind their design was to act as

“battleship hunters” or more properly as “battleship substitutes” against the

Chinese fleet by exploiting their superior 16.5-knot speed and big gun. The

first two units, the Itsukushima and Matsushima, were built in France while

Hashidate and the Akitsushima were laid down in Yokosuka Yard, to be the

biggest and most complex warships built in Japan to that date. While the

French-built ships were ready in two years, the home built units could only be

completed on the eve of the war with China in 1894. In trials, Bertin’s

concept was found to be a dismal failure, with the Canet gun so slow to load

to the point of being almost non-functional, and accuracy being very low. As

a result of tests, Akitsushima was re-configured as a more orthodox protected

cruiser with a powerful battery of four 6-inch and six 4.7-inch quick firing

guns. The construction of the two Sankeikan units provided invaluable

experience to the Yokosuka yard in the building of large warships.130

The failure of the Sankeikan class along with the loss of the Unebi

ended the brief influence of French doctrine in Japan. Thereafter, with a few

exceptions, all the foreign built warships were ordered from Britain. Japan’s

only “armored” unit ordered before the Sino-Japanese War was the small,

2400-ton, British built (1888) armored cruiser Chiyoda, armed with ten 4.7-

inch quick firing guns and three torpedo tubes, protected by a 4.5-inch

compound belt and capable of 19 knots. The best unit of the Japanese navy

130
Peattie and Evans, pp. 15-17.

58
 during the Sino-Japanese War, the 4200-ton protected cruiser Yoshino, was

completed by the Armstrong yard in 1893. Protected by 5-inch deck armor,

she carried a very powerful armament of two 6-inch and and eight 4.7-inch

quick firing guns along with five torpedo tubes for a speed of 23 knots,

making her the fastest warship in the world.131

Despite the failure of the Jeune Ecole cruisers, its second aspect was

to have perhaps the deepest impact in Japanese battle tactics: the torpedo. The

cheapness of the torpedo was appealing to the government while the

torpedoboat ethos which constituted daring, speedy attacks at close range was

attractive to many officers possessing the traditional Japanese warrior spirit.

The Japanese navy obtained its first torpedoes in 1886 and a torpedo school

was opened in Yokosuka in the same year.132 Torpedo boats were initially 54-

ton French designs, shipped in sections and assembled in the Yokosuka yard.

Thereafter German Schichau designs became preferred. However, a

revolutionary craft of this class was ordered from Yarrow, Britain, in 1887,

the 203-ton Kotaka. Built to a Japanese design, the Kotaka was armed with

six torpedo tubes and six 37 mm quick firing-guns. In trials she proved to be

able to accompany large warships in the open sea instead of being limited to

coastal waters. With the Kotaka, the Imperial Japanese navy effectively

invented what was termed the “destroyer” a decade later.133

While the Japanese navy was under Jeune Ecole influence in building

its ships, paradoxically its tactics and strategy were entrenched firmly in the

British mentality of fleet superiority. Two men became the catalysts in this

crucial intellectual transformation, Lt. Cmdr. L. P. Willan, and Capt. John

131
Jentschura, Jung and Mickel, pp. 71-72, 98.
132
Peattie and Evans, pp. 37-38.
133
Ibid., 17-18.

59
 Ingles. Willan came in 1879 and worked for six years tutoring cadets like

Shimamura Hayao and Kato Tomosaburo, all of whom were destined to

become the ultimate architects of the Japanese naval thought in the 1910s. He

penned many treatises on naval tactics which were then translated into

Japanese. Even more than him, Ingles, who came in 1887, became the

intellectual father of the Imperial Japanese navy. He was appointed as

instructor to the Naval Staff College, which had been established in 1887, and

upon his guidance the staff college became a first class scientific education

institution, with mathematics, physics and engineering skills becoming

required knowledge for acceptance and topics of further study inside. He also

acted as advisor to Navy Minister Saigo Tsugimichi for the fleet

modernization and under his influence the Japanese navy completely

abolished the sail as a “machinery”, thus transforming it into a full steam

navy. Ingles was also the one responsible for the adoption of the line ahead

and well-drilled gunnery skill as the main battle tactic instead of the ramming

and close range mêlée favored in most other navies. His lectures were

published in 1894 as Kaigun senjitsu kogiroku (A Transcript of Lectures on

Naval Tactics).134

The final step in the transformation of the Japanese navy from a

coastal defense force to a blue water fleet came with the ascent of Yamamoto

Gombei into the Ministry of Navy in 1891. This strong willed and energetic

officer had three principal aims: achieving full professionalization of the

officer corps, complete freedom of the navy from the army by the

establishment of an independent naval general staff, and to convince the Diet

134
Peattie and Evans, pp. 12-13.

60
 to fund a strong battleship navy. Up to his reforms, Japanese naval officer

corps had been dominated by men of the Satsuma clan, whatever their

professional background. Yamamoto swept through the ranks, sending scores

of old or unqualified officers into retirement while opening the navy to men

of all backgrounds provided they possessed the necessary talent.135 In the

establishment of an independent naval staff, he naturally met hostility from

the army, which was threatened by the possibility of losing its primary

position among the armed services. Nevertheless, through the personal

intervention of Emperor Meiji, a compromise independent naval staff with

authority limited to coastal defense duties was established in 1893 as a first

step.136 In his final attempt to build a large open-seas navy though, he was

frustrated, despite his wide-scale attempts to establish a lobby by spreading

the writings of Mahan and similar-thinking other theorists, like the British

John and Philip Colomb. He was to achieve success in obtaining political

support for a battleship fleet only after the events of the First-Sino Japanese

War in 1894.137 For all these critical achievements, Yamamoto Gombei is

known as “the father of the Japanese Navy.”

Thus was the situation in the Imperial Japanese Navy when the

showdown with China came in 1894 over the mastery of Korea. Since the

1870s, Korea had been able to evade Japanese attempts to gain influence over

the country by using its status as a protectorate of China. In 1894, tension

finally escalated to war. The course of the war will be studied in more detail

in the chapter dealing with the Chinese navy. What should be said here that

the Imperial Japanese Navy, well-drilled and well-prepared in the meantime

135
Peattie and Evans, pp. 20-22.
136
Ibid., p. 23.
137
Ibid., p. 24.

61
 and led by competent professionals, completely obliterated the Chinese fleet

of superior ships. Japan won a great victory with the Treaty of Shimonoseki

on 17 April 1895, earning Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, Shantung

Peninsula and Port Arthur along with a huge war indemnity of 200,000,000

Taels.138 There were also very important tactical lessons. The line ahead was

vindicated as the most effective and easy to control formation in battle. The

Canet guns of Sankeikan-class ships did not score any hits while all the

damage was done by medium-caliber quick firing guns raining high-

explosive shells which blasted the superstructures of the Chinese ships,

decimating the crews and destroying their weapons. However, the thick armor

of Chinese battleships proved to be impervious to the Japanese shells; while

their big guns took a heavy toll on the lightly built Japanese ships, almost

sinking the Japanese flagship Matsushima. Yamamoto would angrily claim

that the newly established (1890) Imperial Diet had sent the navy into battle

“naked, sword in hand, against an enemy shielded by heavy armor.”139 At the

siege of Wei-Hai-Wei, where the remnants of the Chinese fleet had taken

refuge, only by a combination of heavy long-range land artillery and torpedo

raids into the harbor could the armored Chinese ships be despatched. All

these lessons were thoroughly assimilated in the naval college for the next

and ultimate struggle which lay ahead in Japan’s ascent into a world power:

war with Russia.

Japan’s victory at Shimonoseki was shockingly scarred when the

tripartite intervention of Germany, France and Russia on 23 April 1895

forced Japan to give up Shantung and Port Arthur on threat of war.

138
Wright, p. 106.
139
Peattie and Evans, pp. 47-49.

62
 Possessing neither a great fleet nor an army sufficiently equipped to cope

with the ringleader, Russia, Japan was forced to comply, learning a lesson in

diplomacy that it should never forget. Two years later, Russia forced the

“lease” of Port Arthur for “99 years” from China, while in 1898 Germany

took over Tsingtao in Shantung in retribution for the murder of German

missionaries. With Russia in the ice-free Port Arthur and building a powerful

new battle squadron of eight battleships to station in the Far East, while the

trans-siberian railroad was stretching into Manchuria there was a very real

possibility that Korea would fall under Russian domination, presenting a

mortal threat for the security of Japan’s own home islands.140 To all Japanese,

it was clear that a war to drive Russia out of Manchuria was inevitable.

Moreover, this war ultimately would be decided by the domination Northern

China Sea with a clash of two navies. Thus, the decade between 1895-1905

was to be the period when Japan restructured itself as a world class naval

power to tackle Russia, the third greatest naval power on earth.

Preparations for the coming conflict were three-pronged:

technological preparation, tactical preparation and diplomatic preparation. In

1896/97, the Diet finally passed a massive new naval expansion bill to

establish Yamamoto’s long-desired battlefleet. According to his calculations,

Japan needed at least six battleships and six armored cruisers to successfully

challenge the combined force of Russia’s battle squadron in Port Arthur and

cruiser force at Vladivostok. Hence, Yamamoto’s fleet expansion plan came

to be known as the “Six-Six Fleet.” Ironically enough, the Japanese navy

financed its expansion largely with Chinese money, using the allocation from

140
Peattie and Evans, 52-53.

63
 the recently paid Chinese war indemnity.141 The first Japanese battleships, the

Fuji and Yashima, were in fact not part of the 1896 bill, having been ordered

from Britain on the eve of the war with China in 1894. They were powerful

units at 12,500 tons, with four 12-inch and ten 6-inch guns, five torpedo tubes

and an 18-inch Harvey steel armor belt. Their speed was 18 knots. Four very

similar battleships, the Shikishima, Hatsuse, Asahi and Mikasa followed

them, all ordered from Britain and entering service by 1902.

Of these the Mikasa is the last surviving battleship of her period,

being preserved as a monument to the Japanese navy in Yokosuka. When

completed she was the most powerful battleship in the world, weighing

15,000 tons, armed with four 12-inch and fourteen 6-inch guns with a 9-inch

Krupp steel armor belt for a speed of 18 knots.142 Four of the six armored

cruisers, the Asama, Iwate, Izumo and Tokiwa, ordered from the Armstrong

yard, were among the most powerful examples of their kind in the world.

They weighed 10,000 tons, each carrying four 8-inch and fourteen 6-inch

guns, four torpedo tubes, and a 6.9-inch steel armor belt for a speed of 20

knots. Their main armament worked with electric power, firing up to seven

shells a minute. Of the other two, the Yakumo was ordered from Germany and

the Azuma from France so as not to disturb the diplomatic balance but their

design and statistics were the same as British-built ships.

On the eve of hostilities, the Diet approved the purchase another two

powerful armored cruisers built in Italy for Argentina. Named the Kasuga and

the Nisshin, these 7600-ton ships were designed to act as second-class

battleships when necessary, carrying a heavy battery of one 10-inch, two 8-

141
Peattie and Evans, pp. 57-59.
142
Jentschura, Jung and Mickel, pp. 16-19.

64
 inch and fourteen 6-inch guns along with four torpedo tubes.143 To complete

the fleet with the necessary scout and torpedo attack forces eight new

protected cruisers, sixty torpedo boats and fifty five new torpedo boat

destroyers were acquired. Three of the cruisers and sixteen destroyers being

purchased from Britain while the rest were built at home, an act which

boomed the Japanese shipbuilding industry.144

While the navy was growing into a true battlefleet, tactical

preparations gained pace. Two men dominated the tactical and strategic

experiments at the staff college, Yamaya Tanin and Akiyama Saneyuki.

Yamaya was the foremost gunnery and torpedo specialist of the navy.

Through meticulous studies of the Sino-Japanese War and the British naval

maneuvers of 1901 he developed an intricate maneuver to circle around the

head-on approaching enemy fleet and catch it at its weakest point, when it

was in column formation and only able to use forward or rear guns while

Japanese ships were arrayed in line, presenting a full broadside. Due to its

resemblance to the letter “T” when both fleets were so deployed, this tactic

was named “Capping the T” and became the worldwide orthodoxy in naval

tactics due to its annihilating success at Tsushima.145

While Yamaya developed action evolutions, Akiyama introduced a

vital component of success to the Japanese navy, Semmu or logistics. As he

pointed out, a navy’s success depended on the quality and suitability of its

ammunition to the tactics, the avaliability of enough stockpiles, repair

143
Jentschura, Jung and Mickel, pp. 72-75.
144
Peattie and Evans, p. 62.
145
Ibid., pp. 75-77. This maneuver became a Turkish proverb as “Tiye almak”, meaning utterly
humiliating somebody.

65
 facilities and the critical issue of fuel.146 In the field of ammunition the

Japanese naval industry achieved an important breakthrough when chemist

Shimose Masachika developed in 1892 a new and powerful derivative of

smokeless powder named after himself. To take full advantage of Shimose

powder’s blast effect, Admiral Ijuin Goro designed a thin-skinned new shell,

called the furoshiki, with a special impact fuse, which was specifically

tailored for the Japanese preference of blasting the upperworks of enemy

ships.147 Meanwhile, a frantic effort was made to obtain and home produce

the latest optical devices for range finding and the wireless telegraph, which

ushered a revolution in communications, vital for Yamaya’s accuracy and

strict fleet discipline required for the “T” tactic. With the declaration of the

Russo-Japanese War in February 1904, the Japanese navy was the first fleet

in the world fully equipped with wireless sets.148

Final and perhaps the most vital aspect of the Japanese preparations

for war was the diplomatic one, culminating in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance

of 1902. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance is greatly important not only in the

history of the Far East, but in the diplomatic history of the twentieth century

as a whole. It was Britain’s official admission that it could no longer sustain

naval superiority against combined adversaries alone, ending its “splendid

isolation” of the nineteenth century.149 The immediate reason for the Anglo-

Japanese Alliance was the common fear of Russia’s growing ambitions in the

Far East and its increasing naval buildup in the region. However, the long-

term expectations of Britain and Japan were greatly different. Britain’s aim

146
Peattie and Evans, p. 72.
147
Ibid., p. 63.
148
Ibid., p. 79, 84.
149
Sprout, p. 352.

66
 was to minimize the Royal Navy’s Far Eastern commitments through an ally

to gather all available major units in the North Sea against an alarmingly

growing Imperial German Navy, while Japan expected Britain to keep a

squadron at least equal to Russia’s in the region. Although these incompatible

demands was to undermine the alliance in the long run, in the short run the

treaty proved to be vastly advantageous to Japan. It brought prestige through

connection to the world’s leading naval power thus deterring a possible

intervention by a third country and provided critical support in technology

transfer and solved the navy’s critical fuel problem. The Japanese islands are

devoid of any good quality coal and the poor lump coal extracted required a

complex processing to make it suitable for use in warships. In 1904, as the

Japanese industry was unable to produce high calorie coal, the navy’s only

option was to import good Cardiff coal from Britain. With the conclusion of

the alliance, Britain leased half a million tons of coal to supplement Japan’s

still insufficient stockpile of 650,000 tons, thus ruling out any possibility of a

fuel shortage during the war.150

Following the escalating tensions over the status of Manchuria, Japan

severed diplomatic relations on 6 February 1904. Two days later, The

Japanese fleet under command of Admiral Heihachiro Togo, made a pre-

emptive strike to the Russian Far Eastern Squadron of seven battleships and

three protected cruisers at Port Arthur by raiding the harbor at night with

torpedo craft. Although most of the torpedoes missed, three found their mark,

heavily damaging the two most powerful units of the fleet, the battleships

Retvizan and Tsesarevitch, along with the cruiser Pallada. Togo attempted a

150
Peattie and Evans, pp. 65-67.

67
 bombardment of ships laying in the inner harbor, but was repulsed by shore

batteries. At the same time, the escort squadron covering the troops of the

Korean expeditionary army forced the Russian cruiser Varyag to scuttle

herself at Chemulpo.151

In March, the energetic and able admiral Stepan Makarov took

command of the Russian Far Eastern Fleet, revitalizing morale and improving

discipline. The aggressive Makarov was intent on waging battle on Togo as

soon as his damaged units were repaired. However, disaster struck the

Russians on 13 April. Makarov’s flagship the Petropavlovsk hit a Japanese

mine laid to the harbor’s entrance and sank, while the Russian Admiral

rushed to support a destroyer flotilla. Makarov went down with his ship and

took Russian hopes for a successful engagement with himself. After

Makarov’s death, his replacement Admiral Vilhelm Vitgeft, chose to stay in

the harbor and wait for the relief force of the Baltic Fleet warships under

preparation to be dispatched to the Far East. For Togo, the situation was

becoming increasingly dangerous as he lost two of his irreplaceable

battleships to an offensive Russian minefield on 15 May. If the Baltic Fleet

was able to complete its odyssey and link up with the Far Eastern fleet, the

situation of the Japanese would become critical against a much larger

force.152

In this critical moment, the Army came to the rescue. Field Marshal

Nogi Maresuke’s Third Army was landed on 1 August to lay siege to Port

Arthur. In order not to be destroyed in port, Vitgeft attempted to break the

blockade and escape to Vladivostok on 10 August only to be intercepted by

151
Wilson, p. 250-264.
152
Ibid., pp. 273-279.

68
 Togo in what later was called the Battle of the Yellow Sea. The Japanese

opened fire from an unheard distance of 11,000 meters by fully exploiting

their long range precision gunnery tactics. Togo attempted to “cap the T”

more than once, but by skillful maneuvering Vitgeft managed to evade him

and almost made his escape. But using his superior speed Togo caught him

once again. This time a lucky hit found the bridge of the Russian flagship

Tsesarevitch, killing Vitgeft and all his staff. The death of its commander

threw the Russian fleet into such confusion that it dispersed thereafter: the

damaged flagship, two cruisers and four destroyers steamed to neutral ports to

be interned, while the remaining ships returned back to Port Arthur, where

they were sunk at anchor by the Japanese army siege guns in December. With

the surrender of the Port Arthur garrison on 2 January 1905, the first phase of

the war ended.153

While Togo was busy with the elimination of the Port Arthur fleet, the

Vladivostok Cruiser Squadron of three armored and one protected cruiser

conducted a successful raiding campaign on the Japan Sea, sinking three

Japanese army transports and eighteen merchantmen. Initially frustrated by

bad weather, a Japanese armored cruiser squadron of four ships under

Admiral Kamimura Hikonojo finally caught the Russian raiders on 14

August, sinking the Rurik and damaging the rest. The Vladivostok cruisers

thereafter were bottled in their port and did not take an active part in the

war.154

On 15 October 1904, the main body of the Baltic Fleet, now renamed

the Second Pacific Squadron, weighed anchor from Libau to start its epic

153
Wilson, pp. 286-297, 311-314.
154
Ibid., pp. 301-308.

69
 journey to the Far East. Commander of the fleet Admiral Zinovy

Rojhestvensky rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived at Madagascar on

January 1905, where he learned the news of the fall of Port Arthur. The older

and smaller units of the Baltic Fleet were summarily sent via the Suez Canal

under Admiral Nebogatov to compensate for the lost ships of the Far Eastern

Fleet. The two squadrons met in April off Vietnam and proceeded towards

the Japan Sea with the intention of breaking through into Vladivostok.

Rojhestvensky had nominally eleven battleships, three armored cruisers and

five protected cruisers; but in reality only the four new 13,500-ton units of

Borodino class and the 12,700-ton Osliabia were of fighting value, the rest of

the fleet was a worthless collection of antiquated ironclads from the 1880s

and coast defense ships.155 After the destruction of the Port Arthur Squadron,

Togo used his time to the best effect; repairing his ships, resting and drilling

his crews. The Japanese were constantly informed about the whereabouts of

the approaching Baltic Fleet thanks to their British allies and their own

widespread spy network. Through the information he received, Togo

concluded that Rojhestvensky would attempt to cross from the Tsushima

strait and took position accordingly. He was proved right when the Japanese

cruisers spotted the Russians on 26 May 1905.

What ensued the following day became the greatest naval battle of

history since Trafalgar a full century earlier; and proved to be equally

decisive. Togo twice “capped the T” of the Russian Fleet with almost

textbook precision and the accurate Japanese gunnery with furoshiki shells

obliterated three of the four Borodinos along with the Osliablia during a

155
Sondhaus, p. 190.

70
 battle, which lasted into nightfall. Through the night Japanese torpedo craft

hunted the remnants of the Russian Fleet, the battle ending with Admiral

Nebogatov’s surrender aboard the only remaining Borodino class, the Orel,

and three old battleships in the morning. The badly wounded Admiral

Rojhestvensky was captured aboard a Russian destroyer.156

Tsushima came as the result of a three decades-long period of

intelligent decisions, resolute will and dedicated professionalism on behalf of

Japanese policymakers and naval officers. The single-minded import and

assimilation of the British naval professionalism, correct investments to

create a steadily developing naval framework and encouragement of

innovative thinking had resulted in a fleet which erased the greatest

landpower of the earth from the list of first rank naval powers for the next

fifty years, suffering 110 dead and wounded while inflicting 5000 dead and

and 6000 prisoners in doing so.

The war itself ended in October with the Treaty of Portsmouth with

U.S meditation. Japan achieved all its war aims, repulsing Russia from

Manchuria and Korea and added the unexpected prize of South Sakhalin,

conquered following Tsushima.157 The triumph of the Imperial Japanese Fleet

had profound implications in the world, with Japan achieving great power

status, displacing Russia as the fourth greatest naval power and becoming the

premier power in the Far East. The ensuing decade witnessed a skyrocketing

of Japanese industrial production and overseas trade. The Japanese merchant

navy became the third greatest in the world by 1914. Similarly, while Japan

was barely able to produce enough high tensile steel for small warships and

156
Wilson, pp. 331-360.
157
Peattie and Evans, p. 124, 133.

71
 importing almost all big caliber guns along with sophisticated equipment

from aboard in 1901, by 1915 some of the biggest and most powerful

dreadnought type battleships in the world were being fully produced by

Japanese means. Tsushima was the ultimate vindicator of battlefleet’s role in

establishing the status of an expansionist maritime state as well. Japan’s

ascendancy and ambitions in the Pacific, however, was to increasingly bring

it into conflict with a similarly expansionist United States in the region,

leading to a cataclysmic showdown with the superpower in 1941.158

When the the nineteenth century started for the Ottoman Navy with

the end of the War against Russia in 1829, the age of the Industrial

Revolution was dawning for all naval powers in the western hemisphere. First

to come was the revolutionary effect of steam power with the unprecedented

freedom of mobility and tactical flexibility it provided. The effect of steam

power in international relations was to be partly sobering: previously

unnavigable shores and waterways were now open to European aggression

and exploitation, as seen by the French conquest of Algeria (1830), Anglo-

Burmese (1824-26) and Anglo-Chinese Wars (1839-42).159

On continental Europe, the effect of naval steam power was no less

revolutionary as the Crimean War demonstrated. It was due to the limitless

freedom of movement provided by their steam powered fleets that the allies

were able to threaten the vast Russian Empire at their chosen locations, thus

preventing the Czar from concentrating his forces and leading to the eventual

158
Peattie and Evans, pp. 185-187.
159
Daniel Headrick “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and Expansion of European Colonial
Empires in the Nineteenth Century”, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 51, no. 2, Technology and
War (Jun.,1979), pp. 235-248,

72
 Russian defeat.160 In the American Civil War, the Union with its superior

navy was able to divide the Confederate heartland in two along the Mississipi

River axis, thus dooming the Southern cause, while the blockade it applied

slowly strangled Confederate economy.161 Examples can be multiplied, only

to show more elaborately the profound impact of the strategic mobility

revolution provided by naval steam power.

Accompanying the propulsion revolution was the revolution in

firepower. At the Battle of Navarino, warships were still firing roundshot

from cast iron smoothbore guns as they had been doing for three centuries.

Twenty-seven years later, off the Crimean Peninsula, it was the explosive

shell which decided the duels between Russian fortifications and the Allied

fleet.162 Clearly, the wooden warship was defenseless against a foe properly

equipped with incendiary ammunition. Before the end of the Crimean War,

the warship protected by metal armor entered the scene and shortly after the

peace of Paris (1856), the oceangoing armored ship made its debut. The

introduction of the ironclad triggered a race between gun and armor, which

resulted in the abandonment of wood altogether as a warship construction

material and its replacement by iron and steel, the adoption of large caliber

artillery to penetrate ever thickening armor; installation of those large guns

into revolving armored turrets for efficient use and the disappearance of

masts and sails both to clear turrets’ line of sight and to ensure the stability of

the hull. In the meantime, the naval mine and self-propelled torpedo appeared

160
Lambert, Andrew. “Introduction” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905,
edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), p. 10
161
Sondhaus, pp. 77-86.
162 Jonathan Grant “The Sword of the Sultan: Ottoman Arms Imports 1854-1914”, The Journal of Military
History, no.66, (Jan 2002), p. 10.

73
as a deadly threat to the armored capital ship and the radical French naval

strategy, the Jeune Ecole, influenced navies worldwide with its propagation

of torpedo boat warfare and commerce raiding using the modern cruiser

instead of the traditional fleet battle. In the end, the battleship emerged

triumphant with the application of improved machine technology and quick-

firing artillery, and with the integration of the torpedo boat-destroyer into the

battlefleet. By the early twentieth century, the battleship was the pinnacle of

all industrial revolution technologies, including communication in form of the

wireless telegraph. The natural result of the naval transformation was the

monopolization of naval defense and power projection ability by the

industrialized Western nations.

