September 1890
Four days in a typhoon
She sailed from Yokohama in good weather. Within twenty-four hours the wind had turned, and the next four days were spent losing an argument with the sea.
At noon on 15 September 1890 Ertuğrul left Yokohama for Istanbul. The weather was good. There was no reason, standing on the deck that afternoon, to think this passage would be any worse than the eleven months it had taken to get there.
The next morning the wind reversed. By evening it was stronger. By nightfall it was coming from below the bow, hard enough that the sails had to be folded, and the waves had begun to beat against a ship that could barely make headway against them.
The mizzen
The forty-metre mizzen mast came down. That is the sentence; the damage is in what happened next. A fallen mast on a ship in a seaway does not simply lie there. It shifted from side to side with the roll and hammered into the rigging and the remaining sails, so that the ship was steadily being beaten apart by a piece of itself.
The storm kept gaining. Waves coming over the bow began separating the deck boards at the forward end, and once the deck was open, water found its way down into the coal depots in the boiler room. That was the wound that mattered. Wet coal is not fuel, and a frigate that cannot raise steam in a typhoon is a very large piece of driftwood with people on it.
Four days
For four days the crew fought the ship. They remedied what sails they could and tightened the shrouds. They bailed the coal bunkers by hand, in buckets, because the pumps could not keep up — which tells you both how much water was coming in and how few options were left. None of it was enough. The ship was coming apart and everyone aboard knew it, and the only remaining move was to find shelter.
They set course for Kobe, the nearest safe harbour. Then seawater reached the engine room and put out one of the furnaces.
That ended it. Without main sails and without sufficient propulsion, Ertuğrul was effectively immobile — she had only the wind and the waves behind her, and they were pushing her toward the eastern coast of Kii Ōshima, where the rocks are. The crew tried the last thing available and let go the anchors, hoping to stop her short of the reef.
The anchors did not hold. Around midnight on 18 September 1890 she struck, and she did not break up slowly. She fell apart at the first impact.
The count
More than five hundred men died on the reef, among them fifty officers and the commander, Rear Admiral Ali Osman Pasha. Sixty-nine survived: six officers and sixty-three sailors. Of those, six were unhurt, nine were severely wounded, and the rest came out of it with lighter injuries.
It is worth sitting with the arithmetic for a moment. A crew that had crossed half the planet, been received by an emperor, buried twelve of its own to fever in a foreign port, and then set out for home, was reduced in a few hours — most of it within minutes of the first impact — to sixty-nine men in the water off a village they had never heard of, in the dark, ten miles short of shelter.
What happened to those sixty-nine over the following hours is the reason anyone still tells this story.