For the first time in history, being a naval power was equal to being a

great power. Without the necessary industrial framework and know-how, it

was impossible to build and man modern warships. States outside the

Western world were left with two options: either investing in naval industry

infrastructure or developing a dependence on the armaments market of

industrialised nations. This redefinition of naval self-sufficence demonstrates

its dramatic and crucial effect nowhere better than the opposing cases of

China-Japan and the Ottoman Empire-Russian Empire. From the 1860s,

Japan and Russia followed the “infrastructure first” approach and after

suffering an initial but short term technological disadvantage against their

opponents, they quickly closed the gap with their soundly funded native

industries and overwhelmingly surpassed them by the 1890s; when the

investments started to bear full fruit. By contrast, the Ottoman Empire and

China built expensive fleets of the latest model ironclads at European yards

74
from the 1860s to the 1880s and funded them mostly with foreign debt. The

superiority they enjoyed was short-lived. With the catastrophical global

financial collapse of 1873, the already shaky treasuries of each country was

crushed under the weight of the previous years' debt and lost their ability to

maintain effective naval forces.

75
 CHAPTER III

THE OTTOMAN QUEST FOR NAVAL RENOVATION 1830-1897

The modernization of the Ottoman navy went as far back as the reign

of Sultan Selim III (1789-1807) and the Nizâm-ı Cedîd reform initiative.

Selim III’s plans to upgrade the technology of the navy extensively and to

increase the building capacity of the fleet were upheld by his successor

Mahmud II (r. 1807-1839). Nevertheless, the Napoléonic Wars, which

continued almost uninterruptedly from 1798 to 1815, the 1807-1812 Russian

War, as well as the Greek Revolt, prevented these reforms from yielding

rapid results. The simultaneous battles culminated in the loss of lives,

particularly among sailors who were trained in the course of these wars.

Finally, following the demobilization of non-Muslim sailors of Greek origin

during the Greek Revolt, the Ottoman navy suffered gravely from the loss of

manpower.163 The Ottoman State’s reconsideration of the naval

modernization program coincided with the period following the Edirne Treaty

of 1830. The changes that occurred in the ensuing years were to determine the

basic outlines of the approach to the modernization of the navy during the

reform age.

The fundamental trends in this period were: technological or

“hardware” modernization, manpower or “software” modernization, and

administrative reorganization.

163
Ersan Baş, Çeşme Navarin, Sinop Baskınları ve Sonuçları (İstanbul: Piri Reis Araştırma Merkezi,
2007), pp. 118-122, 150.

76
 Technological innovation was given the top priority initially. In fact,

the lion’s share of the naval budget was allocated to the renewal of

technological material. This trend reached its zenith during the reign of

Abdülaziz (1861-1876). Openly undermining the training of specialized

personnel, this policy would eventually end in a fiasco for the Ottoman fleet’s

campaign in the Russian War of 1877-78. Coupled with the financial

difficulties in Abdülhamid II’s reign, the legacy of this war would lead

Abdülhamid II to pursue the opposite policy in his naval undertakings.

The modernization of naval personnel was a twofold problem, solving

the manpower crisis at once and training a new generation of officers and

mechanics with the skills necessary to use the newest technology. Only with

the implementation of conscription in the 1840s that the manpower problem

was somewhat alleviated. Meanwhile, the Ottoman navy’s initial approach to

the question of qualified technicians was traditional; in fact, a method similar

to the recruitment of European military engineers and gunners to the army in

the classical era. However, the extent of the disadvantages of this system was

observed clearly in the fiasco of the 1877-78 war and consequently,

Abdülhamid II would choose to focus on schools that could train technicians.

The third and final trend was the reorganization of the navy within the

bureaucratic chain. Traditionally, since the centuries prior to the Tanzimat

reforms, the Ottoman Imperial Navy had been marked by a combination that

convened seasonally with ships from Garp Ocakları (Barbary States), Bey

Gemileri –ships locally built or equipped by governors of Kapudan Pasha

Provinces in the Aegean Archipelago– and the Sefine-i Hümayûn (Sultan’s

ships) stationed in İstanbul. After a long period of trial and error, the Ottoman

77
 Imperial Navy was finally transformed into a unified fleet administered from

a single centralized unit under the auspices of the Ottoman Ministry of

Marine in İstanbul in 1867.164

Thus, although a considerably large fleet was created in line with the

vision to re-dominate the seas during the reign of Abdülaziz, the naval

rebuilding program, which played a significant role in the collapse of the

Ottoman treasury, ended with the dethronement of Sultan Abdülaziz. During

the reign of Abdülhamid II, the assignments of the navy were largely

circumscribed and through the influence of the Jeune Ecole strategic school,

which marked the 1880s, its tasks were redefined in terms of coastal

defense.165 In a complex web of financial crisis, a dilemma of land and naval

armament priorities, corruption and stagnation; the Ottoman Navy ended the

the nineteenth century in a far different situation than just two decades earlier.

A Navy in a State of Chaos 1827-1847

By the end of the Greek Revolt, the Ottoman Navy had been defeated

in the last momentous battle of the Age of Sail and had greatly suffered from

the loss of material and manpower. During the Battle of Navarino (27

October 1827), three ships-of-the-line, thirteen frigates, seventeen corvettes

and four brigs of the Imperial Navy (Donanma-i Hümayûn) had been sunk.

The majority of the 6000 sailors that were killed were mostly members of the

Ottoman fleet.166 In the 1828-29 Russian War that soon ensued, the Russian

Navy had absolute superiority over the Ottoman fleet, which was

164
Gencer, pp. 15-16.
165
Şakir Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması (Ph.d diss., Erciyes University, 2002), p.
44.
166
Baş, p. 145

78
 immobilized due to lack of crew, and the Russians were able to send

reinforcements to the armies in the campaign in the Balkans without

disturbance.167 Following the war, which ended in disaster for the Ottomans,

while Mahmud II sought to create a new army, he also took measures to

revitalize the navy. There were three major aims standing in the way of the

program he initiated and was upheld during the Tanzimat period: First,

building new units that paralleled the technological level of the great powers,

especially that of Russia to replace lost or old ships; second, to restructure the

crew pool that had entirely collapsed; and third, to revive the Naval College.

The implemented methods and ideas yielded various consequences.

Technological Renewal

Technology transfer was the most easily resolved problem. During the

reign of Sultan Mahmud II, various fleets across the world were comprised of

wooden and sail propelled ships-of-the-line that were armed with muzzle

loading guns at various levels of decks; on broadsides, a system that

traditionally had been upheld in the last three hundred years. The 120, 74 and

80-gun ships-of-the-line, the plans of which were brought particularly by

French shipbuilders during the Nizâm-ı Cedîd era and designated as the

standard at the Imperial Arsenal, were considered to be some of the best

existing warships of their kind.168 The resources required for the shipbuilding

that were available to the Empire were famed across Europe, both in terms of

quality and quantity. In fact, in his memoir-cum-travel journal A Residence at

167
Sondhaus, p. 17
168
Zorlu, Tuncay; “Selim III and Ottoman Seapower” in Logbook of the Ottoman Navy: Ships,
Legends, Sailors, edited by Emir Yener and Ekrem Işın (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009), pp. 37-38.

79
 Constantinople, R. Walsh, chaplain to the British Embassy, who visited the

Imperial Arsenal in 1821, observed the arrival of high-quality timber from the

shores of the Black Sea and the Anatolian provinces near the capital, resin

and tar from island of Negroponte (Eğriboz) and a number of other provinces,

flax from Samsun for the production of ropes and sails, and gunpowder from

Salonica and Gallipoli. According to Walsh, plenty of metal necessary for

cannon founding was extracted across the entire Empire and that both the

arsenal and the foundries rivaled those of Portsmouth and Woolwich. More

than 500 workers and foremen, including the prisoners at the Arsenal

dungeons, constituted the workforce.169

Considering the numerous dissertations that point to the critical

momentum that arsenals of the Royal Navy, as the largest industrial complex

of the period, brought to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the kind

of potential that the Imperial Arsenal held for the Ottoman Empire might

make room for some interesting future research in terms of the Ottoman

industrialization.170 In fact, this large industrial complex in Istanbul gave birth

to the 128-gun ship-of-the-line Mahmudiye, which was built in 1829 and held

the title as the largest battleship in the world over the remaining 25 years of

the Age of Sail. In terms of both her place in collective memory and her

significance as a singular example of the construction and equipment trends

in the reform-age Ottoman battleships, the Mahmudiye has been the subject of

numerous articles and monographs. In this work, the she will be scrutinized

briefly, yet in comparative perspective with the Russian reports.

169
Gencer, pp. 110-111.
170
For a thorough history of the Royal Navy dockyards and their role in Industrial Revolution, see
Jonathan Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989).

80
 The Mahmudiye was a member of the largest battlefleet unit, known in

European naval terminology as “First Rate” (fr. Premier Rang, it. Primo

Rango). As such a classification did not exist in the Ottoman navy, First Rate

ships-of-the-line were referred to as “Üç Ambarlı” or three-decker, due to the

presence of three complete gundecks below the main deck. During battles, the

three-decker ships-of-the-line functioned as a floating fortress and as the

admiral ships, they served as the rallying point for other ships of the fleet.171

There were three three-decker ships-of-the-line for the traditional ranks that

corresponded to that of admiral in the Ottoman Navy in the Age of Sail:

Kapudâne (Admiral of the Fleet), Riyâle (Vice-Admiral) and Patrona (Rear-

Admiral).

At the time of the Greek Revolt (1821), the three-deckers of the

Ottoman Navy included the 47-meter long, 122-gun Selimiye (launched in

1798) built during the Nizâm-ı Cedîd era by French chief engineer Lebrun

and the slightly shorter, 110-gun Mesudiye (launched in 1798), as well as the

gigantic, 130-gun Mahmudiye launched in 1814.172 However, the Mahmudiye,

which impressed chaplain Walsh while the Ottoman Navy campaigned

against the Greek rebels in 1821, had a faulty construction and was thus

unstable and not fit for duty. Hence, after having remained in service merely

for eight years, she was decommissioned and dismantled in 1822.173

Following the Battle of Navarino, a decision was made to construct a longer

flagship equipped with heavy guns to supplement the rapidly aging Selimiye

and Mesudiye. The new battleship was to bear the name of her predecessor.

171
Tucker, p. 3-4. Hacer Bulgurcuoğlu (master’s thesis, Mimar Sinan University, 2004), p. 9.
172
Bostan, p. 200.
173
Bulgurcuoğlu, pp. 40-41.

81
 Launched on Sunday, 31 December 1828, the new Mahmudiye was

the work of two Muslim shipbuilders, Chief Engineer Mehmet Efendi and

Architect Mehmet Kalfa, who had been trained under French engineers

responsible for the modernization of the navy during the reign of Selim III.174

The admiralty model of the ship currently preserved at the Istanbul Naval

Museum reveals that a rounded stern and bow form were used in its design to

provide resistance against raking fire.175 Hence, the new Mahmudiye had a

much higher durability in comparison with the two other three-deckers at

hand. Yet what made the ship truly spectacular were its dimensions. The

ship had an overall length of 214.8 kadem (feet), a breadth of 59.8 kadem, a

hold of 29 kadem, a draught of 28.3 kadem, as well as a deep load of 5553

tons. The crew consisted of 1280 officers, seamen and marines divided into

eleven companies.176 Considering the three-deckers of other fleets of the

period, which were built at a maximum overall length of 50-55 meters, the

overall length of the Mahmudiye, which corresponds to roughly 67 meters in

the metric system, is rather striking. The length and breadth were used to

support the unconventionally designed battery of 128 guns. According to a

Russian intelligence report of the period, rather than a mixed battery

comprised of 32- 24- and 18-pound long guns, she was armed with a

homogenous gun battery composed entirely of 32-pound long guns.177 This

meant that compared with its Russian and other European counterparts,

Mahmudiye had twice the broadside weight.

174
Zorlu “Selim III and Ottoman Seapower”, p. 42.
175
This model is registered to Istanbul Naval Museum inventory as Db. No. 1991.
176
Hacer Bulgurcuoğlu, Efsane Gemi Mahmudiye Kalyonu (İstanbul: Piri Reis Araştırma Merkezi,
2009), p. 44.
177
Morskoy Sbornik, Saint Petersburg 1851.

82
 The armament of Mahmudiye can be regarded as the epitome of a

trend that the Ottoman navy developed in the Age of Sail. The trend in

question, on the other hand, can be evaluated as the consequence of the poor

marksmanship of Ottoman naval gunners. Throughout the eighteenth century,

Ottoman ships-of-the-line were equipped with four or eight immense 112-

pounder guns that would often throw granite cannonballs. In the course of a

battle, poor marksmanship could be compensated for the destruction caused

by these guns even with a few hits.178 Considering the past Ottoman gunnery

practices, it would thus be plausible to argue that the embarrassing state of

Ottoman gunnery during the Greek Revolt and the Russian War may have

instigated the radical method in the armament of Mahmudiye.179

Another theory that I would set forth is closely linked with

institutional mentality. Epitomized by Mahmudiye, the proclivity to construct

gigantic ships took root in the Ottoman Navy and reached its zenith through

the commissioning of the largest battleships of the period, such as the

ironclad Mesudiye during the monumental navy building program in Sultan

Abdülaziz’s reign. The mentality that commissioned such vessels with

complete disregard to the problems of cost or infrastructure would soon

backfire once the naval campaign in the War of 1877-78 ended in fiasco, and

would consequently lead to extreme advocacy for the commissioning of small

craft.

Among the ships-of-the-line built as part of Mahmud II’s naval

program the Mahmudiye was the first and most significant one. However, the

real weight did stay in the rebuilding of the cruiser force necessary to execute

178
Daniel Panzac “Armed Peace in the Mediterranean, 1736-39: A comparative Survey of the
Navies”, Mariner’s Mirror, 84, (1998); pp. 44-45.
179
Adolphus Slade, Kapdan Paşa (İstanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1973), p. 68.

83
 patrolling duties that constituted the major task of the navy. Between 1823

and 1839, a total of thirteen frigates and three corvettes were added to the

fleet.180 The search for technical support in the reconstruction of the cruiser

force triggered an interesting development in Ottoman diplomacy: it opened

the doors of the Ottoman world to a new state, the United States of America.

With the retribution campaigns against Garp Ocakları during the

Napoléonic Wars, the United States had entered the Mediterranean world and

particularly into the seas under Ottoman dominance.The Americans were

willing to operate on Ottoman soil; however, the Sublime Porte had not taken

their enthusiasm into consideration until the Battle of Navarino. Once the

political ties with two traditional allies, Britain and France, came to a

breaking point due to that battle, good relations with the Americans suddenly

gained importance.181 In fact, the impressive victories of the heavy frigates

and corvettes of the U.S.A. against the “invincible” Royal Navy during the

1812-15 British-American War had indicated the superior level the American

naval industry. Surely enough, this technology could be advantageous for the

Ottoman navy as well.

Finally, following a long series of deliberation and negotiation, the

Ottoman-American Treaty of Trade and Navigation was signed on 7 May

1830. Comprised of nine open articles, as well as an epilogue, the true

significance of the treaty was in a separate and secret article. Accordingly,

this article granted the Ottoman State the right to buy battleships from

American arsenals; the Ottoman state would not pay more than the amount

the U.S. Navy paid for similar vessels. Furthermore, the internationally

180
Bulgurcuoğlu, Efsane Gemi Mahmudiye Kalyonu, p. 43.
181
Gencer, p. 125.

84
 recognized, high-quality shipbuilding materials of the U.S. would be sold to

the Ottoman navy and technical support would be provided for the

construction of American-style ships at the Imperial Arsenal.182 However,

though much anticipated by Sultan Mahmud II, this secret article was not

ratified by the U.S. Senate on the premises that it conflicted with American

foreign policy.

In view of the disappointment on the part of the Ottomans and eager

not to jeopardize the new treaty because of possible tension, the U.S.A.

agreed to sell the two corvettes that carried the chargé d’affaires to

Constantinople and granted the American shipbuilders the right to enter

Ottoman service at their will.183 Hence, entering the service of the Ottoman

navy, three Americans served for an extended period of time and made a

significant impact on both the finalization of the Ottoman technology in the

Age of Sail and the integration of steamships into the Ottoman naval power.

These individuals were Henry Eckford, Charles Ross and Foster Rhodes.

As one of the highly renowned shipbuilders of New York, Henry

Eckford recognized the offer of the Ottoman Empire as an opportunity to get

himself out of a financial crisis. In 1831, he traveled aboard the 16-gun

corvette United States, which he personally had built, to join the U.S. mission

to Constantinople.184 Upon arriving, the United States was sold to the

Ottoman Navy and the name was changed to Mesir-i Ferah as Eckford

handed the letter of trust to the Reisü’l-küttâb (foreign secretary).

Unfortunately, since Eckford had to return to the States due to the illness that

would lead to his death in November 1832, the Empire could not benefit

182
Gencer, p. 126.
183
Ibid., p. 127.
184
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 1.

85
 sufficiently from his skills. Still, during his service in Constantinople, he was

able to build one schooner and had begun the construction of a 74-gun ship-

of-the-line as well as a large frigate. British traveler Charles McFarlane, on

the other hand, argues that Eckford was insulted by the Ottoman bureaucracy

and was not paid his dues.185

When Eckford returned to his country, he sent his friend and talented

shipwright Foster Rhodes of Long Island to the Ottoman state as a

replacement. As noted in the memoirs of McFarlane, Rhodes was a cunning

man with a strong will; he had quickly learned that the only way to survive

the intrigues of the Mahmud II era Ottoman bureaucracy was to be in direct

contact with the Sultan himself. He would uncover the frauds of the pashas

who tried to impede his work, and by threatening to divulge their secrets to

the sultan and blackmailing them, he would prevent these men from meddling

in his business. Furthermore, he had the full support of the formidable

Kaptan-ı Derya Çengeloğlu Tahir Pasha.186

Rhodes had a lasting impact on the Ottoman naval technology and

added the best cruisers, namely the American-type frigates and corvettes, to

the inventory of the Arsenal. The five 64-gun “super frigates” built during

Rhodes’ time were designed in compliance with the U.S. blueprints. These

vessels had a length of 175 feet between perpendiculars, a breadth of 45 feet,

a hold of 14 feet and 4 inches, a drought of 22 feet, and a weight of 1700

tons. Equipped with thirty four 32-pound long guns on the gundeck and thirty

30-pound short guns on the main deck, a good example of these versatile

warships is the Nizamiye, which was built in 1837 and sunk during the Battle

185
Gencer, pp. 128-129.
186
Ibid., p. 129. Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 1.

86
 of Sinop.187 Throughout Çengeloğlu Tahir Pasha’s post as Kapudan Pasha

(1831-37) and until Mahmud II’s death, Rhodes had the opportunity to work

productively. However, following Sultan Abdülmecit’s accession to the

throne and the proclamation of the Tanzimat, the “British Party” led by

Mehmet Reşit Pasha came to power. Thus, possibly through the influence of

the British foreign policy, which still had cold relations with the U.S., the

Ottoman-American naval collaboration came to an end. Left without a patron,

Rhodes soon had to resign; the qualified American workers and foremen

employed at the Arsenal followed suit. Although attempts were made to

revive the bilateral relations after 1848, not much was accomplished.188

Despite all, the process of the American-Ottoman technology transfer that

took place between 1830 and 1839 opened a new door in Ottoman diplomacy

and generated a significant leap in the technological reinforcement of the

navy.

A new element that was added to the Ottoman Navy in the course of

Mahmud II’s naval program was steam power, which would yield

revolutionary results in the long run. Closely pursuing the technological

innovations of the period at an institutional level had become the rule of

thumb since the Nizâm-ı Cedid era. At the time, steam power was merely

beginning to be noticed in Europe, yet Sultan Selim III had attempted to

import steam engines from Great Britain to pump the waters at the docks.189

In light of his double-sided experiences with steam warships during the Greek

187
Mark Lardas, American Heavy Frigates 1797-1826 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003), p. 36
188
Gencer, p. 130
189
Danışman, Günhan. “Anadolu Enerji Teknolojileri Tarihçesi ve 18. Yüzyıl Sonunda Osmanlı
Yönetiminin Sanayileşmede Kaçırdığı Fırsatın Yeniden Değerlendirilmesi” in Türk Teknoloji Tarihi,
edited by Emre Dölen and Mustafa Kaçar (İstanbul: Türk Bilim Tarihi Kurumu Yayınları, 2003), pp.
100-103.

87
 Revolt, Çengeloğlu Tahir Pasha supported the purchase of auxiliary steamers

that would supplement the sailing battle line in particular. However, it was

impossible to pursue a planned steamship project amidst the ongoing state of

war and chaos. Exactly at this juncture, the Swift, a small British steamship,

arrived in Constantinople on 20 May 1828. Thirty-two meters long, this small

ship was originally built as a sailer in 1801 and in 1822, she was equipped

with a single cylinder engine and paddle wheels to be converted into a 139-

ton steamer that could cruise at 5 knots.190 The official version of its

acquisition relates that, sold to a consortium of Armenian merchants by her

Captain Mr. Kelly, the ship was offered to Sultan Mahmud as a gift.

However, a more probable explanation is that the ship was sent as a gift to the

sultan to soften British-Ottoman relations, which were on the verge of

collapse after the Battle of Navarino.

Duly named the Sür’at (Speed), Swift became the first steamship of

the Ottoman Navy. Though unarmed at first, she was later armed with two

small salute guns and was put into service as the sultanic yacht.191 The

following year, Tahir Pasha purchased the Scottish built Hylton Joliffe from

his own purse and added the vessel to the fleet. Renamed Sagir, the ship was

38-meters long, weighed 300 tons and could navigate at a speed of 6 knots.

She was also armed with two small salute guns.192 Used as a tug for ships-of-

the-line in the last stages of the Russian War, Sagir was the first vessel to be

propelled by steam in the Ottoman Navy.

Two individuals strongly supported the modest beginnings of the

steam age in the Ottoman Navy: Çengeloğlu Tahir Pasha and Foster Rhodes.

190
Gencer, p. 116. Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 232.
191
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 3.
192
Ibid., p. 232.

88
 However, according to Rhodes’ observation during a conversation at the

launch of the frigate Nusretiye on 26 May 1836, steamships were regarded as

little more than “amusing toys” in the eyes of Sultan Mahmud II, who

directed the naval program. This view was to change the following year

when, while the Sultan was aboard, the frigate Feyziye was saved from

running ashore in a storm in the Marmara Sea when two steamers, one British

and one Austrian, came to the rescue at the last minute. Sultan Mahmud, who

witnessed firsthand the potential of steam power, ordered the construction of

“a series” of steamships.193

The first steamship to be built in the Ottoman shipyards, Eser-i Hayır,

was launched on 24 November 1837 from the Aynalıkavak shipyard. The

vessel was 39 meters long and weighed 285 tons; the Scottish built boilers

allowed the ship to navigate at 6 knots. Except for two salute guns, she was

unarmed. In 1838 and 1839, two more steamers, the Mesir-i Bahri and Tahir-

i Bahri were launched respectively. The 48 meter-long 275-ton Mesir-i Bahri

could cruise at 8 knots, while the 56 meter-long, 529-ton Tahir-i Bahri could

navigate at 6 knots. Both vessels were armed with six guns each and their

boilers had been manufactured in Scotland.194 All three Ottoman-made

vessels were designed by Rhodes and Charles Ross, who at the time, was the

director of the Aynalıkavak shipyard. All the building material was provided

from the local Ottoman sources. However, the insufficiency of the Ottoman

industry had required the engines to be imported from Great Britain. Rhodes

had founded a workshop for the maintenance of engines at Aynalıkavak in

1835 and had even manufactured boilers. However, the rapidly growing

193
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 1.
194
Ibid., pp. 232-233.

89
 complexity of engine technology soon outpaced the speed that the Empire

could follow.195 Consequently, the first seeds of foreign technological

dependency –with Great Britain in particular– were sown.

Rather than functioning as real warships, the first steamers built for

the Ottoman Navy served as Imperial yachts or merchant ships. The

integration of steam power into the battle fleet would take place only after

1847. Nonetheless, these five ships, which we can define as “experimental,”

provided the opportunity for both the navy and the public to get accustomed

to the new technology.

Reorganization of Personnel

While the replacement of lost materials was an easier task, the loss

of specialized personnel constituted a much bigger and unavoidable problem.

As early as the Greek Revolt, a serious manpower problem had emerged due

to the dismissal of the Greek-Ottoman sailors who traditionally had

constituted the navigation specialists of the navy. During the revolt, the

Ottomans largely had relied to press-gang, a method traditionally used also in

Europe to provide personnel for the navy. However, the efforts to draft

personnel by raiding seamen’s coffees in Constantinople did not bear much

fruit. Since hardly anything existed in the name of an Ottoman merchant fleet,

there were very few experienced sailors available. Though an attempt was

made to draft seamen from among the boatmen (kayıkçılar), their strong

resistance and the Janissary status that most possessed made this attempt

195
Langensiepen and Güleryüz., pp. 1-2.

90
 unfeasible.196 According to a detail from the memoirs of Chaplain Walsh, the

absence of sailors, which became increasingly critical, seems to have

triggered a radical change in Ottoman military mentality: appointment of

foreign sailors to the navy. While the Ottoman state was quite reluctant to use

this kind of manpower, it was nonetheless accepted out of despair. Gathered

from the taverns near Galata, sailors of Genoese, Ragusan and Maltese origin,

as well as other nationalities, were added to the naval personnel in large

numbers.197

Still, throughout the reform period, the government was determined to

train Muslim seamen. Newly restructured as a modern autocracy, the

Ottoman Empire’s numerous other institutions already were staffed

predominantly with Muslim personnel and the navy was to follow suit.The

first applicants were Muslim residents of the Marmara, Black Sea and Aegean

regions. However, the crews recruited from these regions were inadequate in

number, and they lacked the traditional habit of naval service of the Greek

personnel and their disciplining constituted yet another important problem.198

As early as 1824, Arsenal director Hüsnü Bey created a “school ship deck” in

the garden of the Arsenal and initiated the training of enlisted Muslim

soldiers.

Another source of Muslim crews was the Garp Ocakları personnel

dispatched by the beys of the North African provinces. An attempt was also

made to train naval personnel from recruits drafted for the Asâkir-i Mansûre-i

Muhammediye (Victorious Soldiers of the Prophet) army; however, none of

196
Gencer, p. 111.
197
Ibid., p. 112.
198
Tobias Heinzelmann, Cihaddan Vatan Savunmasına: Osmanlı İmpratorluğunda Genel Askerlik
Yükümlülüğü 1826-1856 (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınları, 2009), p.

91
 these initiatives bore fruit. Incidentally, it became necessary to supplement

the navigation personnel with Christian subjects again.199 Meanwhile,

although the Ottomans made an effort for the first time to recruit crew

members from among the Arab subjects living in the coastal areas of Syria

and Lebanon, this reluctant group of soldiers, who were described as

“hopeless and useless in terms of discipline and trainability,” were soon let

go.200

The draft of Christian Ottoman subjects into the navy under the term

Mariner is part of an ongoing debate regarding the development of both

compulsory military service and modern notion of citizenship in the Ottoman

Empire. What should be taken into consideration, above all, is that the

recruitment of soldiers from among the Christian subjects was not a decision

made with the state’s own volition, but rather the imposition of the numerical

disparity between the Muslim and Christian subjects of the Empire.201

Following the establishment of the Greek Kingdom in 1830 and the

normalization of the relations between the two nations, the political

environment necessary to re-recruit Greek-Ottoman soldiers to the navy

began to emerge. In fact, the non-Muslim naval personnel policy, which

entailed the recruitment of the Armenian community in Anatolia prior to

1835, began to target the Ottoman-Greek population after that date. As of

1845, a considerable number of Greeks had returned to the navy, though they

were fewer in number with respect to the period prior to the Greek Revolt.202

199
Gencer, p. 117, 119.
200
Heinzelmann, pp. 207-208.
201
Ibid., pp. 222-225.
202
Gencer, pp. 249-250.

92
 While the recruitment of adequate personnel was a concern, the

coexistence and transformation of these individuals from incompatible

backgrounds into a consistent battle force constituted a much bigger problem.

Foreign naval officers who visited the Ottoman navy in the early years of the

nineteenth century noted with bewilderment the huge discrepancy between

first-rate construction quality of vessels and the ignorance and wretched state

of the crews manning them.203

While the dismissal of the Ottoman-Greek personnel and the

annihilation of trained personnel after disastrous battles such as Navarino are

all acceptable explanations, the great difficulty in handling the enemies, such

as the Greek rebels, which were similar to pirate gangs at best, points to a

grave and chronic problem in education and discipline. Although the

comprehensive reforms of the Nizâm-ı Cedid era had a positive effect on the

development of technology, it is evident that no progress had been made in

the training of the crew and officers. Reportedly, the hastily assembled,

hybrid crews were demobilized without any record after the campaigns and,

ironically enough, caused great damage by ransacking the provisions and

equipment of their ships as they were disbanded.204 It was only after the firm

establishment of compulsory military service in the 1840s that the naval

personnel were subjected to an organized system of conscription, as well as

training.

203
Slade, pp. 98-99.
204
Gencer, p. 119.

93
 The Naval College

The third and perhaps most important problem that Sultan Mahmud II

addressed in his naval programme was the rejuvenation of the Mühendishâne-

i Bahr-i Hümayûn, the Ottoman Naval College. This first educational

institution of Western science, the establishment of which constituted a

turning point in Ottoman modernization, had a tumultuous past. Founded by

Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha and his aide Baron de Tott in a room of the

Arsenal in 1773 to augment the competence of naval officers particularly

after the Disaster of Çeşme (1770), the Mühendishâne moved to a new

building in Camialtı in 1784 with increased capacity. However, as the Russo-

Ottoman War of 1788-92 revealed, the desired results had not been

attained.205

In the course of the Nizâm-ı Cedîd program, the reformation of the

Naval College constituted one of the most important topics: French, Swedish

and British officers, who were recruited to modernize the navy under

Kapudan Pasha Küçük Hüseyin, taught in addition to foreign languages

(French), basic naval sciences including modern navigation methods,

cartography, mathematics, astronomy, and shipbuilding.206 However,

following the end of Nizâm-ı Cedîd in 1807, the Naval College underwent a

period of deterioration. When the school building was destroyed in the 1821

Kasımpaşa fire, the classes were distributed to various other buildings to

continue education. It was only in 1838 that the school was moved to the

205
Fahri Çoker, Bahriyemizin Yakın Tarihinden Kesitler (Ankara: Deniz Kuvvetleri Komutanlığı
Karargâh Basımevi, 1994), pp. 120-121.
206
Zorlu “Selim III and Ottoman Seapower”, p. 33.

94
 Kaptan Pasha pavilion on the hill where the present-day Naval Hospital is

located and it was finally housed in a permanent building.207

As can be understood from the Mekteb-i Bahriye by-laws written on 2

February 1825, there were not enough faculty members to teach classes and

due to lack of financial resources and staff, students were forced to make a

living through other jobs. The Naval College, which was expected to teach

Western sciences, was almost transformed into a madrasa in which no

textbooks, other than religious books such as Kara Davut and Mızraklı

İlmihâli, were available.208 The social trauma that occurred a year later with

the abolition of the Janissaries and the ongoing Greek Revolt at full force

prevented the state from taking concrete measure to revive the Naval College

in the ensuing years. Serious and lasting reforms in this respect were initiated

only after the proclamation of the Tanzimat.

The first individual to undertake the reform of the Naval College was

the British naval officer Sir Baldwin Wake-Walker (1802-1876), who was

known by the nickname “Yaver Pasha” due to his post as “yaver”, or aide-de-

camp to Sultan Abdülmecit. Having served the Ottoman state between 1839

and 1845, Walker presented, after a meticulous review, a plan that he had

drafted for the reformation of the Naval College to Kapudan Pasha Mehmet

Sait on 10 February 1840. When the Naval Council approved his plan, the

report was put into effect with an Imperial decree dated 9 April 1840.209 Quite

possibly, however, due to the ongoing Egypt Problem and the Straits Crisis,

Walker’s reform program was not followed in due course and the Naval

College failed to reach the desired level. It was only after the reestablishment

207
Gencer, p. 122.
208
Safvet, Bahriyemiz Tarihinden Filasalar (İstanbul: Donanma Matbaası, 1328), pp. 13-14.
209
Gencer, pp. 262-262.

95
 of peace in the Empire (1841 Treaty of London) and the appointment of

Patrona Mustafa Pasha as the Minister of the Naval College in 1847 that

lasting changes would take place.

Steam, War and Iron: The Transformation of the Ottoman Navy 1847-1877

The year 1847 marks the true start of the Ottoman steam navy, for that

year the first steam warship squadron was formed. The units of this squadron

were the paddle frigates Taif, Mecidiye, Saik-i Şadi and Feyza-i Bahri. Laid

down at the Imperial Arsenal in 1845, they were large examples of their kind

at 1600 tons. The machinery and the armament of thirty 32-pounders and two

10-inch Paixhans guns were imported from Britain. The first Ottoman screw

warship was commissioned two years later, when Khedive of Egypt Abbas

Pasha donated the Alexandria built Şarkiye to Sultan Abdülmecid. Renamed

the Muhbir-i Sürûr, the 1500-ton steam frigate was armed with twenty two

60-pounder guns and British built machinery.210 Those five ships were the

steam component of Ottoman Navy when the Crimean War began.

In 1852, a diplomatic squabble erupted between the new French

emperor Napoléon III, and Russian Czar Nicholas I over the guardianship of

shrines in the Holy Land. The tension rapidly escalated by heavy handed

diplomacy on both sides and soon the Ottoman Empire was drawn into what

originally was a prestige competition between the Catholic and Orthodox

churches. Nicholas I used the Ottoman involvement as a pretext to re-invoke

Russian ambitions in the “Eastern Question” and spurred an agressive

210
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, pp. 130-131.

96
 diplomacy backed by military threat to demand concessions which effectively

meant meddling into the Ottoman internal affairs.211 The Russian aggression

backfired and the Sublime Porte firmly rejected the demands. When Russian

troops invaded the Danubian Principalities to force the issue; an alarmed

Britain and a grudging France gave full support to Ottoman Empire and war

was declared on 19 October 1853, upon the refusal of the Russian

government to evacuate the principalities.212 What was to become the first

post-Napoléonic conflict involving European great powers had thus begun.

At the start of the war, the Ottoman navy had six ships-of-the-line,

eleven frigates, eight corvettes, thirteen brigs, five schooners and five steam

warships fit for duty; with 20,000 personnel. Egypt sent three ships-of-the-

line, three frigates, three corvettes and one paddle corvette as

reinforcements.213 The Ottoman strategy in Black Sea was fixed primarily as

the defense of communication lines with the armies on the Caucassus front.

The Ottoman naval commanders were typical products of the Mahmudian

age, mostly ex-rankers who embraced the reform program and promoted due

to their loyalty to the new order. However, crew efficiency was low, the

majority of ships being manned by recently mobilized conscripts.214

Facing the Ottoman navy, was Russia’s Black Sea Fleet under the

command of Vice-Admiral Vladimir Kornilov, and his chief subordinate

Vice-Admiral Pavel Nakhimov. Both men were first class professional

officers who learned their trade under the great seaman Admiral Mikhail

Lazarev. Due to Kornilov’s vigorous training program in the preceding years;

211
Ponting, pp. 1-8.
212
Sondhaus, p. 57.
213
Çoker, p. 109.
214
Baş, p. 187.

97
 the fleet of fourteen ships-of-the-line, six frigates, four corvettes, twelve

brigs, six large paddle frigates and a host of auxiliary ships enjoyed perhaps

the highest level of efficiency in its history.215 A high degree of integration

between men and officers was achieved and morale was high. Although

Kornilov and Nakhimov favoured an aggressive strategy, including an assault

on the Bosphorus, the Commander General of the area, Prince Menshikov,

was not supportive, and eventually the Black Sea Fleet assumed a more

defensive position.216

The Crimean War was the first conflict of the industrial age. For the

first time incendiary shell guns and steam warships were to be commonly

used and pitted against each other.217 Thus, on 5 November 1853 happened

the first clash between two steam warships in naval history. The swift and

powerful Russian paddle frigate Vladimir, under the command of Captain

Grigoriy Butakov, encountered the 10-gun Egyptian paddle corvette Pervaz-ı

Bahri. In a duel lasting three hours, Butakov outmaneuvered the Egyptian

ship and raked her from both bow and stern, inflicting 58 casualities. The

Pervaz-ı Bahri surrendered and was towed to Sevastopol, where she was

repaired and added to the Russian Navy as the Kornilov.218

In this increasing pace of naval activity, the first major battle of the

war was fought at sea and became one of the most spectacular naval battles of

the nineteenth century. Since the start of the war, the Ottoman squadrons had

been patrolling on the Black Sea, both to train freshly mobilised crews and to

ferry reinforcements into the Caucassus. A squadron of seven frigates, five

215
Baş, pp. 199-200.
216
Sondhaus, p. 48.
217
Ponting, p. 335.
218
Baş, pp. 202-203.

98
 corvettes and two steamers under Vice-Admiral Osman Pasha was ordered to

proceed into Sinop, the best Ottoman harbor in the Black Sea.219 However,

Osman Pasha was strongly against this decision. Sinop was just 180 miles

away from Sevastopol, the base of Russian Black Sea Fleet, while

Constantinople was as far as 280 miles. With raw crews manning ships,

basing an isolated squadron at Sinop would invite disaster. The Ottoman

naval command sought to reinforce Osman Pasha’s force with ships-of-the-

line, but Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, the infamous British ambassador at

Constantinople, objected and eventually convinced the Porte to give up this

idea, despite the protests of Osman Pasha.220 Taking advantage of stormy seas

and autumn fog, Admiral Nakhimov was able to make a successful

reconnaissance of Sinop without being detected, and after receiving

reinforcements, attacked on 18 November 1853. The Russian squadron of six

ships-of-the-line, two frigates and three auxiliary steamers carrying a total of

710 guns destroyed the isolated Ottoman squadron in just one hour. Ottoman

casualities were 3000 dead, wounded, missing and prisoners, including

Osman Pasha who was wounded and taken captive. Russian casualities were

266 dead and wounded. Only the paddle frigate Taif escaped and brought

news of the disaster back to Constantinople.221

After destroying the Ottoman squadron, the Russian ships turned their

guns to the land batteries guarding the harbor, but their indiscriminate

shelling of the town in the engagement caused great destruction and civilian

losses. This proved to be a fatal mistake, for it provided a suitable pretext of

219
Besim Özcan, Sinop Deniz Felaketi (İstanbul: Deniz Basımevi, 2008), pp. 55-56.
220
Baş, pp. 188-189.
221
Sondhaus, p. 58.

99
 “Russian atrocities” to Britain and France for declaring war.222 Apart from its

political significance, Sinop was a remarkable naval battle. It was the last

major clash between wooden sailing warships. As will be remembered, the

effect of Russian shell guns over Ottoman frigates was the leading factor in

the building of the first ironclad warships at the end of the war. From the

Ottoman side, apart from the terrible naval and civilian casualities, Sinop was

a sobering demonstration of the still insufficient Ottoman sailing skill. While

Admiral Nakhimov was perfectly able to navigate and recon inside enemy

waters at bad weather, the Ottoman warships failed to patrol their own area of

operations and were taken by complete surprise.223 Sinop became also the last

large scale Ottoman naval activity during the Crimean War. The Porte was

happy to leave the task of establishing naval superiority to the grand allied

armada of Britain and France, which entered into Black Sea following their

formal declaration of war in March 1854.Thereafter, the Ottoman naval

contribution was limited to providing two ships-of-the-line, including the

fleet flagship Mahmudiye, for the blockade and bombardment of

Sevastopol.224

The crushing allied naval superiority forced the Russian Black Sea

Fleet into Sevastopol, and finally led to their scuttling. With the fall of

Sevastopol on 9 September 1855, after an arduous siege by an allied

expeditionary force, the Crimean War came to an end, and peace was signed

at Paris on 30 March 1856. The Russian Empire, despite possessing the

largest army on earth, was unable to react to allied seaborne assaults due to its

primitive internal communications. In this respect, the Crimean War was the

222
Özcan, pp. 83-86, 135-143.
223
Ibid., pp. 70-71.
224
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 4.

100
 victory of seapower.225 Among the keen students of this strategic lesson was

the Ottoman crown prince Abdülaziz, who once ascended to the throne in

1861, would set out to create the largest navy that the Ottoman Empire had

seen since the days of Suleyman the Magnificent. It was also to be the period

during which the Ottoman navy would complete its transformation into an

industrial iron and steam navy.

The move toward the mechanization of the Ottoman navy did in fact

start before Crimean War ended. Although plans were also made to have the

venerable old flagship Mahmudiye converted to the screw system in Britain,

she was found to be much too rotten and was duly taken out of service.226 The

first screw ship-of-the-line was the 78-gun Peyk-i Zafer, converted in Britain

in 1856. Two years later, the Imperial Arsenal launched the 68-gun screw

ships-of-the-line Şadiye and Fethiye. The last Ottoman screw ship-of-the-line

was the 96-gun Kosova, which was converted in Britain in 1864, along with

the 50-gun frigates Ertuğrul, Hüdavendigâr and Nasr-ül Âziz.227 The last

screw frigate of the Ottoman Navy, the 52-gun Selimiye, was launched in

1870 at the Imperial Arsenal and was among the biggest of her class in the

world. Until 1870, seven 12-gun and six 8-gun screw corvettes were also

added to the fleet.228

With the advent of ironclad warship in 1861, Sultan Abdülaziz

ordered the assembly of a naval council to make necessary preparations for

appopriating armored ships into the Ottoman navy. According to the plan

prepared by Kapudan Pasha Ateş Mehmed and head of the naval council

225
Ponting, p. 336.
226
Bulgurcuoğlu, Efsane Gemi Mahmudiye Kalyonu, pp. 97-98.
227
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, pp. 128-129, 131-132.
228
Ibid., p. 132, 134-136.

101
 Besim Pasha, the first Ottoman ironclads were ordered from Britain in

1864.229 The Ottoman Navy’s decision to order only iron hulled ships proved

a fortunate one: in the later budget-tight years, all the Ottoman armored ships

would be modernised with varying degrees of success instead of just rotting

away as the wooden hulled ironclads of all other navies did in a relatively

short time.230 The first Ottoman armored ships were the four ironclad frigates

of Osmaniye class, all entering into service by 1868. Of 6400 tons, they were

smaller yet powerfully armed derivatives of the HMS Warrior, carrying

fourteen 150 pdr. and two 300 pdr. Armstrong muzzle loading rifled guns.

They were protected by a 10-inch wrought iron armor belt and could make a

maximum of 14 knots.231 Meanwhile, five armored gunboats of the Feth-ül

İslâm class were ordered from France for the Danubian Squadron. Weighing

408 tons, each carried two 32 pdr. guns and was protected by a 3-inch

wrought iron belt.232

Following the first order to Britain, the 5600-ton central battery

ironclad Âsar-ı Tevfik was ordered from France in 1867. This powerful ship

carried six 250 pdr. Armstrong guns in a specifically armor reinforced battery

section at the amidships and two 200 pdrs in two barbettes233 right above this

central battery. Protection was an 8-inch wrought iron belt and the speed was

13 knots.234

229
Fevzi Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları (İstanbul: Deniz Matbaası, 1935),
p. 59.
230
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, p. 185.
231
Tony Gibbons, The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships and Battlecruisers (London:
Salamander, 1983), p. 49.
232
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, p. 59.
233
Barbette or Sponson is a derivative of the turret, where the guns are placed on a circular turntable
inside an armored “bucket” with an open top or light splinter shield. Tucker, p. 146.
234
Gibbons, p. 75.

102
 The second batch of Ottoman ironclads from Britain was ordered in

1869. These were the 2400-ton armored corvettes Avnillah and Muin-i Zafer;

carrying four 250 pdr. Armstrong guns and a 6-inch armor belt. The Feth-i

Bülent, which was ordered a year later, was of the same layout and armament

but carried a 9-inch wrought iron belt for a weight of 2800 tons.235 A

sistership, Mukaddeme-i Hayır, was laid down in Imperial Arsenal to become

the first native built ironclad.236 The third and final order to Britain was made

in 1874, which included the legendary Mesudiye, along with her intended

sistership, the Memduhiye, and the armored corvettes, Peyk-i Şeref and Burc-

u Şeref.237

Designed by the foremost warship designer of the era Sir Edward

Reed, as a modified HMS Hercules, the Mesudiye was built at the Thames

Blackwall yard. At 10,000 tons she was the biggest central battery ship ever

built. Her armament of twelve 400 pdr. Armstrong guns was protected by a

12-inch wrought iron belt. She had the unusual feature of a 1.5-inch deck

armor and carried two 150 pdr. Armstrong guns on this armored deck; the

speed being 12 knots. Upon her arrival in 1876, she became the fleet flagship,

a role she was to perform for the next thirty five years.238 Other ships in that

order were still on slips when the War of 1877-78 erupted, and were bought

by the Royal Navy to reinforce the numbers during the Russian war scare of

1878.239

235
Gibbons, p. 62, 77.
236
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, p. 114.
237
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, p. 61.
238
Gibbons, p. 87. For a detailed monography of Mesudiye see Eda Gülşen Gömleksiz, Mesudiye
Zırhlısı (İstanbul: Piri Reis Araştırma Merkezi, 2007)
239
Sondhaus, pp. 124-125.

103
 The only Ottoman ironclad which was not ordered from Britain or

France was the Austrian-built İclâliye. Completed in 1870, this 2266-ton

armored corvette was protected by a 6-inch wrought iron belt with a speed of

11 knots. Her armament was four 9-inch Krupp muzzle loading guns on

broadsides and one 6-inch Krupp in a barbette on the deck.240

Apart from armored ships ordered by the Porte, the Ottoman navy

added a further four French-built ironclads which originally had been ordered

by the Khedive of Egypt, but transferred to Constantinople due to the

suspicions of Abdülaziz and his British allies over this increase in the

Egyptian armament program.241 The Hıfz-ı Rahman and Lütf-ü Celil were

1771-ton double turreted monitors protected by a 3-inch wrought iron belt,

each turret carrying one 250 pdr. and one 150 pdr. gun. The Âsar-ı Şevket and

Necm-i Şevket were 2000-ton armored corvettes protected by a 6-inch

wrought iron belt. They carried four 250 pdr. and one 120 pdr. guns in a

layout similar to that of the İclâliye.242

Accompanying this dramatic increase in Ottoman naval power was a

conscious effort to develop the industrial framework of the Imperial Arsenal

between 1861-76. One immobile stone and one floating wooden drydock

were built, along with a new stone slipway at Aynalıkavak. By the 1870s, the

British had established a modern foundry and a machine tools factory at

Yalıköşkü, where the armour plates, boilers, ship machinery and high tensile

iron necessary to cast rifled guns were being produced.243 At the modernized

rifle factory, Snider and Martini-Henry rifles of the latest design were

240
Gibbons, p. 75.
241
Sondhaus, p. 90.
242
Gibbons, p. 62.
243
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, p. 127

104
 assembled and repaired, along with a production of 10,000 cartridges per day

at full capacity work.244 The clothing factory, which produced naval

uniforms, was similarly modernized with steam powered looms. Over two

hundred British foreman and skilled workers were employed to help the

functioning of these factories.245

As a result of the two decades long shipbuilding and modernization

efforts, the Ottoman navy had thus became the fourth greatest naval power of

the world, with twelve first-class ironclads by the end of Abdülaziz’s reign.

The Imperial Arsenal had become the largest industrial establishment in the

Ottoman Empire, but both the navy and its framework had taken a very heavy

toll from the unstable Ottoman finances. This was a price which would prove

catastrophic in years following the 1873 global financial collapse.246

Institutional Framework: Recruitment, Command and Education

To man its warships, the Ottoman Empire continued the rather

ecclectic method of old-style volunteer recruitment and partial conscription

until 1849, when the Kur’a Kanunnamesi (Conscription Law) was initiated.

According to the new law, regular service in the navy was to be ten years

(this decreased to eight years in 1851) and liability for naval reserve was to be

five years. It was planned to conscript 3000 men for naval service each year.

A major revision was made in 1865, when the non-comissioned officer class

was initiated and both regular and reserve services were fixed at six years

244
Grant, p. 14.
245
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, p. 128.
246
Sondhaus, p. 103. Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, p. 129.

105
 each.247 With the increasing pace of naval mechanization, foreign nationals

under contract started to be employed in increasing numbers. At first, these

were mainly machinists and engineers whose tasks were limited to the

running and upkeep of steamship machines. Theoretically, as the native

Ottoman machine skills developed, they were to be discharged but in practice

it happened in the opposite way. In the 1870s, there were ships which were

fully manned by mercenaries.248 Similarly, foreign naval officers started to be

appointed to actual command posts. British adventurer Charles Augustus

Hobart-Hampden became the first Christian to reach the rank of Müşir-i

Bahri (Great Admiral).249

The bureaucratic re-organization of the Ottoman navy was a process

which started after the edict of the Tanzimat, and through a slow, largely

experimental process, culminated in the establishment of the Bahriye

Nezareti, The Ministry of Marine, in 1867. The greatest challenge facing

Ottoman naval authorities was the professionalization of the navy as an

institution. After a short-lived attempt in 1840-41, the Meclis-i Bahri (Naval

High Council) was established in 1845 to direct naval modernization, develop

a naval strategy compatible with the Imperial defense policies and oversee the

professionalization of personnel.250

The Meclis-i Bahri made an important step in 1853 by completely re-

organizing the traditional rank system of the Ottoman navy which hitherto

reflected an essentially land-based organization. The new regulations

formalised the status of warship commanders as professional officers. The

247
Çoker, p. 109.
248
Sondhaus, p. 31, 90.
249
Çoker, pp. 168-169.
250
Gencer, pp. 142-145.

106
 traditional three flag-rank offices of Kapudane, Riyale and Patrona were

retained, but raised to Pasha level. Battleship (ship-of-the-line) commanders

were called Miralay (Captain), Cruiser (frigates and corvettes) commanders

became Kaymakam and Binbaşı (Commander and Lieutenant-Commander),

while captains of small craft (Brigs, Schooners, etc.) became Sağ Kolağası

(Lieutenant). The new rank of Komodor (Commodore) was initiated as a

flotilla commander.251 The final turning point came on 12 March 1867, with

the unification of the Imperial Arsenal and Navy administrations as a new

ministry, the Ministry of Marine and the abolition of the Kaptân-ı Derya’s

office, which was replaced by Bahriye Nazırı, the Minister of Marine.252

The education of naval officers possessing the necessary knowledge

became a topic to which the Meclis-i Bahri gave great importance. After

presenting a treatise about the modernization of naval education on 27 April

1847, the accomplished organizer Patrona Mustafa Pasha was appointed as

the director of the Naval College; which was renamed the Mekteb-i Bahriye-i

Şahane (Imperial Naval Academy).253 Under his command, the Mekteb-i

Bahriye found its final location at the restored Heybeliada navy barracks in

1852, where it continues to function today.

Initially the school had four classes and 120 cadets. At the third class,

the deck (battle) and shipbuilding divisions were separated, and those who are

destined for sea service were drilled aboard a training ship. At the same time,

English became the primary foreign language, reducing French to second

choice. During the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz, accompanying the naval

buildup, the Mekteb-i Bahriye was again expanded. The numbers of cadets

251
Çoker, p. 109.
252
Gencer, pp. 316-317.
253
Safvet, pp. 21-23.

107
 was increased and a third “steam” division was opened to train machinists. A

naval staff school was established in 1864. During the directorship of Sait

Pasha (1869-1874), who had been educated at Edinburg University in

mathematics and engineering, many handpicked British instructors were

employed, who raised the school to a high level of efficiency.254

The Prisoner Fleet: Abdülhamid II and the Ottoman Navy, 1877-1897

In 1875, the last year of Sultan Abdülaziz’s reign, a young Ottoman

lieutenant by the name of Süleyman Nutkî was assigned to the ironclad

frigate Aziziye, along with his friend Tekirdağlı Arif. He left a vivid

description of the conditions aboard this powerful unit of the Ottoman Navy:

…on the day we arrived, there was no sign of the order and dignity
that we expected. In the chamber that was given to us, there wasn’t
any furniture and as if that was not enough, officers had to provide
their own rations. This both disturbed the necessary discipline and the
sense of camaraderie [among the officer corps]. This disturbance was
caused by the lack of a money allotment to ships for providing rations.
Although the deck officers were more than fifteen in number, only
one-third of them were college graduates and the rest were ex-rankers
(alaylı). Due to the great difference of habits and mentality, there was
a great hatred between the two groups, which dissolved the unity of
spirit. The crew was below strength and the daily drill was limited to
the keeping of basic order aboard, without proper training.255

254
Çoker, p. 121.
255
Bal, Nurcan., ed. Süleyman Nutkî Bey’in Hatıraları (İstanbul: Deniz Basımevi, 2003), pp. 23-24.
“Arkadaşım Tekirdağlı Arif Efendi ile beraber atandığımız bu firkateyne geldiğimiz gün ümit ettiğimiz
düzen ve yücelikten eser görülemedi. Bize ayrılan kamarada mobilya namına bir şey olmamakla
beraber subaylar kendi yemeklerini kendileri tedarik etmek mecburiyetinde idiler. Bu durum,
gemilerde hem düzeni bozmaya ve hem arkadaşlıkta pek gerekli olan ahbaplık ve yakınlığı yok etmeye
vesile olur. Bu yalnızlığa başlıca sebep, subay lokantaları için yemek parası adıyla bir ödenek
verilmemesindendir. Firkateyn mürettebatından güverte subayları on beş kişiden fazla olduğu halde
bunlardan üçte biri okulda yetişenlerden olup geri kalanı askerden yetişenlerden (alaylı) olduğundan
ve bu iki kısım arasında görgü kuralları açısından çok zıtlık olduğundan ve birbirlerinden çok nefret

108
 Süleyman Nutkî’s account is clear and informative about the true

conditions behind the imposing image of ironclads. Tremendous amounts of

money were spent to build the fourth greatest fleet of the world, but there

were critical deficiencies in training, discipline and regulations, which

seriously undermined the real power of the navy. Although the Mekteb-i

Bahriye had recently undergone a serious reform, the institution was too

immature to turn out enough numbers of decently educated officers. The

upper ranks were thus still dominated by ignorant ex-rankers who were

totally insufficient to cope with the necessities of modern warfare. Patronage

and corruption were also the usual compatriots of the administration; and

Süleyman Nutkî noted disturbing instances which badly sapped the morale.256

These were not apparent to the public in peacetime, but were to be painfully

obvious at the test of war in a couple of years.

Since 1871, a combination of developments in world politics and

internal difficulties were spiralling the situation of the Ottoman Empire from

bad to worse. First, with the defeat and humiliation of France in 1871, Russia

was freed from its greatest continental check to her ambitions. Then came the

catastrophic 1873 financial crisis, which brought the Ottoman economy to the

brink of collapse due to the large amounts of foreign loans taken after the

Crimean War. A lengthy drought added much to the plight of the peasantry,

leading to rebellions in Bosnia in 1875. The Bosnian rebellions spread like

wildfire in the Balkans; Montenegro and Serbia joined in 1876. The wave of

insurrection culminated with the April 1876 uprising of Bulgarian nationalists

ettiklerinden bu da düşünce birliğine yegâne engeldi. Askerî mürettebatın sayısı gerekli olandan
noksan olmakla, günlük hareketler düzeni sağlamakla sınırlı olup eğitimlere önem verilmemekte idi.”
256
Bal, pp. 24-25.

109
 which was accompanied by a horrendous attempt at the ethnic cleansing of

Bulgarian Muslims.257

As the regular troops were busy with the pacification of Bosnia and

Serbia, the Porte made the disastrous decision to unleash the Başıbozuk

irregulars, the majority of whom were Circassians and Tatars who had

suffered great tragedies at the hands of Russians in the preceding decades and

were thus burning with desire for revenge. Ottoman officials lost control over

the başıbozuks, who indiscriminately massacred Bulgarian civilians. These

events echoed throughout Europe, and the resulting outcry effectively isolated

the Porte in the diplomatic arena, sweeping away the traditional British

support as well. It was exactly the opportunity that Russia had been seeking

since the Crimean War to settle the debts with the Ottoman Empire.258

Amidst this ongoing chaos, Sultan Abdülaziz was dethroned on 30

May 1876 by a clique of liberal ministers headed by the grand vizier Midhat

Pasha, and supported by the commanders-in-chief of both the army and the

navy. Coup leaders had his nephew Murad V ascend the throne while

Abdülaziz was found dead on 4 June, supposedly by suicide, but possibly he

was murdered. Murad V was never mentally very strong and upon hearing

Abdülaziz’s death he lost his sanity altogether. Due to his mental unstability,

he stayed on the throne only for ninety three days and was replaced by his

brother, Abdülhamid II, on 31 August 1876. Abdülhamid II was to be the last

“real” sultan who would influence the fate of the Empire during a long reign

257
Dumont, Paul. “Tanzimat Devri” in Osmanlı İmparatorluğu Tarihi v. 2, edited by Robert Mantran
(İstanbul, Adam Yayınları, 1999), pp. 129-130.
258
Stanford Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: v.2
Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Pres, 1977), p. 162

110
 of thirty three years. This was to be a decisive effect for both the future of the

peoples under Ottoman rule, and that of the Ottoman navy.259

Upon his accession to the throne, Abdülhamid II found an empire in a

most dire crisis. Russia was intent on exploiting the diplomatic isolation and

turmoil of the Porte. A surge of nationalism, unseen since the days of

Napoléon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, surged through Romanov territories.

Thousands of volunteers, spurred by the “Pan-Slavism” ideology, flocked to

to the Russian army, which was expected to move into the Balkans to

“liberate” Bulgaria. Russians further secured their position by reaching an

agreement with the Austrians and by pressing their demands to the Porte

through an international conference which gathered in Constantinople. The

Ottomans made an unexpected maneuver by declaring a constitution on 23

December 1876, hoping to stave off great power intervention into Ottoman

internal affairs. However, Russia was not to be appeased and following

further futile negotiations, war was declared on 24 April 1877.260

In the previous wars with the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Black Sea

Fleet had played a critical role for fire support and logistics. However,

because of the Treaty of Paris, Russia had not had a naval force other than a

coast guard in the Black Sea for twenty years. What Russians devised for

offensive naval operations was a makeshift force of merchant vessels

converted into auxiliary cruisers and mother ships for small torpedo launches.

Against them was arrayed a formidable ironclad fleet which enjoyed

complete command of the sea. However, the results of action turned out to be

259
François Georgeon, Sultan Abdülhamid (İstanbul: Homer Kitabevi, 2006), pp. 53-61.
260
Dumont, pp. 134-138.

111
 a complete source of embarassment for the Ottoman Navy and deeply

influenced its future.

The greatest danger for the Russians was to be interdicted at the most

delicate moment, when their army was crossing the Danube. In the river,

there was a strong Ottoman squadron which comprised of the powerful

monitors Hıfz-ı Rahman, Lütf-ü Celil and five smaller armored gunboats,

along with some wooden vessels. Russians mined the mouth of the Danube

and erected powerful coastal batteries on the northern bank of the river.

While all these preparations were going on, the Danubian squadron did

absolutely nothing to interfere. On 11 May Lütf-ü Celil was hit by one of

these coastal batteries and blew up with only two survivors. Two weeks later,

a torpedo lauch sank the armored gunboat Seyfi. After this attack, the

Ottoman squadron surrounded itself with a floating boom and was driven into

full passivity. On July 16, Russians captured two Ottoman armored gunboats

and after this loss the Danubian squadron was driven out of the river, with

only two ships left undamaged.261

In the Black Sea operations, the Ottoman navy initially seemed to be

more successful. The powerful Ottoman Black Sea Fleet under the command

of Vice-Admiral Bozcaadalı Hasan Hüsnü Pasha had eight ironclads and six

sizeable wooden warships. On May 14, the Black Sea Fleet executed the only

Ottoman offensive naval operation in the war by shelling Sohumkale and by

landing troops, which secured the town of Sochi. If it had been executed by

something more than a token force, the Sochi landing would have turned into

a serious diversionary assault which could have gravely impeded Russian

261
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, pp. 90-100.

112
 operations. Even then, the Ottoman landing showed its immediate effect by

inciting revolt among the Tatar population. Russians assigned the majority of

their torpedo forces into the area, making repeated assaults on the Ottoman

ships. However, Ottoman safety measures proved to be useful. The only

Russian success was detonating a spar-torpedo under the ironclad Asar-ı

Tevfik on the night of 23 August but the ship did not suffer serious damage.

The operations in Crimea came to an end when a superior Russian Army

approached; the landing forces along with 40,000 Tatar refugees fearing from

Russian reprisals were evacauted by 1 September.262

After the evacuation of Crimea, the Fleet was occupied mostly with

ferrying reinforcements to the Caucassus front. Especially the disarmed old

screw ships-of-the-line Kosova, Şadiye and Fethiye proved to be suitable for

carrying large numbers of troops. The main base of operations was Batum

and Russian torpedo operations moved into that region. In the last months of

1877, the Russians brought self-propelled torpedoes to the front and made

many attacks on the ships in the harbor. The wooden gunboat Intibah became

the first victim of this weapon in naval history on the night of 25 January

1878.263

The Ottoman Mediterreanean Fleet, which also included the brand

new flagship Mesudiye along with four other ironclads and the big wooden

frigate Selimiye, stayed mostly inactive in the war, but proved to be useful as

a deterrent to keep Greece out of the war. During the pell-mell retreat of the

defeated and dissolved Ottoman armies in the Balkans, elements of the

262
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, pp. 101-104.
263
Ibid., pp. 104-112.

113
 Mediterrenean Fleet, especially the Selimiye, did great work by evacuating

many troops trapped on the Thracian coast.264

The war ended with the armistice on 31 January, the Russian Army

having advanced within striking distance of Constantinople. This was too

much for Britain, which could never accept Russia seizing the Turkish Straits,

and to prevent a total Ottoman collapse, a powerful “flying squadron” along

with an expeditionary force was dispatched summarily to the Bosphorus;

arriving on 13 February. In response, the Russian Army advanced to San

Stefano (Yeşilköy), just six miles from the Ottoman capital and braced itself

for a new Anglo-Russian war. The other great powers intervened and at the

Congress of Berlin, with the brokerage of the German Chancellor Otto von

Bismarck, a new peace was re-written with considerably softened terms

compared with the original treaty imposed by Russians on 3 March.265

The War of 1877-78 was the most disastrous defeat ever suffered by

the Ottoman Empire since the repulsion of the second assault to Vienna in

1683. It marked the effective end of the Ottoman Empire as a great power.

Serbia and Romania which, albeit nominally, had been autonomous

princedoms of the Empire officially gained their independence. Northern

Bulgaria became a nominally autonomous, de-facto independent princedom.

Southern Bulgaria became the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia

under a Christian governor, only to be annexed by the Bulgarian Princedom

in 1885. Austria-Hungary occupied the rebellious Bosnia-Hercegovina to

“administer it in name of the Sultan”. Even the non-belligerent Greece

264
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, pp. 115-120.
265
Sondhaus, pp. 124-125.

114
 snatched territory by annexing Thessaly in 1882 under the clauses of treaty.

In the Caucassus, the key fortresses of Batum, Kars and Ardahan are lost.

In addition to the territorial losses, one of the greatest demographic

catastrophes of history took place in the Balkans with the repulsion or

massacre of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. A crippling war indemnity

was also to be paid to Russia.266 The last and perhaps the ugliest loss was the

ceding of Cyprus to a “British protectorate” as a price of its involvement in

the last stages of the conflict. Britain was no longer hopeful that the Ottoman

Empire could stop another Russian onslaught on the Straits and desired

Cyprus as a safe naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean, close to the Suez

canal.

The forced concession of Cyprus marked the effective end of the

Anglo-Ottoman Alliance. The fate of this old co-operation was sealed in

1882, with the British occupation of Egypt. In the new geopolitical situation,

Britain no longer needed the Ottoman Empire to guard the route to India

while the Ottomans were deeply resentful of British opportunism. Thereafter,

the Ottoman Empire gravitated more and more toward Germany, which was

rapidly emerging as the foremost rival to both Russia and Britain, culminating

in the Ottoman-German Alliance in the First World War.267 The new

geographical, political and diplomatic situation also altered the fate of the

Ottoman navy.

The virtual collapse of Ottoman naval power in the two decades which

ensued the War of 1877-78 was the subject of continuous investigation after

the proclamation of the Second Constitution in 1908. The prevailing idea

266
Dumont, pp. 141-142.
267
Georgeon, pp. 255-265.

115
 among both the public and intelligentsia was that Abdülhamid had left the

navy to rot because of the institution’s share in the dethronement of

Abdülaziz and he feared that the same should be done to him as the navy was

the most liberal branch of all armed forces.268 More recent scholarly studies

have focused either on the reversion of modernization priority to the army

during the Hamidian era269 or to the financial impossibility to support the

great sums required for the upkeep of a sizeable fleet in the chronic financial

crisis following the 1875 moratorium.270 Şakir Batmaz argues that the Sultan

never stopped his interest in maintaining the fleet, constantly ordering the

modernization of ironclads, but was misled by the corrupt and inefficient

bureaucracy of the Ministry of Marine.271 According to my opinion, all these

arguments have some truth, but rather than looking for a single cause it is

more productive to search for the reasons behind “the melting” of the

Ottoman navy from a mixture of all the arguments cited above.

Thus, through a complex web of political unwillingness, financial

difficulty, shift in defense priorities and administrative incompetence, the

Ottoman navy, which had been strenghtened into a world class naval power

in two decades, collapsed into oblivion within a same amount of time. The

Imperial Arsenal was especially hard hit by the eclipse of the Anglo-Ottoman

Alliance, as it was Britain which had provided the majority of technical help.

By 1881, except for a token advisor group, more than two hundred British

workmen who had provided the necessary know-how to the Ottoman navy

268
Enver Ziya Karal. Osmanlı Tarihi: I. Meşrutiyet ve İstibdat Devirleri 1876-1908 v. 17 (Ankara:
Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1962), p. 369
269
Albert Griffiths, The Reorganization of the Ottoman Army under Abdülhamid II (1880-1897),
(Ph.d diss., UCLA, 1966)
270
Kaori Komatsu, “Financial Problems Of the Navy During the Reign Of Abdülhamit II”, Oriente
Moderno, XX(LXXXI), 1, 2001, pp. 209-219.
271
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, pp. 291-292.

116
 were discharged. The pace of naval construction immediately lapsed; the

6600-ton ironclad Nusretiye (renamed Hamidiye) which had been laid down

in 1874 could be only completed in eleven years, totally obsolete in design

and with defective armor and machines.272 The workshops set up at great

expense to roll armor and produce ship machinery fell into disrepair. Only the

gun foundry and the small arms factory were kept alive as they reverted to the

production of the army’s needs. With the deactivation of the ironclads, the

only initiative undertaken in the Arsenal for the battlefleet was the re-

armement of ships with new Krupp guns, both imported and produced under

licence.273

As the Ottoman battlefleet was mothballed in the Golden Horn, the

rule of the day became coast defense. The Ottomans’ recent experiences with

torpedo craft in the Russian War and the effects of the Jeune Ecole prompted

the Sultan into acquiring torpedo boats as the principal naval weapon system.

The key figure in the Ottoman torpedo boat program was the British naval

officer Sir Henry Felix Woods (1842-1929). Woods was a close subordinate

of Hobart Pasha, who made a deep impact in the creation of the Ottoman

ironclad navy. Upon Hobart’s death in 1886, Woods replaced him as Sultan’s

aide-de-camp and advisor in naval affairs. However, possibly due to his war

experience in 1877, when he had fought in the Danube and witnessed the

most successful Russian mine and torpedo operations, he became a proponent

of the torpedo craft. Surprising for the career of a Hamidian era high ranking

272
Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople 1873-1915 (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), pp. 170-
171. Gibbons, p. 128.
273
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, pp. 161-166.

117
 officer, he remained a close confident and trustee of Abdülhamid II until the

Sultan’s deposition in 1908.274

Under Woods’ supervision the Ottoman Empire acquired twenty five

torpedo craft between 1882-1897. Of these, three were built in France, three

in Britain, six were constructed in the Imperial Arsenal and the rest came

from Germany. The first two boats were the 40 ton, French built Burhaneddin

and Tevfik. Capable of 17 knots, they were armed with a spar-torpedo and

two 35.5 cm locomotive torpedoes along with two machine guns. Four copies

were built in the Imperial Arsenal as the Mecidiye class between 1886-1893.

The British built 83-ton boats Mahabet and Satvet entered service in 1887.

Capable of 21 knots and armed with two 35.5 cm torpedo tubes along with

two machine guns, they so rapidly deteriorated that both were

decommissioned in 1892. The twelve German built units of the Gilyum (five

boats) and Nasır (seven boats) classes formed the backbone of the Ottoman

torpedoboat force. Ships of both classes weighed 90 tons, were armed with

two 42.8 cm torpedo tubes along with two machine guns and were capable of

21 knots. The largest units of the Ottoman flotilla were the German built

Ejder, her two enlarged native built half-sisters Berkefşan and Tayyar, and

the German built torpedo gunboats Peleng-i Derya and Nimet. The 140-ton

Ejder was armed with two 42.8 cm torpedo tubes and five 37 mm quick firing

guns for a speed of 24 knots. Her two half-sisters weighed 230 tons for a

speed of 21 knots and the same armament. The torpedo-gunboats weighed

750 tons with a speed of 18 knots and an armament of three 35.5 cm torpedo

tubes, two 10.5 cm quick firing guns and six machine guns. The smallest

274
Çoker, pp. 169-170.

118
 Ottoman torpedo craft were the tiny 30 ton launches Timsah and Şemşir-i

Hücum, built respectively in France and Britain. Both weighed 30 tons for a

speed of 15 knots and were armed with two 35.5 cm torpedo tubes.275

The most interesting sequence in the torpedo-centered reorganization

of the Ottoman navy was the acquision of two prototype submarines from

Britain. These two 100-ton craft were the brainchild of reverend George

Garret, a British clergyman and inventor. He had designed a 60-ton prototype

in co-operation with the Swedish weapons manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt

and sold it toGreece in 1886 during the Greco-Ottoman war scare over the

crisis of Eastern Rumelia-Bulgaria unification. In response, the Ottoman navy

ordered two larger units from Nordenfelt, which were produced in Britain and

shipped in sections to Constantinople to be assambled in the Imperial

Arsenal. Christened Abdülhamid and Abdülmecid, the boats made a trials in

the Golden Horn in 1887, where they sank an old hulk with the first

submarine-fired locomotive torpedoes in naval history. However, the

submarine technology was too immature at the time, the Nordenfelt boats’

pressurised steam machine could provide power only for five minutes

underwater and the craft were dangereously unstable during torpedo

launching. As a result, both were deemed useless and decomissioned, only to

be left to rot.276

The largest ship built in the Imperial Arsenal during Hamidian era was

the 2000-ton composite corvette Heybetnüma. When finished in 1895, her

machines proved to be so defective that she became a stationary school ship

at Heybeliada. In the building of smaller ships the Arsenal was more

275
Langensiepen and Güleryüz; pp. 160-167, 174-175.
276
Konstantin Zhokov and Aleksandr Vitol, “The Origins of the Ottoman Submarine Fleet”, Oriente
Moderno, V. XX (LXXXI), No. 1, 2001, pp. 221-232.

119
 successful, completing two wooden and five steel gunboats up to 1897 to

replace the rapidly deteriorating gunboats built in the 1860s. The steel hulled

units proved to be quite successful and were only decommissioned at the end

of the First World War, after arduous convoy escort duties.277

In an inactive fleet where there is no drill and pay is both cut and in

arrears, a decrease in discipline is inevitable. In violation of regulations, the

officers who were assigned to duty outside Constantinople brought along

their families and usually employed naval personnel for their personal needs.

Among the ranks, disrespect towards superiors was increasingly becoming

commonplace, and sailors were deserting their ships or spending their time in

the Kasımpaşa coffeehouses. Regulation of uniforms was disregarded.

Because of insufficient salaries, all officers were occupied with jobs other

than the military profession. Although many edicts and decrees were issued to

alleviate the rapidly increasing problem of undiscipline, none became

something more than saving the day.278 The morale of both officers and

cadets slumped during the era.

Süleyman Nutkî, who was assigned as instructor to the school frigate

Hüdavendigâr in 1886, soberly remembered the drunkardness among the

cadets and related an event which took place in the Suda Bay, Crete. During a

visit to one of the latest model British battleships which was visiting the port,

he had to quickly evacuate his pupils without receiving the traditional sailor’s

toast between the crews, as he feared that the cadets would get drunk and start

277
Langensiepen and Güleryüz, pp. 137-138, 188.
278
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, pp. 99-103.

120
 to protest the Abdülhamid government openly to the foreign naval personnel

due to their exasperation and hardships.279

The stagnation of the Ottoman naval assets included also the Mekteb-i

Bahriye. No great novelties were introduced during the period and even there

was some deterioration for in 1897, a reorganization of the curriculum was

ordered. Nevertheless, altogether twenty three cadets were sent to foreign

countries for training –twelve to Britain, six to France and five to

Germany.280 However, one activity in the Mekteb-i Bahriye is of interest and

requires closer examination. This activity is the establishment of the Torpido

Mektebi (the torpedo school).

The initiative to establish a torpedo school started in 1882 and the

following year the old screw frigate Muhbir-i Sürûr was allocated to house

the school, with twenty instructors and forty cadets. In 1886, two officers

were sent to Germany and two to France to study torpedo technology, but

because of the torpedo factories’ uncooperativeness, they were not of much

help. Similarly, efforts to hire technicians to start torpedo production in the

Imperial Arsenal fell off due to the financial difficulties. By 1889, as the

Ottoman torpedoboats were entering service, the need for further torpedo

officers increased and a torpedo class was opened in the Mekteb-i Bahriye,

with the Muhbir-i Sürûr operating as drill ship. However, the excessive

importance given to torpedo training caused the neglect of gunnery standards

279
Bal, pp. 105-106
280
Batmaz, II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması, pp. 112-116, 95-98.

121
 and, as a result, the priority was reversed once again. However, the torpedo

traning in the Muhbir-i Sürûr continued until at least 1904.281

In the Hamidian era, the only active parts of the Ottoman navy were

the gunboat squadrons of Basra and the Red Sea. The old wooden screw

gunboats assigned to these outposts were often unable to catch the speedy

local dhow type sailing boats used by Arabs for smuggling. Neverthless, an

extensive mapping effort of these regions was made, providing a detailed

survey of the region for the first time in Ottoman history.282 Two other

important events are symbolic of the Hamidian era naval activities and the

condition of the Ottoman navy. The first was the disastrous cruise of the

frigate Ertuğrul to Japan in 1890 and the second was the scandalous cruise of

the Ottoman navy during the Thessalian War some seven years later.

In 1887, Emperor Meiji’s uncle made a visit to Constantinople during

a circumnavigation of the world with two of the Imperial Japanese Navy

warships. Abdülhamid was very interested in establishing relations with this

rapidly modernizing Eastern country and decided to send an ambassador ship

to Japan in 1889. The cruise was also intended to provide long-range sailing

experience for cadets. The ship selected for the voyage was the old wooden

screw frigate Ertuğrul, a thirty year old unit with worn out machines. Mr.

Harty, an Englishman who was her chief machinist, protested the selection

and openly declared that sending such a dilapidated ship to Japan would be

murder. The Minister of Marine Bozacaadalı Hasan Hüsnü Pasha came under

assault of his political opponents for selecting the Ertuğrul and he became

281
Batmaz, Şakir. “An Example of the Efforts to Train Naval Personnel during the Reign of Sultan
Abdülhamid II: The Torpedo School” in Logbook of the Ottoman Navy: Ships, Legends, Sailors,
edited by Emir Yener and Ekrem Işın, (İstanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009), pp. 65-75.
282
Bal, pp. 63-94.

122
 fearful of attracting the wrath of Sultan and losing his office. To silence the

opposition, he fired Mr. Harty and selected his own son-in-law Osman Bey as

the Ertuğrul’s commander to make an open show of his trust to the ship. The

Ertuğrul weighed anchor with 550 picked sailors and 57 officers (mostly

cadets) on 14 July 1889. After a year long voyage beset with lack of funds,

accidents and an outbreak of cholera which claimed twelve members of the

crew, the Ertuğrul arrived to Yokohama on 7 June 1890. During the cruise,

Osman Bey had been promoted to Pasha. After a visit of three months and

handing out Abdülhamid II’s gifts to Emperor Meiji, Osman Pasha set sail on

15 September 1890 for Constantinople. At that time, he was warned that

cruising around the Japanese Islands would be a great risk for an incapable

old ship like Ertuğrul as the typhoon season had come. However, Osman

Pasha was under constant pressure by Hasan Hüsnü Pasha, always concerned

about revealing any clue to the Sultan about the unsoundness of the Ertuğrul,

to return according to the schedule. Without option, Osman Pasha complied;

only to be caught by a typhoon on the same night the Ertuğrul set sail. After a

three day long hopless battle against the waves, the old frigate disintegrated

on the coast of Oshima Island (18 September 1890). 533 of the crew perished,

including Osman Pasha. In the words of Süleyman Nutkî, who later wrote a

history of this disaster, the cream of the Ottoman Navy was sent to their

deaths only to hide the truths about the Ottoman Navy by a corrupt naval

administration fearful of losing their posts.283

283
Süleyman Nutkî Bey, Ertuğrul Fırkateyni Faciası (İstanbul: Bahriye Matbaası, 1897) is a
contemporary monography and perhaps still the best account of the Ertuğrul’s cruise. Among the
recent studies of the incident, the noteworthy are: Esenbel, Selçuk. “Alacakaranlık Diplomasisi:
Japonların Osmanlı İmparatorluğuna İlgisi”, Tarih ve Toplum Cilt: XXXVII, Sayı: 218, Şubat 2002
and Kaori Komatsu, Ertuğrul Fırkateyni: Bir Dostluğun Doğuşu (Ankara: Turhan Kitabevi, 1992)

123
 The case of the Ertuğrul was hidden behind the power of the waves

and the wind, but the true condition of the Ottoman navy was to be revealed

not only to the Sultan, but to all the world in the 1897 re-activation scandal of

the battlefleet. In 3 February1897, the Ottoman Empire declared war on

Greece, which was stirring the population of Crete to insurrection in order to

annex the island. The Ottoman army which had been reformed in recent years

under the supervision of the able German General Colmar von der Goltz, won

a lightning style victory in a campaign which lasted just a month. The

ironclad fleet under the command of Hasan Rami Pasha was re-activated to

attack the small Greek navy, but what resulted was a virtual “self-destruction”

of the Ottoman ships.

On 20 March, the fleet of eight ironclads, fourteen torpedo craft and

four transports set sail from Constantinople towards Dardanelles. In full view

of Istanbulites who gathered along the shores to watch the sailing of the navy

for the first time since two decades, the three boilers of the flagship Mesudiye

burst. The fleet barely made to Lapseki, where Hasan Rami Pasha and the

German Admiral von Hofe, who was the supervisor of shore fortifications,

started an intensive training and repair program to bring the ships into basic

working condition. During the firing excercises, the runners of Armstrong

guns stuck, the hydraulic pistons of Krupp guns were bent and it was

discovered that the breech blocks of many small quick firing guns were stored

in depots at Constantinople. None of the torpedoboats were seaworthy, their

condensers and boilers having terribly deteriorated. Not one ship was able to

make over ten knots speed. Both Hasan Rami Pasha and von Hofe reported

that if the Ottoman Navy looked for a fight it possibly would be sunk by the

124
 numerically fewer but technically and administratively much superior Greek

navy.284 The scandal of fleet re-activation shook all of the Empire. As one

British observer noted: “the Turks had no navy left.”

Following the war, even the reluctant Abdülhamid II agreed for a

sizeable naval modernization program, but in the end scarce funds were

wasted in the tenders to modernize the hopelessly antiquated ironclads. The

collapse of the navy, which was in so stark contrast with the effective

performance of the army during the Greek War, prompted even more hostility

towards the fleet. Lieutenant-Colonel Süreyya from the Ottoman general staff

perhaps summed up the ideas of his many contemporaries, both civilian and

military, in his polemical treatise “Donanma mı Şimendifer mi?” (Navy or the

Railroad?):

….In the last Russian War our navy ranked third in the world but
Russians hadn’t any navy. What we could do? [Nothing] Because the
Russian army was stronger than ours. In the last Greek War, the
Greeks had a navy but we didn’t had anything. What did they
achieve? [Nothing] Because the Ottoman army was stronger. The
result: when the army is stronger a navy can do nothing ….An
excellent army does not leave any weak spots in the country. If weak
spots are in the interior it fortifies them, if they are on the coast it
erects coastal fortifications, creates minefields; all in all it shapes them
into a reinforced area and such fortifications doesn’t have any fear
from enemy navies; even if the British Navy come!….If the aim is to
keep and defend our homeland, we don’t need a navy….I’m sure that
each military train that moves on the railroads is worthy of a
dreadnought. I’m sure that thanks to the railways, this poor homeland
shall quickly enrich as the internal and external security will be
assured and time will be found to work for the greater wealth..285

284
Hasan Rami Paşa, Hatıralar v.1 (Ankara: Deniz Kuvvetleri Komutanlığı Karargâhı Matbaası,
1997), pp. 2-34.
285
Süreyya, Donanma mı Şimendifer mi? (İstanbul: n.p., 1327), pp. 7-13. “Geçen Rusya seferinde
bizim donanmamız dünya üzerinde üçüncü derecede idi. Halbuki Rusların hiç donanması yok idi. Ne
yapabildik! Çünkü Rus ordusu bizim ordudan daha kuvvetli idi. Geçen Yunan seferinde Yunanlıların
donanmaları var idi. Halbuki bizde hiçbir şey yok idi. Ne yapabildiler. Çünkü Osmanlı ordusu daha
kuvvetli idi. Netice ordu kuvvetli olunca donanma bir şey yapamaz….Mükemmel bir ordu memleket
dahilinde zayıf noktalar bırakmaz. Zayıf noktalar dahilde ise onu tahkim eder. Sahilde ise etrafına
sahil istihkâmatı yapar. Torpiller kurar velhasıl bir mevki-yi müstâhkem haline onu ifrağ eder. Bu
gibi mevki-yi müstâhkemenin de düşman donanmalarından hiç korkusu olmaz. İsterse İngiltere

125
 Ideas like these only would be falsified with the loss of Western

Thrace and the Aegean Islands to the Greeks in the Balkan War (1912-13)

and the resulting surge to buy the latest system dreadnoughts for naval

reconstruction would constitute one of the main causes of the Ottoman entry

into the First World War.286

The Ottoman navy entered into the nineteenth century in a state of

chaos. Years of war, rebellion and the disastrous destruction at Navarino had

seriously depleted the manpower pool and worn out the ships. As the Empire

had a vast maritime geography spanning from the Adriatic and the Black Sea

to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean seapower was a vital component of

Ottoman imperial defense. Acutely conscious of the navy’s importance,

Mahmud II initiated a naval rebuilding program which managed to replace

most of the ships destroyed in the decades of conflict. In terms of quality, the

new ships were world class vessels. There was a noticeable trend to gigantism

in this building program, exemplified by the ship-of-the-line Mahmudiye. In

an interesting parallel to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s “big ships with big

guns” obsession, the Ottoman warships in the twilight of the fighting sail era

tended to be massively built and overloaded with ordnance. It may be

concluded that, as the Ottoman Navy’s only battlefleet adversary was the

Russian Black Sea Fleet, it was possible to mobilize the Empire’s vast

donanması karşısına gelsin!...Maksad; memleketimizi muhafaza ve müdâfaa ise, donanmaya lüzum

yoktur…. Eminim ki; demir yolları üzerinde hareket eden her askeri tren bir dertnota muadildir.
Eminim ki şimendiferler sayesinde şu zavallı vatan pek çabuk zengin olacaktır. Çünkü asayiş-i dahili
ve harici bu sayede temin gelinecek, vatan zenginliğe doğru çalışmak içün zaman, vakit
bulabilecekdir.”
286
Güvenç, Serhat. “The Ottoman Navy in the Age of Dreadnoughts, 1909-1914” in The Logbook of
the Ottoman Navy: Ships, Legends, Sailors, edited by EmirYener and Ekrem Işın (İstanbul: Pera
Müzesi, 2009), pp. 45-63.

126
shipbuilding resources to produce a relatively small number of overlarge

ships sufficient to operate in a rather restricted area of operations. For its

patrol commitments, the Ottoman navy focused on large frigates built with

American technical help, which was provided following Navarino. In the

same period, the newly burgeoning naval steam power started to be applied

by the Ottoman naval administration, and following the Crimean War

mechanization of the fleet gained pace. The accesion of pro-navy Sultan

Abdülaziz in 1861 became a turning point in the fortunes of the Ottoman

navy. Upon his full support, in the decade between 1864-1874, the Ottoman

navy completed its transformation from a wooden and sail dominated force

into a fleet of steam driven ironclads.

Along with the technological change, the naval framework was also

thoroughly restructured. The greatest problem of the Ottoman navy in the

early nineteenth century was the losses suffered by the manpower pool. The

intermittant struggle since the Napoléonic Wars, defeats and the purge of

Greek sailors following the Greek Revolt wreaked havoc in cadres. The

mixture of press-gang, conscription and voluntary enlistment failed to

alleviate the problem. The re-recruitment of Christians had to restart by the

late 1830s, but only after the initiation of the Conscription Law in 1849 was a

more satisfactory result obtained. Despite this, the quality of the crews

remained low. Although the navy was a popular institution among the scions

of elites who aspired to be officers, the concripted rank and file remained of

rather low efficiency. Naval personnel were a technical class which required

professionalisation, and in the absence of a merchant navy and its skilled

127
 sailors it was difficult to train efficient crews out of conscripted peasants. To

put it otherwise, the Ottoman navy simply lacked a sufficient social basis.

The bureaucratical and intellectual modernization of the Ottoman

navy was reflected in the establishment of a Naval Council in 1845; and the

administrative unification of the Imperial Arsenal, and the Navy as the

Ministry of Marine in 1867. The reorganization of the ranks contributed to

the professionalization of the officer class while the establishment of the

Ministry of Marine improved the overall administration of the navy by

centralising command.

The educational initiative had always constituted a critical issue in the

Ottoman navy all through the reform age. The Mühendishane, which had

been established even before Nizam-ı Cedid era, had became defunct over

time; until it became almost non existant during the 1820s. After abortive

attempts to reform and re-establish it during the initial Mahmudian reform

era, serious renovation only started with Patrona Mustafa Pasha’s directorship

of the Naval College in 1847. Largely to his and to Sait Pasha’s efforts in the

1870s, Ottoman Naval College was transformed into an effective modern

school.

Impressive as they are, the naval reforms encountered in the end the

greatest obstacle common to all other state institutions of the Ottoman

Empire: money. The Ottoman tax collection system was still largely pre-

modern and unable to levy enough funds for the intimitading sums required

by the modern state. Overburdened during the Crimean War, the Ottoman

Treasury resorted to foreign credit for the first time in its history.287 Foreign

287
Gencer, p. 230

128
 indebtment continued in the victorious and optimistic aftermath of the

Crimean War through the 1860s. However, the great financial collapse of

1873 dragged the world economies into a sudden crisis and when the interest

holders of Ottoman foreign debts demanded their repayment, the Ottoman

Empire had no means to comply. The Ottoman moratorium of 1875 was a

national catastrophy, but no other institution would suffer from it as much as

the navy which had to drink gold to remain a credible force.288 The costly

ironclad fleet could achieve little in the Russian War of 1877-78 to justify its

existence and was promptly made a prisoner in its own base in the Golden

Horn through a combination of political suspicion, financial difficulty and re-

adoption of an “Army first” approach. The 1880s were a time of tight

finances which badly affected both the condition of mothballed ships and the

status of naval officers. The avaliable funds were spent to torpedo boats for

building a coast defense force, but even these were not properly maintained

and rapidly deteriorated. When the navy went out of its berth for war in 1897,

all of its ships were practically reduced to scrap iron status. In twenty years,

the Ottoman navy had seen both the summit of power and the depths of

oblivion.

288
For a detailed study of Ottoman Moratorium see Mehmet Hakan Sağlam, Osmanlı Devletinde
Moratoryum 1875-1881 Rüsûm-u Sitte’den Düyûn-u Umumiyye’ye (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt
Yayınları, 2007)

129
 CHAPTER IV

THE IRONCLAD STEAMS EAST: THE RUSSIAN AND CHINESE

NAVIES

The evolution of the Ottoman Imperial Navy from a wooden and sail-

powered naval force into a fleet composed of armored ships driven by steam

power is illustrative of the difficulties in keeping technology’s sharp edge

during the industrial era for a state which rested still on a pre-modern

economy. However, the Ottoman navy was not alone in this. The late

modernising maritime states with pre-modern economies, akin to the Ottoman

Empire, faced the same difficulties in their attempts to build and maintain

effective modern naval forces. In this chapter, the story of the Imperial

Russian and Imperial Chinese Navies up to 1905 will be analysed briefly to

provide an opportunity for comparative study. The question of why these

three particular states are chosen is answered with three arguments.

First, both the Russian and Chinese empires had strategic maritime

geographies notably similar to that of the Ottoman Empire. While the

Ottoman navy controlled four different maritime areas (the Black Sea, the

Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Adriatic Sea), the Russian

Imperial Navy oversaw three maritime areas which were separated by the

Eurasian landmass (the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the Pacific Ocean), each

demanding very different requirements. The Chinese Imperial Navy was

similarly structured according to a strictly regional character. In fact, it is

130
 possible to speak not about a single Chinese Imperial Navy, but about three

separate Chinese Imperial Navies. In the North China Sea and in the South

China Sea were based two fleets of open sea capability, while at the Yangtze

river was a gunboat flotilla to patrol the main economic artery of the country.

Each of these fleets was independently financed and administered by

provincial viceroys.

Second, the economic framework of the Ottoman Empire, Russia and

China were broadly similar until the end of the nineteenth century. The

Ottoman, Russian and Chinese states depended on the taxation of peasant

masses to fill their coffers, with a feeble middle class.289 This social situation

meant that the Ottoman, Russian and Chinese navies were totally dependent

to the state’s will for their existence. Lack of a merchant middle class whose

welfare was reliant to the naval power meant that the navy lacked a social

base which could exert pressure on the administration on its behalf. Lack of a

merchant marine also left these three navies largely devoid of the natural

manpower pool from which came officers and seamen.

Third, the critical dichotomy of army priority versus navy priority

plagued both three states. The shifts in international relations were thus

decisive upon the fate of their navies. It can be argued that for the Ottoman,

Russian and Chinese navies the status disadvantage versus the army was

inescapably permanent, as both three empires were primarly landpowers,

having their primary strategic commitments on the continent.

289
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR and the Successor States (Oxford:
Oxford University Pres, 1998), pp. 6-11; Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 74-85; Rifa’at Ali Abou-El-Haj, Modern Devletin Doğası (İstanbul:
İmge Yayınevi, 2000), pp. 40-44.

131
 With an analytical framework for a comparative study laid, a more

detailed description of each navy is now to follow.

The Imperial Russian Navy 1822-1878

At the accession of Nicholas I to the throne in 1822, the Imperial

Russian Navy was resting upon the laurels it had earned during eighteenth

century. As an institution which owed its existence only to the will of Russian

sovereigns, it had made a most impressive progress since its creation by Peter

the Great a century earlier. With an awesome power projection capability that

had been extended gradually from the Baltic and the Black Sea to the

Mediterranean and the Pacific during the Ottoman and Napoléonic Wars, it

had became the third greatest navy of the world by 1815. Unlike the Baltic

Fleet, which was demobilised following Napoléonic Wars, the Black Sea

Fleet remained active in the period between 1815-1853, providing vital

logistical and fire support to the Russian armies operating in the Balkans

during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29 and in the conquest of Caucassus

during the 1830s. However, the social and military stagnation which typified

the reign of Nicholas I was to affect the Russian navy as well, resulting in a

seriously obsolete fleet by the outbreak of the Crimean War.290

The first experiments with steam power in the Russian navy started

during the reign of Czar Alexander I, with an experimental steamboat being

built at St. Petersburg in 1815, and the navy’s purchase of the small paddle

steamer Skorij in 1817. Both these two ships were small river craft. However,

little was done to develop the native industry and the Russian navy was

290
Sondhaus, p. 17.

132
 totally dependent tono foreign capital and mechanical expertise, a liability

which was largely to continue for most of the the nineteenth century.

According to a British intelligence report from 1852, there were thirteen

steam warships in the Baltic and twenty one in the Black Sea Fleets; however,

only eight of the Baltic and six of the Black Sea ships were considered steam

frigates, the rest being small despatch craft. Large or small, all of the Russian

steamers had either foreign-built machines or had been entirely bought from

aboard. The largest steamer in Baltic was the Olaf, while the best steam

warship of all the Russian navy was the 1500-ton Vladimir, attached to the

Black Sea Fleet. Built in 1848 in England, she had an armament of five 8-

inch shell guns, with a speed of 11 knots.291 There was not one screw warship

in the Russian Navy by the start of hostilites.

As was seen, the Crimean War opened with the greatest victory in the

history of Russian Black Sea Fleet, at Sinop. However, once the vastly

superior allied fleet entered the Black Sea, there was nothing for Admiral

Kornilov to do but to retreat to the safety of the Sevastopol fortifications.

Apart from periodic sorties by paddle steamers, the Russian ships-of-the-line

and frigates remained idle in the port and eventually they were all scuttled to

block the harbor after their guns and crews were removed to bolster the

defense of the besieged city.292 In the Baltic, the situation was the same,

though the fleet of twenty five ships-of-the-line, which constituted the bulk of

Russian naval force, was saved due to the great strength of Kronstadt

fortifications.

291
Andrew Lambert, “The Introduction of Steam” in Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship
1815-1905, edited by Andrew Lambert (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992), p. 27.
292
Ponting, pp. 106-107.

133
 During the war, the Russian navy pioneered the use of naval mines,

sowing primitive examples of those weapons in the approaches to St.

Petersburg. In the meantime, a modernisation program initiated by the Czar’s

brother, Grand Duke Constantine, added two screw ships-of-the-line, the Orel

and the Vyborg, and twenty three heavily armed screw gunboats to the Baltic

Fleet by 1855.293

Suffering eventually defeat in the Crimean War, Russia was allowed

to own only a coast guard force in the Black Sea, the largest ships of which

would not be greater than 800 tons; and Sevastopol could not be fortified.

Accordingly, the Sinop and the Tsesarevitch, the two screw ships-of-the-line

which had been being built in the Black Sea, were transferred to Baltic.294

The lessons of the war were clear: without an adequate railway network

linking the fortified bases of Russian Navy, it would be impossible to make a

successful defense against such a maritime alliance again. Thus, the Russian

government started to rebuild its coastal defenses in the years following the

war.

Naturally, the first priority was given to bolster the fortifications of

Kronstadt. Even before the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and the accession of

Alexander II, 200,000,000 francs were spent to develop the defensive works

of the base, with some 3000 guns deployed to five redoubts and a fortified

ring around the naval complex. The new Czar had the walls of redoubts295

covered by metal armor and guns of the biggest caliber installed.296

293
Sondhaus, p 63.
294
Ibid., p. 64.
295
Redoubt is a reinforced fortification with short, thick and angled walls to resist heavy cannon fire.
It’s main function is to act as a firebase for heavy artillery.
296
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, p. 73.

134
 In the Black Sea, as Sevastopol could not be fortified, efforts were

made instead to deploy batteries at the entrance of the Azov Sea, and to the

mouth of the Bug River to protect the main shipyard of Nicolaev. Kinburn

and Kertch were given top priority, 1,000,000 francs alone being spent on the

Kertch earthworks.297

Efforts were made to develop shipbuilding facilities as well. The

biggest ones were the Baltic Shipyards on the Neva river, with some factories

established by British entrepreneurs. Each of these yards had between 1000-

5000 workers, with the navy depots on the New Holland point on Neva

storing iron, tar, sailcloth, clothing and ammunition. The military prisons at

the same place allowed the employement of convicts as supplementary

labour.298 Nicolaev shipyards also were updated with hydropowered

machines to roll armor for ironclads. However, as the development of the

base was proceeding slowly, temporary workshops were built to complete the

light warships allowed in thr Black Sea. There were three naval barracks,

each able to hold 2000 personnel along with huge victuals and ammunition

depots and a naval apprenticeship college. A most important development

was the layout of a vast railway network from Finland to Crimea, linking the

fortified naval bases with fortress cities of Warsaw, Modlin, Ivanogorod and

Brest-Litovsk on the western land frontier299

Integral to the fortification of the naval bases was an early program of

coast defense ships. One of the results of the Crimean War was the

remarkable approachment of the United States and the Russian Empire

against Britain. The Russian navy obtained plans of the U.S navy’s monitors

297
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, p. 74
298
Ibid., pp. 73-74.
299
Ibid., p. 74.

135
 as a result of this co-operation and by 1870 had completed ten single turreted,

four double turreted and two triple turreted monitors for the Baltic Fleet.300

Larger seagoing ironclads included the British built 3340-ton, 25-gun

armored frigate Pervenetz; her native-built copies, the Ne Tron Menya and the

Kreml; 6130-ton, 25-gun wooden hulled armored frigates Sevastopol and

Petropavlovsk; the iron-hulled, 5000-ton, 12-gun armored frigates General

Admiral and Gerzog Edinburgski, the 5000-ton, 8-gun armored corvette

Knyaz Pojharski and her sister Minin, which was completed as a masted

turret ship. All were stationed in the Baltic.301 By 1876, the Russian navy also

had added the 10,000-ton Pyotr Veliky, armed with four 12-inch guns paired

in two turrets and armored with 14-inch compound plates on her broadsides,

making her one of the most powerful battleships to that date.302

As the Black Sea Fleet effectively had been sundered as a fighting

force, in order to defend the mouths of Don and Volga rivers, the Russian

navy commissioned two floating batteries, which were among the most

curious ship designs in history. Called the Popovkas after Admiral Popov,

who had designed them, the 2500-ton Novgorod and the 3550-ton Popov

were circular in shape, respectively, 101 and 120 feet in diameter and each

carrying two 27-ton guns. Great advertisement of them was made, but it was

soon revealed that they were barely able to move at 7.5 knots and tended to

spin because of their shape when maneuvering, making them useless as

warships.303

300
Ponting, pp. 244-249. Sondhaus, pp. 89-90.
301
Gibbons, p. 34, 50, 63.
302
Ibid., p. 85.
303
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, pp. 81-82.

136
 To defy the crushing Ottoman naval superiority in the Black Sea, the

Russian navy turned to the cutting edge of technology and adopted the

torpedo as its main weapon in that theater of operations. Nineteen fast

merchant ships between 1000-1500 tons were acquired to be fitted as tenders

for small steam launches, which in turn were covered with a light turtleback

iron deck to protect the crew and armed with both spar and self-propelled

torpedoes.304 At the start of the War of 1877-78, the total muster roll of the

Russian Navy in both the Baltic and the Black Sea was ten open sea and

twenty coast defense ironclads, five wooden screw frigates, twenty two

klipers (wooden steam corvettes), hundred screw gunboats and fourteen

yachts.305

Russian naval tactics in this early phase of the steam and iron era was

a curious mixture of backward and futuristic features. The foremost tactician

of the navy was Admiral Grigory Butakov, the successful former commander

of the Vladimir during the Crimean War. He was a proponent of close range

tactics, favoring especially ramming and torpedo attacks. This was partly due

to the deadlock between gun and armor in this phase of naval warfare and

partly reflective of the fact that Russian gunnery standards were quite bad.

However, this reliance on ramming was more dangerous for friend than for

foe, a number of accidents happening during maneuvers. The worst was the

accidental sinking of the wooden frigate Oleg by the ironclad Kreml during

excercises in 1869.306

304
Lyons, p. 141.
305
Kurdoğlu, 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları, p. 83.
306
Ibid., pp. 78-79.

137
 The Russian Battlefleet 1878-1905

The effects of the torpedo strategy during the War of 1877-78 and

how it ultimately influenced the emergence of the Jeune Ecole during was

discussed in the previous chapters. However, the Russian navy and leadership

took very different lessons from its experience. The first lesson was, however

incompetent it was, that a foe possessing command of the sea would have the

ability to destabilise the country by threatening landings anywhere along the

coast. Second, the lack of logistics and gunfire support by the sea seriously

had hindered the operations of the Russian army in both the Balkans and

Caucassus, eventually rendering the situation of the army camped out of

Constantinople vulnerable to the threat of the British Fleet.307

As a result of the lessons learned, a fleet program was initiated in

1882, with a particular focus on the Black Sea. Up to 1902, a total of twenty

battleships and twenty four cruisers were to be built upon a budget of 242

million rubles. This program made Russia an anomaly in the period when

world navies were being swept by the effects of the Jeune Ecole.308 The first

battleships built for the Black Sea Fleet after its dismantling with the treaty of

Paris (1856), were the five 10,000-ton units of the Ekaterina II class,

completed between 1883-87. They were armed with six 12-inch Krupp guns

and seven 6-inch guns; the armor being 16-inch compound. The smaller

Dvyenadsat Apostolov was completed between 1888-90. Armed with four 12-

inch guns and four 6-inch guns, she carried 14-inches of compound armor.309

The first true pre-dreadnought battleship in the Black Sea was the Tri

307
Sondhaus, p. 147.
308
Ibid., p. 148.
309
Gibbons, p. 122, 125.

138
 Svyatitelya, completed between 1891-93. At 13,500 tons, she carried four 12-

inch and six 6-inch guns, along with an 18-inch Harvey steel armor belt. The

Rostislav was a lighter version, at 8800 tons, with four 10-inch and eight 6-

inch guns and 14-inch Harvey steel armor. The last pre-dreadnought built in

the Black Sea before the war against Japan was the notorious Knyaz Potemkin

Tchavritcheskii, of 12,500 tons, with four 12-inch, sixteen 6-inch guns; with a

9-inch Krupp steel armor belt.310

The battleships built for the Baltic Fleet were a less homogenous lot,

ranging from the 10,000-ton Sissoi Velikiy, carrying four 12-and six 6-inch

guns with a-16 inch Harvey steel belt, to three units of the 4000-ton Admiral

Ushakov class coast defense battleships with a battery of four 10-inch and

four 4.7-inch guns and 10-inch Harvey steel armor.311 The naval program of

1882 provided a remarkable boost to the industrial development of Russia,

along with the vast railroad programs like the Trans-Siberian railway.

Although it was dependent on foreign licences, Russian naval industry was at

least able to produce the necessary material at home. Until the 1890s, it was

Krupp which provided necessary expertise for Russian territorial and naval

artillery. With Bismarck’s retirement in 1888 and Russia’s termination of the

Three Emperors’ League two years later, German investments in Russia

retreated. Meanwhile, France, always looking for a continental ally against

Germany after 1871, approached Russia and the Franco-Russian Alliance was

concluded in 1894. Thereafter, French investment flowed into the Russian

naval framework, with the Schneider and Canet companies establishing

310
Gibbons., p. 138, 144, 158.
311
Ibid., p. 142, 130.

139
 foundries in St. Petersburg; replacing Krupp as the main technological

advisor for the Russian navy.312

Another important development in Russian diplomacy was the ever

growing interest in Manchuria and Korea. With the “leasing” of Port-Arthur

(Lüshun) from China in 1897, the third Russian battle squadron came to fore:

the Far Eastern Fleet. In 1898, a new seven-year naval program was

approved, prescribing the building of eight battleships, seventeen cruisers and

over fifty light warships. This building pace surpassed the capacity of the

Russian shipyards and as a result foreign yards were asked to support the

program. Some of the best warships which participated in the war with Japan

were such foreign built units. The 12,900-ton Retvizan, which earned the

reputation of being the soundest unit in the Far Eastern Fleet, was built in the

Cramp shipyard of Pennsylvania. The “lucky ship” Tsesarevitch, of similar

size and tonnage, was French built and served as the model for the Borodino

class of four units, the core of the fleet that went to the reckoning at

Tsushima.313

In the category of smaller warship classes, cruisers, auxiliaries,

torpedo boats and later destroyers, there was equally lively work. The first

modern steel cruiser of the Russian navy was the French built, 3000-ton

Pamiat Merkuria. With an eye to commerce raiding against British trade in

the Pacific, extremely powerful armored cruisers carrying a large battery of 8

and 6-inch guns were commissioned throughout the 1880s and 1890s, with

speeds varying around 18 knots. By 1905, there were eight such vessels in

service. The successful operation of auxiliary cruisers during the War of

312
Sondhaus, p. 167.
313
Sondhaus, p. 167. Gibbons, pp. 157-158.

140
 1877-78 prompted the Russian Navy to form a “Volunteer Fleet” of

merchantmen suitable for conversion into cruisers with 8 and 6-inch guns

stored in Sevastopol and Vladivostok. By 1898, there were twenty five such

British built liners had been acquired for the Volunteer Fleet. The first

modern torpedo boat of the Russian navy was the 43-ton Batum, built by the

British Yarrow company in 1880. By 1904, there were eighty six torpedo

boats in service, built in Britain, France and Germany as well as in Russia.314

In this era of the “true battleship,” Russian naval tactics followed the

technology from behind. The outmoded column, instead of the battle line,

was given priority during maneuvers. Gunnery standards left much to be

desired. However, the Russian navy maintained its edge in one field which

would later prove to be critical: mine technology. The successful results of

mine and torpedo warfare during the War of 1877-78 had given impetus to

many innovations by the Russian navy, including mine-triggering

mechanisms and offensive mine laying tactics. These were to be put to good

use during the war with Japan in 1904-05.315

As a result of a two decades-long program of naval construction, by

1904 Russia kept her status as the third greatest naval power in the world.

However, the navy was not without problems, the most serious being with the

personnel manning the ships. The officer corps was of very mixed quality.

Officers of the middle rank were mostly professional, competent men.

Aleksandr Kolchak, who was to gain fame during the First World War and

the Russian Civil War, was a good example of these middle rank officers. He

had participated in some famous polar expeditions in the years preceding

314
Sondhaus, p. 148.
315
Ibid., pp. 189-190.

141
 Russo-Japanese War, excelling in navigational skills. During the war, he

commanded the destroyer Serditiy, and by a skillful use of mines he

succeeded in sinking the Japanese heavy cruiser Takasago. His leadership

was always from the front, earning the respect of his men.316

In the upper echelons however, the picture was different. For sure,

there were competent and dedicated officers of flag rank, like the legendary

Stepan Makarov, but the majority were men of aristocratic background,

owing their promotions to court connections rather than skill. Admirals like

Oskar Stark, commander of Port Arthur and Nebogatov, second in command

of Baltic Fleet at Tsushima were greatly responsible for the most colossal

defeat ever suffered by a naval force in history.317

The situation of the rank and file presented an ever growing problem

to the naval command in the decades preceding the Russo-Japanese War. A

main cause of the problem was the always draconian nature of naval

discipline and bad living conditions. In the age of sail, when crews had been

conscripted from the peasantry, the conditions had been stoically accepted by

mujhiks (russian peasant) manning the ships. However, with the

mechanisation of the fleet, sailors increasingly were drawn from the urban

lower classes with some industrial skill. This was a period when anarchist and

socialist ideologies were spreading among that emerging working class. By

the time of the Russo-Japanese War, there was serious unrest among the

crews of many ships. At Port Arthur and Tsushima, rank and file did their

utmost, but were let down by the inept command. News of the disaster,

coupled with the long-standing tensions due to living conditions and

316
M.I Smirnov “Admiral Kolchak”, The Slavonic and East European Review, 11, no. 32 (Jan., 1933),
pp. 373–387.
317
Wilson, pp. 244-245.

142
 bolshevik propaganda among sailors resulted in the notorious rebellion of the

Black Sea Fleet in June 1905, led by the battleship Potemkin.318 Material

destruction aside, it was obvious that the personnel manning the navy were no

longer reliable. In the last decade of Tsarist rule, the question was how to

keep that unreliable force together as a coherent entity.

The Birth and the Death of the Imperial Chinese Navy, 1862-1895

Imperial China under the rule of Qing or Manchu Dynasty was a

realm in turmoil at the start of the nineteenth century. Coming under the

direct assault of European imperialism, China suffered perhaps most severely

from the naval superiority of her western enemies. The humiliations that

China had to endure during the two Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1858-62) were

largely due to the complete freedom that the British and French enjoyed in

selecting where and when to strike on the more than 2000 mile-long Chinese

coast, which stretched from Korea to Vietnam.319 With the establishment of

formal relations with Western powers with the treaty of Tientsin, a naval

defense fund was initiated by the newly created Tsungli Yamen, or foreign

office at the Qing court, in 1862.Thus begin the formation of an organized

navy in China for the first time since the voyages of Admiral Cheng Ho in the

early fifteenth century.320

The first attempt to form a naval force composed of modern ships had

the modest aim of providing a maritime customs squadron to assist in

collecting taxes and intercepting smugglers. Called the Lay-Osborn Flotilla,

318
For a detailed account of the Black Sea mutiny see Richard Hough, The Potemkin Mutiny (London:
Bluejacket Books, 1961)
319
Sondhaus, pp. 35-36.
320
Wright, pp. 13-14.

143
 after the two English naval officers appointed to command this squadron by

Prince Kung, head of the Tsungli Yamen, this force consisted of two paddle

and four screw corvettes purchased from Britain. However, due to the refusal

of Chinese provincial authorities to be commanded by foreign officers, the

flotilla existed less than a year, and the ships were laid up in Shanghai until

1865, when they were sold to various countries.321 After this fiasco, a fresh

start was taken in 1867, with the establishment of the Canton Flotilla. Its four

ships were all British built, small screw corvettes under 500 tons. This tiny

force took root, paving way to the naval modernisation of Quing China.322

At the foundation of the Chinese naval modernization, was the

development and fortification of bases which were to harbor purchased ships

and hopefully would contribute to native shipbuilding. The Chinese coastline

was basically divided between the North China Sea, or the Yellow Sea as it

was often called, from theYalu River to Shanghai; and the South China Sea

stretching from Shanghai to Vietnam. Shanghai was also the entrance to the

Yangtze river, the main artery of the Chinese Empire.323 Due to its great

commercial and strategic importance, Shanghai was the first base to be

developed. The Kiangnan Arsenal at this city was set up in 1864 and soon

grew to employ 1300 workers. The first ship built there was a paddle steamer

completed in 1868. In 1875 an experimental ironclad was finished, followed

by a small steel gunboat in 1881. However, the Shanghai-built ships were

deemed unsuccesful and the Kinagnan Arsenal instead focused on producing

great quantities or ordnance. Almost all the native cast guns –licence

produced European models- arming coastal fortifications and warships were

321
Wright., pp. 15-18.
322
Ibid., p. 20.
323
Ibid., p. 11.

144
 products of the Kiangnan Arsenal. Meanwhile, a dockyard was built in 1872,

thus transforming Shanghai into the base of Yangtze gunboat fleet.324

The Southern Fleet’s base was set up at Foochow. A 120-acre area

was selected near the mouth of River Min, close to the Pagoda anchorage and

building work started in 1867 with French expertise and finance. Three

building slips with the attached workshops are built, followed in 1871 by an

iron foundry. The first ship completed at Foochow was a 1450-ton armed

transport launched in 1869. The Foochow Arsenal was not sufficient to build

armored ships, thus the building executed was wooden or composite. Despite

its more ambitious beginnings and direct foreign investment, Foochow never

managed to fulfill expectations and its functions were gradually taken over by

the Kiangnan Yard.325

Increasing tensions with the Meiji government following Japan’s

Taiwan expedition of 1874 led to the establishment of the Northern or

Peiyang Fleet as the most important squadron of the Imperial Chinese Navy.

It was planned that the Peiyang Fleet would comprise high tonnage modern

units bought aboard, thus requiring not only a dockyard and arsenal but also a

fortified anchorage. The location selected to become the dockyard was the

small, shallow inlet of Lushun on Liaotung Peninsula in Manchuria, called

Port Arthur by the Europeans. By 1881 work started on Lushun. The harbor

was dredged, a torpedo boat depot, dockyard and assorted repair and

maintenance facilities were installed. All of the construction took nine years

to complete. The Bay of Wei-Hai-Wei, some 100 miles southeast of Port

Arthur, was selected as the fortified anchorage. Meanwhile, to serve the

324
Wright., pp. 21-22.
325
Ibid., pp. 23-24.

145
 smaller units of the Peiyang Fleet, a fortified arsenal was set up in Taku, at

the mouth of Peiho River.326

The construction of a navy then requires men to crew the ships. China

had an enormous coastal population with traditional seamanship knowledge;

however, transforming picked members of this maritime society into an

effective modern naval personnel was another matter. To train naval officers,

each regional fleet set up its own college in its base, employing French and

British instructors who tought foreign languages, navigation, gunnery and

engineering. In 1877, twelve cadets from Foochow were sent to Britain to

continue their training aboard Royal Navy ships. Almost all of these select

men, such as the famous admiral of the future Sah Chen-ping, reached the top

echelons of the Chinese navy in the last years of Qing rule and throughout the

Republican era.327

Up to 1877, the Kiangnan and Foochow yards together completed

twelve wooden warships and twelwe wooden armed transports. Of these, the

largest units were the screw frigates Hai-an and Yu-yuen, completed at

Kiangnan in 1872-73. They were 2630-ton warships carrying twenty six

muzzle loading guns. The first ironclad built in China was the small 195-ton

gunboat Chin-ou completed in 1875 at Kiangnan. She carried a single 17-cm

muzzle loading Krupp gun.328 Following the Japanese expedition to Taiwan,

the Qing court decided to increase the scope and pace of naval armament.

From Britain, six iron and six steel gunboats were ordered. These ships,

weighing between 256 and 440 tons, were armed with a single large and two

smaller calibre guns. All arrived by 1881.

326
Wright, pp. 26-27.
327
Ibid., pp. 30-32.
328
Ibid., pp. 34, 36, 38-39.

146
 At the same time, the Chao Yung and the Yang Wei, 16 knot fast,

1350-ton small cruisers armed with two 10-inch and four 40-pounder guns

were built in Armstrong Yard. Native building was concentrated at Foochow

yard, where five 1300-ton composite sloops and the 2150-ton composite

cruiser K’ai Chi were completed up to 1885. Meanwhile, the Kiangnan yard

achieved a notable success by laying down the 1477-ton crusier Pao Min in

1883, the first native steel warship of China. She was completed a few

months after the end of the Sino-French War.329 The Qing court sought to

acquire armored cruisers and battleships to constitute the striking force of the

Peiyang Fleet; however, Britain was unwilling to sell such large ships out of

the fear of upsetting Russia, which had a growing interest in the Far East

during that period. As a result, Li Hung-chang, the viceroy of Chihli who was

responsible for the Peiyang Fleet, sent envoys to other European countries

and found a willing seller in Germany. 7144-ton steel battleships Ting Yuen

and Chen Yuan, and the 2300-ton protected cruiser Tsi Yuen were ordered

from the Vulcan shipyard, while Howaldt Works completed the 2200-ton

steel cruisers Nan Shui and Nan Ch’en. In the class of torpedo craft, the

Chinese navy acquired eight second class and fourteen third class

torpedoboats from the Vulcan and Schichau yards.330

Completed in 1885, the Ting Yuen and the Chen Yuen were the most

powerful warships in Far Eastern seas. They were armed with a main battery

of four 12-inch Krupp breechloaders in two barbettes amidships and a

secondary battery of two 5.9-inch Krupp breechloaders in two small turrets at

each end of the deck. There were three torpedo tubes and two 15-ton satellite

329
Wright, pp. 42-47.
330
Ibid., pp. 50-53, 181-182.

147
 tropedo boats stowed on the deck as well. The armor was compound, being

12-inch on barbettes, and 8-inch on belt. Their speed was 10 knots.331 With

their arrival following the end of Sino-French War, China established

regional naval superiority.

Chinese steam navy’s first baptism of fire came in 1884, during the

Sino-French War over the domination of Vietnam. The area of operations was

the responsibility of the Southern Fleet, composed of three wooden warships,

three wooden armed transports, two British-built ironclad gunboats and a

motley collection of worthless armed junks; in total twenty two ships.

Commanding the fleet was Chiang Peilung, a court bureaucrat and member of

the “hawk” faction, which advocated war against France. Despite his

warmongering, Chiang proved to be a most lilylivered and incompetent

military leader once the action began. Facing the Southern Fleet was the

French Far East Squadron composed of four ironclads, four cruisers, three

gunboats and two torpedo boats under the command of the able Admiral

Amadée Courbet.332 Having neither stomach nor hope to give an equal fight

against the qualitatively much superior French force, Chiang retreated his

ships to the shallow waters of Foochow where the large French ironclads

could not navigate. However, the determined Courbet managed to pass his

three gunboats, two torpedo boats and one ironclad from the River Min and

attacked the Chinese fleet on 23 August 1884. The result was a disaster for

the Chinese, with 1085 casualties, nine ships sunk, ten damaged and the

arsenal bombarded. More disasters followed when French torpedo boats sank

the large frigate Yu Yuen and the composite sloop Teng Ch’ing on 14

331
Gibbons, p. 105.
332
Wilson, pp. 122-124.

148
 February 1885 at Shipu Bay. War ended with Chinese defeat in April 1885.

The Southern Fleet never recovered from the losses it suffered.333

The less than encouraging results of the war with France did not stop

the Chinese naval program. The ships that had been lost were all obsolete

wooden ships of very low fighting value, the modern units ordered from

Germany were detained by their builders due to neutrality laws and were thus

kept out of harm’s way.334 Once the peace was signed, battleships, cruisers

and torpedoboats arrived one by one while the native construction resumed.

During the decade leading to the war with Japan in 1894, the repaired and

improved Foochow yard launched three composite cruisers weighing between

1296-2100 tons; four 500-ton wooden gunboats and three 1000-ton steel

torpedo gunboats.335 The most striking native built ship of that decade was

the 2067-ton steel armored cruiser Ping Yuen, built in the Foochow yard in a

very noteworthy three years (1886-89). Her 8-inch armor belt and the

armament of one 10.2-inch and two 5.9-inch Krupp breechloaders were

imported from Germany but the rest of her construction was executed by

local resources. She had a speed of 11 knots.336

Considering that the fledgling Imperial Japanese Navy of the period

was only able to assamble small torpedo boats imported from France in

sections, Chinese naval industrial achievement sounds impressive.337 The last

foreign built major units to join the Imperial Chinese Navy were the 2300-

ton, 18 knot fast Armstrong protected cruisers Chih Yuen and Ching Yuen,

and the 2900-ton, 15 knot fast Vulcan built armored cruisers King Yuen and

333
Tucker, p. 170.
334
Sondhaus, p. 152.
335
Wright, pp. 68-70.
336
Ibid., p. 78.
337
Sondhaus, p. 131.

149
 Lai Yuen. Completed in 1887, Armstrong cruisers carried a powerful battery

of three 8.2-inch and two 6-inch guns with four torpedo tubes; while the

armored cruisers completed same year had two 8.2-inch and two 5.9-inch

guns with four torpedo tubes.338 All joined the Peiyang Fleet upon arrival.

More torpedo boats were also added to the flotilla, with one first class and six

second class units being completed in Britain and Germany before 1895.339

Two decades of increasing tensions with Japan over the domination of

Korea and Taiwan finally exploded into full war in July 1894. Numerically,

the fleets were an even match with ten first-class warships, but technically the

Chinese navy had absolute superiority over its adversary. Against its five

armored warships, included two battleships, the Japanese had not one

armored unit.340 However, the critical difference was in the less glamorous,

but much more decisive details: command and logistics. Admiral ItoYuko,

who commanded the Japanese Fleet, was an accomplished professional with

long years of sea experience and training, little different from his European

peers in personal record.341 In stark contrast, Admiral Ting Ju-ch’ang

commanding the Peiyang Fleet was a cavalry officer who had been

transferred from the army. He was personally brave but totally clueless about

naval warfare. He relied to the expertise of Philo MacGiffin, a former US

Navy ensign hired to act as his counsellor and de-facto second in command

aboard the flagship Ting Yuen. Their subordinate officers mirrored the two

commanders both in character and capability.342

338
Wright, p. 73.
339
Ibid., p. 182.
340
Wilson, pp. 137-140.
341
Peattie and Evans, p. 40.
342
Wright, p. 46, 82.

150
 The Logistics of the Chinese navy was hiding a disaster which was to

show itself in the fine hours of combat. During the battle of Yalu, most of the

12-inch shells fired by Chinese battleships were discovered to be lacking their

explosives or had been filled by concrete and even sawdust due to the fraud

and corruption at the arsenals.343 Chinese naval operations also lacked a clear

directive. Admiral Ting was initally ordered to escort troop movements

between Korea and mainland China; thus he dispersed some of his smaller

units for this task. Later, he received orders to seek and destroy the Japanese

navy for naval domination; but in the intervening actions some of his

detached ships had been already lost. In contrast, Admiral Ito was given the

general directive to ensure the safety of Japanese troop movements as first

priority, and if the opportunity arise, gain naval domination as a secondary

objective. The clarity of his orders and the freedom he was given for tactical

considerations ensured advantage of planning and flexibility over the

enemy.344

The first action of the war occured on 22 July 1894. The cruiser Tsi

Yuen and the torpedo-gunboat Kuang Yi which were going to meet and escort

three troop ships encountered the Japanese flying squadron consisting of the

cruisers Yoshino, Naniwa and Akitsushima to the west of Asan. Japanese

warships opened fire from close range, heavily damaging the Tsi Yuen and

sinking the Kuang Yi. The Naniwa, then under command of Togo Heihachiro,

caught the British flagged troop ship Kowshing while pursuing the fleeing

Chinese cruiser and sank her after six hours of fruitless negotiations, with

heavy loss of life. The sinking of a British flagged ship created an

343
Wilson, p. 138.
344
Ibid., pp. 141-142.

151
 international incident, but the case was closed in the favor of the Japanese

after investigations.345

The next month passed with naval inactivity as both sides were busy

with convoy duties. But when Admiral Ting received a change of orders to

seek and destroy the Japanese Fleet the major battle of the war was fought on

17 September 1894 at the mouth of the Yalu River. The Battle of Yalu was

the first naval action fought between modern battleships. Admiral Ting

arranged his ships in line abreast, imitating the formation of the Austrian fleet

at the Battle of Lissa346 28 years earlier. Against him, Ito placed his ships in

line ahead. During the six hour-long action, the well-manned Japanese ships

easily evaded the head-on charge of the Chinese formation and circled around

the Chinese warships until dusk, battering them mercilessly with their quick

firing guns from close range. The Chinese lost four cruisers and a sloop; the

rest of the ships were badly damaged for a total of 1350 casualities. Japanese

casualities were 290 with four damaged ships.347

Ting took his mauled squadron back to Port Arthur while Ito declined

to pursue him due to his own damage. For a month, Ting repaired and readied

his remaining ships as best as he could and went to sea again in October,

when a Japanese army had landed on Liaotung Peninsula to take Port Arthur.

Ting brought his ships to Wei-Hai-Wei where he was blockaded by the

Japanese fleet, while two Japanese army divisions were landed to besiege the

345
Wilson. pp. 142-147.
346
Battle of Lissa was an inconclusive naval action fought on 20 July 1866 during the Seven Weeks
War, between an Italian fleet of sixteen and an Austrian fleet of eleven ironclads. Austrian admiral
Wilhelm von Tegetthoff arranged his fleet in an arrowhead formation and charged to the Italian line
which was virtually stopped because of poor leadership. The Italian flagship was rammed and sunk by
the Austrian flagship while a smaller ironclad blew up when her magazine caught fire. This confused
mêlée erroneously led most of the naval tacticians around the world to give a precedence to close
range tactics and ramming instead of fire discipline and sailing in line. Sondhaus, p. 94-96.
347
Tucker, pp. 240-241.

152
 harbor. Japanese torpedo boats made several raids during winter, eventually

sinking the Ting Yuen, but only with the fall of forts guarding the anchorage

did the situation became hopeless for the Chinese. Admiral Ting comitted

suicide on 12 February 1895, and on 16 February what remained of the

Peiyang Fleet surrendered, namely the cruisers Tsi Yuen and Ping Yuen, the

battleship Chen Yuan, six gunboats and a torpedo boat.348 Peace was signed

on April 1895 at Shimonoseki, Japan.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki was the worst defeat ever suffered by

China in modern history. What remained of the once great navy, built in two

decades at great cost, was a handful of gunboats and torpedo boats. Following

the war a feeble attempt was made to reconstruct the navy on more modest

lines but due to the financial collapse caused by war indemnity, and the

internal unrest fueled by the anger and desperation of the defeat frustrated

these intentions.349 The Chinese revolution of 1911 and the following spiral

of destruction (political fragmantation, civil war and the Japanese invasion of

1937) was to continue until the victory of the communists in 1949, effectively

ruling out any possibility to own other than a flotilla of gunboats to patrol the

Yangtze River. China only started to rebuild a navy of open sea capability in

the 1970s. Thus, the First Sino-Japanese War marked the effective end of the

Chinese steam navy.

When assessed, the short but tumultuous story of the Imperial Chinese

Navy constitutes an exemplary vindication of the fact that an assembly of

warships do not necessarily make a navy. Imperial China failed miserably in

the three critical backbone elements of an efficient naval force: framework,

348
Wright, pp. 99-105.
349
Sondhaus p. 173.

153
 personnel and command. Corruption on naval bases was endemic, as in

almost all other late Qing institutions. Warships were carefully painted and

polished to color the eyes of local mandarins and foreign visitors, but when

more closely examined by expert eyes, they were fully revealed to be lacking

discipline and often in bad state of repair.350 The naval colleges were

haphazard institutions; with no unity of curriculum and practically little

tactical training. The number of cadets was always low to man all of the

ships. A regulated promotion system was non-existent; appointments were

executed according to patronage and court intrigues. The result was

bureaucrats like Chiang Peilung and army officers like Ting Ju-ch’ang

commanding fleets and leading them to destruction.351 To provide the

necessary expertise the Qing government resorted to hiring mercenary

European officers to act as advisors for the captains and as drillmasters

aboard warships from the early years of the Chinese steam navy; sometimes

with notable improvements. However, once they resigned from their posts;

generally due to the chronic shortage of money which plagued the late Qing

military system, every improvement they had brought went with them.352 In

short, the Imperial Chinese Navy was an institutional failure and eventually

was destroyed by the smaller and technically weaker, but institutionally much

superior Japanese Navy. Perhaps the most positive effect of the Chinese

350
When the Peiyang Fleet visited Yokohama in 1891, Togo Heihachiro who inspected the Ting Yuen
was shocked to see trash on the decks and laundry hanging from the guns. He likened the Chinese
fleet to “having the appearance of a fine sword but being no sharper than a kitchen knife.” When the
famous British Admiral Lord Charles Beresford visited Chefoo in October 1898 and examined the
Chinese warships present, including four brand new training cruisers, he had “bluntly told to leave the
defense of the country to the army and sell off the ships, including those under construction.” Wright,
p. 84, 112.
351
Ibid., p. 30, 95.
352
Ibid., p. 83.

154
 Imperial Navy was its pioneering of a modern military industry in China;

with important consequences in the later years of the twentieth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century, seapower was the primadonna of

international power politics. Although land armies possessed increasingly

improved weapons, the advantages they provided were incremental rather

than decisive. Armies were still composed of foot slogging infantry, horsed

cavalry and artillery. The European contingents of imperialism, however well

armed they were, were always in danger of getting defeated by the native

peoples of Asia, Africa and Americas.353 But against the destruction that an

armor clad battleship with big caliber guns could inflict, native peoples had

no answer. This is why the nineteenth century is called the era of “Gunboat

Diplomacy.” The building or the purchase and upkeep of such vessels

required no less than a total re-organisation of the state, and eventually

society, along modern lines. Being a first-rank naval power equalled the

status of great power according to the requirements of a battlefleet.354 The

second half of the nineteenth century witnessed both spectacular

demonstrations of mechanised navies and a head spinning pace of

technological change which often left battleships obsolete even before they

were launched to the sea. In that context, the Ottoman, Russian and Chinese

Empires, the three major landpowers of Eastern Eurasia, struggled to build

and maintain credible battlefleets with varying results. The story of the

Ottoman navy was examined in the previous chapter. Comparing Russian and

353
Vandervort, Bruce. “1815-1960 Sömürge Savaşları” in Dretnot, Tank ve Uçak: Modern Çağda
Savaş Sanatı 1815-2000, edited by Jeremy Black (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınları, 2003), pp. 164-170.
354
Headrick, p. 243. Sondhaus, pp. 227-228.

155
 Chinese steam navies with the Ottoman battlefleet provided interesting

perspectives about the limits of modernization in each empire.

Despite its long standing position as one of the primary great powers,

Russia was essentially an un-industrial, pre-modern society in early the

nineteenth century. By the time the Crimean War had begun, there was no

railroad in the Romanov territories beyond Moscow. The capability of

producing any kind of steam machinery was non-existent. The traditional

weakness of Russian naval power, the need to maintain three separate fleets

in regions as far and unconnected as the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the

Pacific Ocean, greatly exacerbated any attempt at a thorough modernization.

Due to the weakness of native industrial base, Russia had to depend on

foreign markets for steamship machinery, or often for the ships themselves in

the initial period of the steam battlefleet. However, after their traumatic defeat

against the mainly naval-industrial power of allied Britain and France, Russia

moved to establish a sound industry and an integrated rail network to never

suffer paralysis in the face of an enemy again. The Russian railway program

culminated in the epic Trans-Siberian Railway (1889-1917), one of the

greatest feats of industry and engineering of the nineteenth century.355

The great role that the lack of sufficient internal communications

played in the 1877-78 catastrophy was to play a similar invigorating role in

the Ottoman railroad program during the 1880s. However, the Ottoman

Empire never managed to develop its industrial basis, unlike Russia. Russia,

spending the money to raise and develop factories instead of buying weapons,

initially suffered a disadvantage in war technology against the Ottoman

355
For a monography about Trans-Siberian Railway, see Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The
Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917 (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1991)

156
 Empire, which had laid huge sums from its already overburdened treasury

into the international arms markets for the latest weaponry. However, once

Russian industry took root and gained impetus by the 1880s, it rapidly re-

established technological superiority over its Ottoman rival.356

Using various foreign licences, Russian shipyards rapidly launched

modern battleships while the Ottoman Fleet, prisoner in the Golden Horn,

rapidly collapsed out of neglect and lack of means to maintain it. In the area

of personnel and training, the Russian Fleet relied on conscripted peasants

like the Ottomans. However, the big difference was in the institutional ethic

of officer corps in both states. As a participant of the eighteenth century

military revolution, despite the widespread malign by its western peers,

Russian officer corps had by and large became a dedicated caste of

professionals by the mid-nineteenth century. By contrast, the Ottomans were

a full century late in the establishment of a professional officer corps and, as a

result, they always remained deficient in command and drill compared to the

Russians.357

The colorful story of the Chinese steam navy is very educative about

the impossibility of establishing a naval force in a pre-modern state. The

Imperial Chinese Navy bore the curious distinction of being the only “feudal”

steam fleet in the world. It was totally outside a centralised administration

and was devoid of any strategic notion; each provincial fleet was caring for

itself, left to its own regional means. Totally unlike the Ottomans, who made

356
For an overview of the Russian military industry development see Jonathan Grant “Tsarist
Armament Strategies 1870-1914,” Journal of Soviet Military Studies 4 (March 1991), pp. 141-149.
357
About the effects of the eighteenth century military revolution on the Russian army see Virginia
Aksan’s remarks about the Russian Army in the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish War in Virginia H. Aksan,
Ahmed Resmi Efendi: Savaşta ve Barışta bir Osmanlı Devlet Adamı 1700-1783 (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı
Yurt Yayınları, 1997), pp. 126-128.

157
conscious and determined efforts to establish a professional officer corps, the

Chinese never made more than a token effort to train proper naval officers.

The very large coastal population that China possessed was never

transformed into a naval reserve pool. China acquired the latest system

warships, but these were only a collection of vessels, not a navy. However,

the industrial aspect of Chinese naval effort requires closer examination.

China did not possess any practice or experience of building modern warships

before the 1870s but by the 1880s its shipyards were able to complete vessels

as large and complex as a steel armored cruiser in a relatively short amount of

time. Compared with this performance, the Ottoman Imperial Arsenal

required eleven years to complete the medium-size ironclad Hamidiye, laid

down in 1874. The fraud within Chinese and Ottoman bureaucracies

paralleled each other, but obviously the Chinese did not allow it to impede

their shipbuilding effort as much as the Ottomans did. Whatever its industrial

achievement the Chinese steam navy never seriously possessed an organised

basis and support, and once encountered a well-prepared and determined foe,

it rapidly collapsed. In turn, despite the financial difficulties, governmental

neglect in the later part of the nineteenth century, and a weak industrial basis,

the Ottoman steam navy managed to develop a core of professional officer

class, which kept it alive for better times.

158
 CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

By the end of the Napoléonic Wars, Britain had emerged as the

undisputed sovereign of the seas, the premier naval power. Its defeated

longtime rival, France, still had the second, but Russia emerged with the third

greatest battlefleet of the world, eclipsing the devastated Spain and Holland.

The rise of Russian naval power was due not to any change in the Russian

maritime trade or a surge of colonialism. The Russian navy had become an

indispensable part of the imperial defense, as Finland was added to the

Empire and the Russian position in the Black Sea had been firmly entrenched

during the decades of war. As Russian imperialism moved into the

Caucassus, the indispensable mobility, logistics and fire support missions of

the Black Sea fleet became increasingly important. In other words, the

Russian Navy had assumed the role of commissariat and siege train in

addition to its original purpose of providing a shield to the coastal possesions

against seaborne Ottoman assaults. In the meantime, Ottoman seapower was

emerging from a time of technological innovation and reorganization. In

numbers of ships-of-the-line, the Ottoman navy ranked fourth in the world in

1830, and was the foremost among the second rank naval powers. This

change was due to a new understanding of naval power by the Ottomans.

As part of the coalition against Napoléon, the Ottomans had witnessed

the efficiency of British seapower in the defeat of France, especially during

the Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801). Due to a correct perception of the

159
 importance of naval power by Selim III and his successor Mahmud II, the

Ottoman navy started to develop into an independent armed force instead of

being an extension of the army.358 The main cause of the naval weakness had

been identified correctly as the unprofessional nature of the naval officers

even before the sultanate of Selim III and a naval college, the Mühendishane-

i Bahr-i Hümayûn, was set up to alleviate the problem. The Russians had

encountered the same problem earlier in the eighteenth century, and had

countered it by hiring officers among the maritime nations of Europe until

they had trained their own competent professionals. In fact, the fleet which

set the Ottoman battle squadron afire in Çeşme (1770) had been commanded

by a British admiral while Rear-Admiral Dzhon, the commander of the Black

Sea Fleet during the Ottoman War of 1788-92, was none other than John Paul

Jones, the legendary Yankee hero of the American Revolution.

Ironically the Ottomans had a far older tradition of employing foreign

specialists in their army, a practice descended from the early classical era. It

was not, however, for the purpose that Russians did it: the import and

institutionalisation of the western military professionalism.359 By the

Napoléonic Wars, Russians had their own great seamen of first generation,

like Admirals Senyavin and Ushakov. To be fair however, it must be said that

the Ottomans lacked the necessary peace time required for proper officer

education and training. The period from 1768 to 1841 was a time of

continuous warfare and turmoil for the Ottoman Empire which virtually

358
Panzac, Daniel. “The Ottoman Navy: From Early Beginnings to Nizâm-ı Cedîd (14th to 18th
Centuries),” in The Logbook of the Ottoman Navy: Ships, Legends, Sailors, edited by Emir Yener and
Ekrem Işın (İstanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009), p. 31.
359
For an analysis of the import of western military professionalism both in Russia, the Ottoman
Empire, China and Japan see David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army: the Introduction of
European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World 1600-1914 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Pres), pp. 13-79, 107-142.

160
destroyed the basic fabric of state and society. Everything had to be created

almost from scratch, including naval education and colleges. Only by the

1870s did graduates possessing necessary skills begin to appear in the

Ottoman navy in any numbers.

Finding enough crewmembers was another serious problem. With the

Greek Revolt and Mahmud II’s restructuring of the empire as a Muslim

autocracy, the navy was purged of its Greek-Christian element, which had

traditionally constituted the navigation personnel. Impressment or voluntary

recruitment all failed to alleviate the problem. Only with the full

implementation of conscription in the 1840s was a more satisfactory solution

to the manpower shortage found. By comparison, Russia had implemented a

working conscription system in the eighteenth century which also had been

used to man the navy. Initially, the muzhiks allotted to man the warships

suffered heavy losses in many accidents and storms in the period of initiation

on the sea, but with persistant efforts, Russia managed to train a satisfactory

number of naval reserves.

As the Ottomans struggled to properly man and professionalise their

navy, technological change was gaining pace. As well as being the harbinger

of the industrial revolution, steam power offered a mobility revolution over

the waves by freeing ships from the unpredictability of the elements. The first

steamships were in commercial use in the middle of the Napoléonic Wars and

before the end of the conflict, the first steam warship was on the water. Over

the next thirty years, the advances were so rapid that technology quickly

surpassed the level which could be followed by countries without an

industrial framework.

161
 The initial paddlewheels quickly left their place to the screw propellor

while the appeareance of the shell gun triggered the armored warship. Guns

became heavier and more destructive; they were installed in rotating armored

turrets to provide “round the clock” fire. As ships got bigger, masts and sails

disappeared in favor of increasingly developed machinery. First iron, then

steel replaced wood as the primary shipbuilding material. Such a rapid and

complex change meant that warships became the most costly and advanced

weapon systems in the world.

The Ottoman Empire and Russia were broadly similar in industrial

capability at the start of the period and thus were technologically dependent

on the western market and expertise in the initial phase of the naval

revolution. However, following the Crimean War, Russia initiated a massive

industrialisation program which changed the face of its realms. In the twenty

years following the Treaty of Paris (1856), Russia built the necessary naval-

industrial framework to construct its own latest model battleships. The

Ottoman Empire, in contrast, apart from a short period between 1870-80,

failed to construct a similar heavy industry and remained a client to the

Western arms market with serious financial and political implications.360

While the Russo-Ottoman naval rivalry was going in, on the Far East

a new rivalry was emerging. China under the Qing dynasty was the world’s

greatest economy until the end of the eighteenth century, but by the end of

1850’s it was a giant in the state of stagnation and decline. European

imperialism had made a shocking show of force twice (1839-42 and 1858-62)

to open the Chinese economy to “free trade” by a full exploitation of steam

360
Grant, pp. 34-36.

162
powered warships and improved artillery. A similar act of “gunboat

diplomacy,” this time by the United States of America, was employed to

impose an unequal relationship on the introvert Japanese Empire in 1853. The

reactions given by the two states offer a salutary lesson in terms of

modernisation. The Chinese elites never seriously considered the complete

overhaul of the state and society required by a modern state. Though, to be

fair, even if they had wanted one, it is doubtful that the unending internal

turmoil and continuous foreign intervention would have allowed them to

follow a coherent agenda.

In 1862, China set out to build an organized navy for the first time

since the early fifteenth century. Shipyards and arsenals were set up,

sometimes with successful results, and Chinese shipbuilding gained

noteworthy successes in its own fledgeling capacity. Still, the Chinese naval

organization was almost caricaturesquely pre-modern, centered around

regional fleets under semi-autonomous viceroys, without a proper drill

program or professional officers. Almost any Chinese naval capability was

dependent on hired foreigners. In the end, China ended up with a costly

collection of ships the primary mission of which was coastal defense and

which was devoid of any professionalism. These regional fleets were

annihilated by France in 1885 and by their regional rival, Japan, in 1894.

The story of the Imperial Japanese Navy, on the other hand, is

exemplary. When the American “Black Ships” appeared in the Tokyo harbor

in 1853, Japan had not built even a specialist warship in its history, let alone a

navy. Some twenty years later a modest but extremely conscious start was

taken for the construction of what was to become the third greatest naval

163
power in the world in 1941. With the adoption of the British Navy as a role

model, the Japanese Navy succeeded in making the unique cultural import of

naval professionalism complete with its traditions. Financially strapped and

conceived only as a coastal defense force by politicians, the Imperial

Japanese Navy gave the first priority to the education of a superb officers

cadre, fully equipped for the necessities of modern naval warfare. These men

correctly understood the correlation of naval power and overseas trade in the

same time with Mahan and launched a carefully prepared political campaign

to rally popular support for the navy’s cause. Their professionalism would be

crowned with a great victory over a technically much superior enemy in the

1894-95 Sino-Japanese War that brought the long awaited political support.

In the meantime, stage by stage, Japan overcame its poverty in natural

resources and managed to build a sound naval-industrial framework,

supported by a healthy private sector. In this second and critical area, Japan

far surpassed both China and the Ottoman Empire. In the decade following

the war with China, Japan assured British diplomatic support and constructed

a well-built, well-manned battlefleet to tackle its next and most dangereous

rival in the Far East, Russia. Such a balancing of means, aims and strategy

had been seen nowhere outside the West at that point. The successful

modernization of Japan, and above all its navy, brought the greatest naval

victory of the modern age along with the great power status to the nation in

the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

While Japan was making its modest naval beginnings, the Ottoman

navy was entering to its last dramatic period of expansion under the direction

of the pro-navy Sultan Abdülaziz. The defeat of Russia to the maritime

164
 alliance of France and England had convinced many Ottomans of the

superiority of seapower. However, the Ottoman naval expansion was flawed

in many respects. First of all, reinforcing the fleet up to the point that it

became the fourth greatest armored navy of the world was beyond the

resources of the Ottoman state. To cover the fleet’s expenses large amounts

of foreign loans were used, which would prove to be fatal to the imperial

economy in the long run. The number of ships had far surpassed the number

of avaliable sailors and officers, which resulted in a manpower shortage. The

naval college was properly reformed into a modern institution but the number

of graduates was always small.

Considering the fact that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the principal

raison d’etre of the Ottoman battlefleet, was scuttled according to the Treaty

of Paris (1856), the question of why the Ottoman administration felt the need

for such an enormous naval expansion comes to the mind. Without Russia,

only Greece remained a maritime threat, but it could be countered surely

without a costly ironclad force. Lawrence Sondhaus argues that, just like

nuclear weapons today, the armored battlefleets of the nineteenth century

were perceived as the ultimate deterrent force; the best way to force rivals to

back down without resorting to the costly and socially disruptive land

mobilizations.361 Abdülaziz had seen the allied armada of the Crimean War

forcing the Russian giant onto its knees and it can be argued that he tried to

imitate this deterrent force. However, the Ottoman Empire had no framework

to support such a fleet. The Sultan made a grave mistake in misjudging the

means at his disposal and the aims. The contribution of Abdülaziz’s naval

361
Sondhaus, pp. 226-228.

165
 program to the Ottoman moratorium of 1875 was to cost him his throne; by a

fate of irony, he had become the first victim of the navy he himself had built.

In the ensuing Balkan crisis and the Russian War of 1877-78, the huge

ironclad fleet that Ottomans could neither maintain nor properly man

achieved little.

The collapse of the Ottoman naval power into oblivion during the

thirty three year reign of Abdülhamid II was, and still is, one of the most

controversial topics of modern Ottoman history. Abdülhamid’s political

opponents accused him of locking the navy into the Golden Horn out of his

fearful obsession about the role that the navy had played in the deposition of

Abdülaziz, since his deposition in 1908,. There was no doubt that Abdühamid

II’s approach to the navy was reluctant at best. Admiral Mark Kerr, who was

the British naval attaché in Constantinople, remarked that Abdülhamid

showed a great interest in the submarine and, according to him, this was

because submarines had no big guns to turn towards his residence, Yıldız

Palace.362 However, the Sultan was not alone in his skepticism about the

navy. The recent experience of the Russian War, when the makeshift Russian

torpedoboats had virtually immobilized the inept Ottoman navy and Russian

merchant cruisers raided the Ottoman Black Sea coast with impunity, had

created an outcry in among the Ottoman elite. The existence of a navy created

at such a crippling cost came into question and an anti-navy sentiment rallied

around the slogan “Donanma İstemezük !” (We don’t want a navy !)363

Accompanying the anti-navy sentiments of Abdülhamid II and many

of his ministers was the permanent economic crisis which also effectively

362
Mark Kerr, Land, Sea and Air: Remnisciences of Mark Kerr (New York: Longman, 1927), pp.
127-128.
363
Çoker, pp. 56-65.

166
 ruled out any possibility to allot the former lavish sums to the navy. The

Ottoman treasury had simply no means to pay the foreign debt, which

approached 200,000,000 gold liras. The devastation of the Russian War, the

loss of the Balkan heartland which so far had yielded most of the revenues,

war expenses and the indemnity of 35,310,000 gold liras delivered the

Ottoman economy a mortal blow from which it never recovered. With no

option and under constant pressure from the great powers, the Porte issued

the Muharrem Kararnamesi (the decree of Muharram) in 1881, which

established Düyûn-u Umûmiyye İdaresi or the Ottoman Public Debt

Admnistration (PDA). The PDA was an international commission to which

the control of the Ottoman treasury and major revenues were relinquished.364

It allocated the majority of Ottoman revenues to the settling of foreign debts

and left only a bare sum for state expenses. Considering the meagre resources

left, it was natural that the land forces which formed the backbone of imperial

defense took priority.

Yet, it must be asked, considering all the financial difficulties, was the

navy’s total collapse inevitable? My argument is that it was not. After the

naval scandal of the Thessalian War (1897), when a limited naval renovation

program was initiated, more than 12,000,000 gold liras were spent for a futile

attempt to modernize the antiquated ironclads of Abdülaziz’s navy. Instead,

those useless old ships should be retired and a moderate but far more flexible

and effective fleet should be built around a couple of armored cruisers or

coast defense ships, a similar number of protected cruisers and a flotilla of

modern destroyers. However, the short-sightedness in naval strategy and

Şevket Pamuk, 100 Soruda Osmanlı-Türkiye İktisadi Tarihi 1500-1914 (İstanbul: Koç Üniversitesi
364

Yayınları, 1999), pp. 280-284.

167
corruption, especially when concerning tenders, caused the waste of the

precious money.

All counted, the Ottoman navy was like an obstinate phoenix during

the nineteenth century. More than once (in 1827 and 1853) it was destroyed

with heavy material and manpower loss but each time it rose again with

renewed vigor. It never reached to the effectiveness of the Russian and

Japanese navies, but it fared far better than the Chinese navy, succeeding in

professionalisation and the creation of a more or less trained naval reserve.

The most serious drawback of the Ottoman naval power was its excessive

dependence on foreign industry for its war material in the second half of the

nineteenth century. Only after the proclamation of the Republic did a

revitalisation of the Turkish naval-industrial framework start, and the results

only became visible in the 1950s. The Ottomans spent great sums on what

was basically a coast defense force and made little use of their fleet thereafter,

but also they succeeded in the creation of a professional naval officer corps

which passed on to the Turkish Republic.

168
 APPENDIX A

PRIMARY NAVAL FORCES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Wooden Battlefleets 1815-1860

Ships-of-the-line 1815 1830 1845 1860
Britain 218 106 88 58
France 69 53 46 37
Spain 21 4 2 -
Holland 19 5 7 -
Russia 47 47 47 8
Ottoman Empire 20 16 16 4

Note: Only ships-of-the-line fitted with a steam machine are counted for 1860
estimates.

Armored Battlefleets 1870-1904

First Class Battleships 1870 1885 January 1904
Britain 37 39 46
France 35 34 23
Russia 10 15 24
Ottoman Empire 12 8 -
Italy 16 11 11
Austria-Hungary 11 10 9
Germany 7 10 24
United States 6 - 31
China - 2 -
Japan - 1 6

Note: Battleships in building stage are also counted.

Cruiser Forces 1884-1904

Armored Cruisers 1884 1894 January 1904
Britain 5 12 35
France 14 11 16
Russia 4 5 8
Ottoman Empire - - 1
Italy - 1 9
Austria-Hungary - 1 3
Germany - 2 6
United States - 2 12
China - 3 -
Japan 2 1 10

Note: Ironclads rebuilt as armored cruisers are also counted.

169
 Torpedo Craft 1880-1900
Seagoing Torpedo Craft 1880 1890 1900
Britain 2 176 306
France 58 128 233
Russia 19 31 206
Ottoman Empire - 24 24
Italy 4 163 119
Austria-Hungary 10 63 68
Germany - 72 124
United States - 1 33
China 1 18 16
Japan - 25 42

Note: Only First and Second Class Torpedoboats, Torpedo-Gunboats and Destroyers
are counted.

Source: Compiled from data in the: Lawrence Sondhaus. Naval Warfare 1815-1914;
Tony Gibbons. The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships and Battlecruisers, and
the Brassey’s Naval Annual ‘s issues of 1880, 1890 and 1900.

170
 APPENDIX B

OTTOMAN NAVY ORDERS OF BATTLE 1853-1897

The Crimean War

Imperial Ottoman Navy, 1 October 1853

Admiral of the Fleet: Topal Mahmud Pasha

Topal Mahmud Pasha Squadron Type Year Built Guns

Mukaddeme-i Hayır SoL 1806 74
Teşrifiye SoL 1834 96
Peyk-i Meserret SoL 1834 96
Halep (E) SoL 1833 100
Mefta Cihad (E) SoL 1833 100
Ben Zuhaf (E) SoL 1833 100
Nusretiye F 1835 64
Reşid (E) F 1826 60

Mustafa Pasha Squadron Type Year Built Guns

Taif PS 1847 32
Mecidiye PS 1847 32
Saik-i Şadi PS 1847 32
Feyza-i Bahri PS 1847 32
Muhbir-i Sürur SF 1849 22

Osman Pasha Squadron Type Year Built Guns

Avnillah F 1832 44
Navek-i Bahri F 1834 42
Nizamiye F 1832 60
Fazlillah F 1822 44
Kaid-i Zafer F 1825 54
Dimyad (E) F 1829 52
Necm-i Fesan C 1824 26
Gül-i Sefid C 1831 22
Feyz-i Mabud C 1828 22
Ereğli PS 1839 5
Pervaz-ı Bahri (E) PS 1845 10

171
Kayserili Ahmed Pasha Squadron Type Year Built Guns
Bahri (E) F ? ?
Zir-i Cihad F ? ?
Şerafeddin F ? ?
Mesir-i Ferah C 1829 16
Necat-i Fer C 1831 22
Burc-u Şeref C ? ?
Alayiş-i Derya C ? ?
Cihad Bekker (E) C 1829 22
Cena Bahir (E) C 1829 22
Saman Bahri (E) C 1838 26
Tir-i Zafer B 1837 11
Ahter B 1834 20
Bergüzide B 1850 18
Kav-i Zafer B 1837 22
Fery-i Sefid B 1833 22
Feth-i Hüner B 1833 18
Tabidar B 1850 16
Ferahnüma B 1842 22

Note: (E) denotes Egyptian ships.

The Cretan Uprising

Imperial Ottoman Navy, April-May 1866

Admiral of the Fleet: Ateş Mehmed Pasha

Rumelia Fleet: Rear-Admiral Edhem Pasha

st
1 Division Type Year Built Guns
Şadiye SSoL 1858 68
Fethiye SSoL 1858 68
Eruğrul SF 1864 40
Muhbir-i Sürur SF 1849 22
Eser-i Cedid PS 1842 6
Talia PS 1864 4
Medar-ı Zafer PS 1864 4
2nd Division Type Year Built Guns
Şevketnüma SC 1859 4
Sinop SC 1859 16

172
Anatolian Fleet: Rear-Admiral Ibrahim Pasha
1st Division Type Year Built Guns
Peyk-i Zafer SSoL 1842 78
Eser-i Nusret SC 1864 4
İskenderiye SC 1862 3
Meriç SC 1863 12
2nd Division Type Year Built Guns
Akka GB 1859 4
Varna GB 1859 4

The Russo-Turkish War 1877-78

Imperial Ottoman Navy, March 1877

Minister of Marine: Rauf Pasha

Black Sea Fleet: Vice-Admiral Bozcaadalı Hasan Hüsnü Pasha

Black Sea Ironclad Division Year Built Tonnage Guns
Asar-ı Tevfik 1868 5600 8
Orhaniye 1864 6300 15
Asar-ı Şevket 1868 2600 5
Necm-i Şevket 1868 2600 5
İclaliye 1868 2200 5
Feth-i Bülend 1867 2800 4
Muin-i Zafer 1867 2400 4
Avnillah 1867 2400 4
Black Sea Wooden Division Year Built Tonnage Guns
Hüdavendigar 1856 2900 36
Muhbir-i Sürur 1849 1500 22
Sinop 1857 780 16
Muzaffer 1861 780 12
İzmir 1857 780 16
Edirne 1857 780 16
Asır 1869 1600 4
İsmail 1964 1000 4
Mecidiye 1847 1400 4

173
 Mediterranean Fleet: Vice-Admiral Giritli Hüseyin Pasha
Mediterranean Ironclad Division Year Built Tonnage Guns
Mesudiye 1874 10,000 15
Aziziye 1864 6300 15
Osmaniye 1864 6300 15
Mahmudiye 1864 6300 15
Mukaddeme-i Hayır 1872 2800 4
Mediterranean Wooden Division Year Built Tonnage Guns
Selimiye 1865 6500 55
Mansure 1867 780 12
Utarid 1860 600 7
Eser-i Cedid 1840 1100 6
Sahir 1864 260 4
Taif 1869 1600 4
Fevait 1851 1000 4
Talia 1863 1000 4

Danubian Fleet: Vice- Admiral Mehmed Ali Pasha

Ironclads Year Built Tonnage Guns
Lütf-ü Celil 1867 2500 4
Hıfz-ı Rahman 1867 2500 4
Hizber 1870 400 2
Seyfi 1870 400 2
Semendire 1864 340 2
Feth-ül İslam 1864 340 2
Böğürtlen 1864 340 2
İşkodra 1864 340 2
Podgoriçe 1864 340 2
Wooden Vessels Year Built Tonnage Guns
Akka 1857 200 4
Varna 1857 200 4
Şevketnüma 1857 200 4
Sultaniye 1862 3.000 4
Müverrid-i Nusret 1869 3.000 2
Mesir-i Bahri 1838 300 4
Feyza-i Bahri 1848 1500 -
Şerafeddin ? ? -
Medar-ı Tevfik (*) 1869 800 -
Kayseriye (*) 1873 1000 -
Batum (*) 1869 900 -
Selanik (*) 1869 800 -
Mersin (*) ? ? -
Lütfiye (*) 1865 600 -
Pürsur (*) 1865 700 -
Canik (*) 1869 900 -
Kılıç Ali (*) 1865 500 -

Note: (*) denotes transports from Idare-i Aziziye state shipping company.

174
 The Thessalian War

Imperial Ottoman Navy, March 1897

Minister of Marine: Bozcaadalı Hasan Hüsnü Pasha

Commander: Admiral Hasan Rami Pasha

st
1 Division Type Year Built Tonnage Armament
Mesudiye I 1874 10,000 12x25.4 cm 3x17.8 cm G
Hamidiye I 1871 6600 4x23.8 cm 10x15 cm G
Aziziye I 1864 6300 2X24 cm 8x10.5 cm G
Orhaniye I 1864 6300 2x24 cm 8x10.5 cm G
Ejder TB 1886 150 2x42.8 cm TT
Berkefşan TB 1883 250 2x42.8 cm TT
Siham TB 1886 90 2x42.8 cm TT
Pervin TB 1886 90 2x42.8 cm TT
Gilyum TB 1885 90 2x42.8 cm TT
Tarık TB 1886 90 2x42.8 cm TT
Tir-i Zafer TB 1885 40 2x35.5 cm TT
Eser-i Terakki TB 1883 40 2x35.5 cm TT
İzmir T 1871 1500 -
Mekke T 1872 2500 -
2nd Division Type Year Built Tonnage Armament
Osmaniye I 1864 6300 2x24 cm 8x15 cm 5x10.5 cm G
Necm-i Şevket I 1868 2600 1x23 cm 4x18 cm G
Hıfz-ı Rahman I 1867 2500 2x22.5 cm 1x15 cm 1x12 cm G
Peleng-i Derya TB 1887 750 2x10.5 cm G 3x35.5 cm TT
Vesile-i Nusret TB 1885 90 2x42.8 cm TT
Fatih TB 1886 90 2x42.8 cm TT
Şahab TB 1886 90 2x35.5 cm TT
Mecidiye TB 1883 40 2x35.5 cm TT
Burhaneddin TB 1883 40 2x35.5 cm TT
Marmara T 1871 1800 -
Hüdeyde T 1874 2000 -

Abbreviations:

C = Corvette
F = Frigate
G = Gun
GB = Gunboat
I = Ironclad
PS = Paddle Steamer
SC = Screw Corvette
SF = Screw Frigate
SoL = Ship-of-the-Line
SSol = Screw Ship-of-the-Line
T = Transport

175
TB = Torpedoboat
TT = Torpedo Tube

Source: Compiled from Bernd Langensiepen and Ahmet Güleryüz. The Ottoman
Navy 1828-1922 and Hacer Bulgurcuoğlu. Efsane Gemi Mahmudiye Kalyonu.

176
 APPENDIX C

TORPEDO COMMISSION’S REPORT ON THE TORPEDO SCHOOL

Müzekkere

Ba irâde-i seniyye Tersâne-i Âmire’de teşkîl olunan Torpido Komisyonu’ndan tanzîm ve

takdîm olunup Şûrâ-yı Bahriye’ye havâle buyurulan işbu melfûf mazbata ile defter kırâât ve
mutâla‘a olundu. Mazbata-i merkûmânın hulâsa-i me’âlî torpidonun Avrupa’ca olan
terakkiyâtı bahriye zâbitânın dahi istihsâl-i ma‘lûmât ve iktisâb-ı ameliyât eylemeleri için
Tersâne-i Âmire’de bir Torpido Mektebi’nin te’sis ve teferru‘ât-ı lâzımesinin icrâsı îfâde ve
tafsilâtından ibâret bulunmuşdur. Ma‘lûm-ı ‘âlî-i nezâretpenâhîleri buyurulduğu vechile
torpido fenninin Avrupa devletlerince meşhud olan terakkiyâtına tevfîkan ve Donanma-yı
Hümâyûn-ı cenâb-ı mülûkâne zâbitânının dahi kesb-i ma‘lûmât ve ameliyât eylemelerinin
lüzûm ve ehemmiyeti gayr-i münkir olup mazbata-i mezkûranın mevâdd-ı münderecesi şu
maksad-ı hayr mirsadın hîn-i husûle vusulü esâsına mübteni bulunmuş olduğundan
mûcebince münâsib bir sefînenin tahsîsiyle mekteb-i mezkûrun hemen teşkîl ve küşâdı ve
komisyon-ı mezbûrun nezâret-i mütemadiyesi tahtında bulunmak üzere erbâb-ı fen ve
iktidârdan bir ser mu‘allim ile üç nefer mu‘allim zâbitin ve icâbı mikdâr mu‘avinlerin ve
mektebe devam edecek zâbitânın mikdârı şimdilik yigirmiye iblâğ olunarak bunun nısfının
Tophâne-i Âmire zâbitânından ve nısf-ı diğerinin dahi Şiltenk, Çarhçı ve sülüsanının
Güğerte sınıfından ve Bahriye ve Tophâne-i Âmire’den yigirmişer kadar neferâtın dahi
oldukça okuyup yazmak planlarından tefrîk ve ta‘yîni ve sefîne-i merkûmânın derûnunda
tanzîm ve i‘tâ olunacak resim mûcebince dershâne ve kamaralar ve eşyâ muhafâzası için
mağazalar inşâsı ve icrâ-yı ameliyâta muktazi iki aded istimbotun tahsîs ve lehimcilik ve
modülcülük gibi i‘mâlâta muktedir lüzûmu kadar işçinin dahi ta‘yîn olunması ve defter-i
mezkûrda muharrer alât ve edevât-ı muktaziyenin tedârik ve mübâya‘ası ve torpido fennine
dair olup lüzûmu beyân olunan gazetelerin abone olunarak celbi ve mazbata-i merkûmâda
münderic mevâd ve tefarru‘ât-ı sâiresinin dahi mükemmelen icrâsı Şûrâ’ca dahi tezekkür ve
tensîb kılınmış ise de sûret-i ma‘ruza nezd-i ‘âlî-i âsafâneleri’nde dahi rehîn-i tasvîb
buyurulduğu halde alât ve edevât-ı mukteziyeden melfûf evrâkda gösterildigi vechile bir
kısmının torpido mûcidi Kapudan zâtdan ve kısm-ı diğerinin Mösyö Simin ve
birâderlerinden mübâya‘ası lâzım gelecegi misilli mevcûd bulunan beş aded Whitehead
Torpidosu için lüzûmu olan edevâtın dahi mumaileyh Fabrikatör Whitehead’den iştira ve
celbi icâb edecegi ve bunların mecmu‘-ı esmanı bin dokuz yüz seksen Lira-yı Siterlin ve on
Şilin’e baliğ olacağı cihetle ona göre icâb-ı halin icrâsı ve mekteb ittihâz olunacak sefînenin
techîzât-ı lâzımesi icrâ ve ikmâl olunmak üzere liman Kumandanlığı Vekâlet-i Behiyyesi’ne
ma‘lûmât ve teferru‘at-ı sâiresinin icrâsı hakkında komisyon-ı mezbûra me’zuniyet i‘tâ
buyurulması bâbında.
Fi 13 Şa‘bân Sene 1300.
‘Osmân, Tahsîn, Ali, Hasan, Ârif, Mehmed, Zühdü, İbrâhim, Fâik.

Deniz Müzesi Arşivi, ŞUB-197/18-A.

Discovered in the Istanbul Naval Museum Archive by Assistant Professor Şakir

Batmaz and published by his permission.

177
 APPENDIX D

THE MAPS AND PICTURES

Figure1. The Sailing Warship: Ottoman Three-Decker Ship-of-the-Line Mahmudiye

Figure 2. The Battle of Sinop (1853), Last Engagement of the Age of Sail.

178
 Figure 3. The Paddle Warship: Duel of Vladimir and Pervaz-ı Bahri (1853)

Figure 4. The Screw Warship: Ottoman Steam Frigate Ertuğrul, Just Before Her
Fateful Voyage to Japan (1889)

179
 Figure 5. The Ironclad Warship: HMS Warrior (1860)

Figure 6. The First Battle of Ironclads: Monitor vs. Virginia (1862)

180
 Figure 7. The Chinese Armored Ship Chen Yuan (1895)

Figure 8. The Jeune Ecole warship: Sankeikan Class Japanese Cruiser Hashidate

181
 Figure 9. Line-Ahead vs. Line-Abreast: Plan of the Battle of Yalu River (1894)
Source: “Famous Sea Fights from Salamis to Tsu-Shima” p. 264

Figure 10. The Mahanian Battleship: Mikasa, Flagship of Admiral Togo Heihachiro

182
Figure 11. “Capping the T”: Plan of the Battle of Tsushima (1905)
Source: “Famous Sea Fights from Salamis to Tsu-Shima” p. 326

183
 Figure 12a. The Torpedo Craft: Ottoman Torpedoboat Sultanhisar

Figure 12b. The Torpedo Craft: Ottoman prototype Submarine Abdülhamid

184
 Figure 13. The Ironclad Mesudiye, Flagship of the Ottoman Navy

Figure 14. Ottoman Sailors from the Reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1908)

185
Figure 15. A View of the Imperial Arsenal from the Nineteenth Century

186
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Morskoy Sbornik, 1851. The annual inter-service journal of the Imperial

Russian Navy.

Bal, Nurcan., ed. Süleyman Nutkî Bey’in Hatıraları. İstanbul: Deniz

Basımevi, 2003. A compilation of notebooks belonging to Süleyman

Nutkî Bey, noted Ottoman military intellectual and founder of Naval

Museum. It’s an invaluable source for any student of Ottoman Navy’s

social history.

Hasan Rami Paşa. Hatıralar volume 1. Ankara: Deniz Kuvvetleri

Komutanlığı Karargâhı Matbaası, 1997 reprint of the first volume of

Hasan Rami Pasha’s memoirs. He was the Ottoman Fleet commander

in 1897, later became Minister of Marine.

Kerr, Mark. Land, Sea and Air: Remnisciences of Mark Kerr. New York:

Longman,1927.

Pears, Edwin. Forty Years in Constantinople 1873-1915. New York:

D.Appleton,1916.

Safvet. Bahriyemiz Tarihinden Filasalar. İstanbul: Donanma Matbaası, 1328.

187
Slade, Adolphus. Kapdan Paşa. İstanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1973. Turkish

translation of author’s well known two volume travel log Records of

Travels in Turkey, Greece, andc., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea,

with the Capitan Pasha, in the Years 1829, 1830, and 1831, originally

published in1834

Süleyman Nutkî Bey. Ertuğrul Fırkateyni Faciası. İstanbul: Bahriye

Matbaası 1897.

Süreyya. Donanma mı Şimendifer mi? İstanbul: n.p., 1327.

Secondary Sources

Abou-El-Haj, Rifa’at Ali. Modern Devletin Doğası. İstanbul: İmge Yayınevi,

2000.

Aksan, Virginia H. Ahmed Resmi Efendi: Savaşta ve Barışta bir Osmanlı

Devlet Adamı 1700-1783. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1997.

Baş, Ersan. Çeşme Navarin, Sinop Baskınları ve Sonuçları. İstanbul: Piri Reis

Araştırma Merkezi, 2007.

Batmaz, Şakir. “II. Abdülhamid Devri Osmanlı Donanması.” (Ph.d thesis

Erciyes University, 2002).

188
Batmaz, Şakir. “An Example of the Efforts to Train Naval Personnel during

the Reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II: The Torpedo School.” In eds.

Emir Yener and Ekrem Işın, Logbook of the Ottoman Navy: Ships,

Legends, Sailors. İstanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009

Bostan, İdris. Osmanlılar ve Deniz. İstanbul: Küre Yayınları, 2007.

Bulgurcuoğlu, Hacer. “Deniz Tarihimizin Sembol Gemilerinden

Mahmudiye.” (Master’s thesis, Mimar Sinan University, 2004).

------------------------- Efsane Gemi Mahmudiye Kalyonu. İstanbul: Piri Reis

Araştırma Merkezi, 2009.

Campbell, John. “Naval Armaments and Armour.” In ed. Andrew Lambert,

Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship1815-1905. London:

Conway Maritime Press, 1992.

Coad, Jonathan. The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850. Aldershot: Scolar

Press,1989.

Corlett, E.C.B; “The Screw Propeller and Merchant Shipping 1840-1865.” In

ed. Basil Greenhill, The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship

before 1900. New Jersey: Chartwheel Books, 2000.

189
Çoker, Fahri. Bahriyemizin Yakın Tarihinden Kesitler. Ankara: Deniz

Kuvvetleri Komutanlığı Karargâh Basımevi, 1994.

Danışman, Günhan. “Anadolu Enerji Teknolojileri Tarihçesi ve 18. Yüzyıl

Sonunda Osmanlı Yönetiminin Sanayileşmede Kaçırdığı

FırsatınYeniden Değerlendirilmesi.” In eds. Emre Dölen and Mustafa

Kaçar, Türk Teknoloji Tarihi. İstanbul: Türk Teknoloji Vakfı, 2003.

Darr, Karl Wilhelm. “The Ottoman Navy 1900-1918.” (Master’s thesis,

University of Lousiville, 1998).

Dumont, Paul. “Tanzimat Devri.” In ed. Robert Mantran, Osmanlı

İmparatorluğu Tarihi volume 2. İstanbul, Adam Yayınları, 1999.

Esenbel, Selçuk. “Alacakaranlık Diplomasisi: Japonların Osmanlı

İmparatorluğuna İlgisi”, Tarih ve Toplum cilt XXXVII, Sayı: 218,

Şubat 2002

Gardiner, Robert. “Design and Construction.” In ed. Robert Gardiner, The

Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840. London: Conway

Maritime Press, 1998.

-------------------- “The Frigate.” In ed. Robert Gardiner, The Line of Battle:

Sailing Warships 1650-1840. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1998.

190
--------------------. “The Sloop-of-War, Corvette and Brig.” In ed. Robert

Gardiner, The Line of Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840. London:

Conway Maritime Press, 1998.

-------------------- “Guns and Gunnery.” In ed. Robert Gardiner, The Line of

Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840. London: Conway Maritime

Press, 1998.

Gencer, Ali İhsan. Bahriye’de Yapılan Islahat Hareketleri ve Bahriye

Nezareti’nin Kuruluşu 1789-1869. Ankara: Türk Tarih

KurumuYayınları, 2001.

Georgeon, François. Sultan Abdülhamid. İstanbul: Homer Kitabevi, 2006.

Gibbons, Tony. The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships and

Battlecruisers. London: Salamander, 1983.

Glete, Jan. “John Ericsson and the Transformation of Swedish Naval

Doctrine”, International Journal of Naval History, 2, No. 3,

(December 2003).

Gömleksiz, Eda Gülşen. Mesudiye Zırhlısı. İstanbul: Piri Reis Araştırma

Merkezi, 2007.

Grant, Jonathan. “Tsarist Armament Strategies 1870-1914,” Journal of Soviet

191
 Military Studies 4 (March 1991), pp. 141-149.

------------------ “The Sword of the Sultan: Ottoman Arms Imports 1854-

1914,” Journal of Military History, no. 66, (Jan. 2002), pp. 9-28.

Greenhill, Basil. “Steam before the Screw.” In ed. Basil Greenhill, The

Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship before 1900. New Jersey:

Chartwheel Books, 2000.

Griffiths, Albert. “The Reorganization of the Ottoman Army under

Abdülhamid II (1880-1897)”, (Ph.d thesis UCLA, 1966)

Güvenç, Serhat.“The Ottoman Navy in the Age of Dreadnoughts, 1909-

1914.” In eds. Emir Yener and Ekrem Işın, The Logbook of the

Ottoman Navy: Ships, Legends Sailors. İstanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009.

Haythornwaite, Philip. Nelson's Navy. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1993.

Headrick, Daniel “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and Expansion of

European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal

of Modern History, Technology and War, 51, no. 2, (Jun.,1979)

Heinzelmann, Tobias. Cihaddan Vatan Savunmasına: Osmanlı

İmpratorluğunda Genel Askerlik Yükümlülüğü 1826-1856. İstanbul:

Kitap Yayınları, 2009.

192
Herwig, Holger. “The Battlefleet Revolution, 1885-1914.” In eds. McGregor

Knox and Williamson Murray, The Dynamics of Military Revolution

1300-2050. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Hough, Richard. The Potemkin Mutiny. London: Bluejacket Books, 1961.

İlgürel, Mücteba. “Buharlı Gemi Teknolojisini Osmanlı Devletinde Kurma

Teşebbüsleri.” In ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Çağını Yakalayan

Osmanlı. İstanbul, IRCICA Yayınları 1998.

Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2002.

Jentschura, Hansgeorg Jung, Dieter and Mickel, Peter. Warships of the

Imperial Japanese Navy 1869-1945. Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press,1986.

Komatsu, Kaori. “Financial Problems Of the Navy During the Reign Of

Abdülhamit II,” Oriente Moderno, XX(LXXXI), 1, (2001), pp. 209-

219.

------------------- Ertuğrul Fırkateyni: Bir Dostluğun Doğuşu. Ankara: Turhan

Kitabevi, 1992.

193
Karal, Enver Ziya. Osmanlı Tarihi: I. Meşrutiyet ve İstibdat Devirleri 1876-

1908 volume 17. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1962.

Kublin, Hyman. “The Early Meiji Army,” The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 9,

No. 1. (Nov., 1949)

Kurdoğlu, Fevzi. 1877-78 Türk-Rus Harbinde Deniz Harekâtları. İstanbul:

Deniz Matbaası, 1935.

------------------- Yunan İstiklal Harbi ve Navarin Muharebesi. İstanbul: Deniz

Matbaası, 1944.

Lambert, Andrew. “Introduction.” In ed. Andrew Lambert, Steam, Steel and

Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905. London: Conway Maritime

Press, 1992.

--------------------- “The Introduction of Steam.” In ed. Andrew Lambert,

Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905. London:

Conway Maritime Press, 1992.

--------------------- “The Screw Propeller Warship.” In ed. Andrew Lambert,

Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905. London:

Conway Maritime Press, 1992.

--------------------- “Iron Hulls and Armour Plate.” In ed. Andrew Lambert,

194
 Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905. London:

Conway Maritime Press, 1992.

Langensiepen, Bernd and Güleryüz, Ahmet. 1828-1923 Osmanlı Donanması.

İstanbul: Denizler Kitabevi, 2000.

Landström, Björn. The Ship. New York: Doubleday 1960.

Lardas, Mark. American Heavy Frigates 1797-1826. Oxford: Osprey

Publishing, 2003.

Lavery, Brian; “The Ship-of-the-Line.” In ed. Robert Gardiner, The Line of

Battle: Sailing Warships 1650-1840. London: Conway Maritime

Press, 1998.

London, Charles. Jutland 1916: Clash of the Dreadnoughts. Oxford: Osprey

Publishing, 2000.

Lyon, David; “Underwater Warfare and the Torpedo Boat.” In ed. Andrew

Lambert, Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The SteamWarship 1815-1905.

London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Seapower Upon History 1660-

1783. Boston: Little and Brown, 1890.

195
Marks, Steven G. Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the

Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917. New York: Cornell

University Press, 1991.

McClellan, James and Dorn, Harold. Dünya Tarihinde Bilim ve Teknoloji.

Ankara: Arkadaş Yayınları, 2006.

Özcan, Besim. Sinop Deniz Felaketi. İstanbul: Deniz Basımevi, 2008.

Pamuk, Şevket. 100 Soruda Osmanlı-Türkiye İktisadi Tarihi 1500-1914.

İstanbul: Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1999.

Panzac, Daniel. “Armed Peace in the Mediterranean, 1736-39: A comparative

Survey of the Navies,” Mariner’s Mirror, 84, (1998), pp. 41-55.

----------------- “The Ottoman Navy: From Early Beginnings to Nizâm-ı Cedîd

(14th to 18th Centuries).” In eds. Emir Yener and Ekrem Işın, The

Logbook of the Ottoman Navy: Ships, Legends, Sailors.İstanbul: Pera

Müzesi, 2009.

Parker, Geoffrey. Askeri Devrim 1500-1800. İstanbul: Küre Yayınları, 2003.

Peattie, David and Evans, Mark. Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in

the Imperial Japanese Navy 1887-1941.Annapolis: Naval Institute

Pres, 1997.

196
Ponting, Clive. The Crimean War: The Truth Behind The Myth. London:

Random House, 2005.

Ralston, David B. Importing the European Army: The Introduction of

European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-

European World, 1600-1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1995.

Roberts, John. “The Pre-Dreadnought Age 1890-1905.” In ed. Andrew

Lambert, Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905.

London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992.

Roff, W.J. “Early Steamships in Eastern Waters.” In ed. Basil Greenhill, The

Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship before 1900. New Jersey:

Chartwheel Books, 2000.

Ropp, Theodore. “Kıt’ada Ortaya Çıkan Deniz Gücü Doktrinleri.” In ed.

Edward Mead Earle, Modern Stratejinin Yaratıcıları. Ankara: ASAM

Yayınları, 2003.

Sağlam, Mehmet Hakan. Osmanlı Devletinde Moratoryum 1875-1881

Rüsûm-u Sitte’den Düyûn-u Umumiyye’ye. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı

Yayınları, 2007.

197
Shaw, Stanford and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and

Modern Turkey: volume 2 Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise

of Modern Turkey 1808-1875. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Pres, 1977.

Smirnov, M.I. “Admiral Kolchak,” The Slavonic and East European Review,

11, no. 32 (Jan., 1933), pp. 373–387.

Sondhaus, Lawrence. Naval Warfare 1815-1914. New York: Routledge,

2001.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. New York: W. W.

Norton, 1991.

Sprout, Margaret Tutle. “Mahan.” In ed. Edward Mead Earle, Modern

Stratejinin Yaratıcıları. Ankara: ASAM Yayınları, 2003.

Still, William; Watts, Gordon and Rogers, Bradley. “Steam Navigation and

the United States.” In ed. Basil Greenhill, The Advent of Steam: The

Merchant Steamship before 1900. New Jersey: Chartwheel Books,

2000.

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR and the

Successor States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

198
The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Abingdon, 2004.

Tracy, Nicholas. “Naval Tactics.” In ed. Robert Gardiner, The Line of Battle:

Sailing Warships 1650- 1840. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1998.

Tucker, Spencer C. Handbook of Nineteenth Century Naval Warfare.

Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000.

Turnbull, Stephen. Fighting Ships of the Far East volume 2, Japan and

Korea 612-1639. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003.

Vandervort, Bruce. “1815-1960 Sömürge Savaşları.” In ed. Jeremy Black,

Dretnot, Tank ve Uçak: Modern Çağda Savaş Sanatı 1815-2000.

İstanbul: Kitap Yayınları, 2003.

Watts, Anthony J. The Royal Navy. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999.

Wilson, Herbert W. Zırh Devrinde Deniz Muharebeleri volume 1: 1850-1918.

İstanbul: Kitap Yayınları, 2006.

Wilson, Michael. “Early Submarines.” In ed. Andrew Lambert, Steam, Steel

and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905. London: Conway

Maritime Press, 1992.

Wright, Richard N. J. The Chinese Steam Navy 1862-1945. London: Chatam

199
 Publishing, 2000.

Zhokov, Konstantin and Vitol, Aleksandr “The Origins of the Ottoman

Submarine Fleet,” Oriente Moderno,10 (81), No. 1, (2001), pp. 221-

232.

Zorlu, Tuncay. Innovation and Empire in Turkey: Sultan Selim III and the

Modernisation of the Ottoman Navy. New York: I.B Tauris, 2008.

----------------- “Selim III and Ottoman Seapower.” In eds. Emir Yener and

Ekrem Işın, Logbook of the Ottoman Navy: Ships, Legends, Sailors.

Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2009.

200