1889–1890
The order to sail
How a courtesy call from a Japanese prince put a twenty-five-year-old wooden frigate on the far side of the world.
The Ottoman Empire and Japan spent a decade circling each other before either put a ship in the water for the other's sake. The sloop Seiki called at Istanbul in November 1878 on a European training cruise, and Abdülhamid II received her officers and handed out medals. In 1881 a mission under the diplomat Yoshida Masaharu reached Yıldız Palace to discuss trade and wartime status. Then, in October 1887, Prince Komatsu Akihito arrived in person and presented the Sultan with the Order of the Chrysanthemum — the highest decoration Japan had to give.
That required an answer. You do not accept the Chrysanthemum and reply by letter.
On 14 February 1889 the Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha wrote to the head of the navy, Bozcaadalı Hasan Hüsnü Pasha, asking which battleship might be fit to sail to the seas of Indo-China and Japan — ostensibly so that Naval Academy graduates could put their theoretical training into practice. Eleven days later Hasan Hüsnü answered: the frigate Ertuğrul would do, and could be ready within a month. Only then did the Grand Vizier state the real errand. The ship was to carry gifts and the Ottoman Medal of High Honor from the Sultan to the Emperor of Japan. A secondary aim was simpler and older: show the flag across the Indian Ocean.
An old ship for a long errand
Ertuğrul was launched on 19 October 1863 at the Taşkızak shipyard in Galata, with Sultan Abdülaziz present. She was named for the thirteenth-century Ertuğrul, father of Osman I. Three masts, wooden hull, 79 metres long, 15.5 metres in the beam, drawing 8 metres. In 1864 she went to England and came back with steam engines and, for the period, genuinely modern fittings — electrical lighting among them. She fought in the Cretan campaign in 1866, and then spent the early Hamidian years laid up in the Golden Horn, which is a polite way of saying she sat still for a long time.
By 1889 she was twenty-five years old. She was overhauled before departure and most of the wooden hull members were renewed. On 6 April the naval ministry gave her to Captain Ali Osman Bey, chosen for his languages and his seamanship.
Eleven months
She left Istanbul on 14 July 1889 with roughly 607 men aboard, including 57 officers — though the figure is disputed and other accounts put the complement closer to 656. The route was ambitious and unhurried: Marmaris, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Jeddah, Aden, the Somali coast, Pondicherry, Calcutta, Singapore, Malacca, Saigon, Chinese ports, Hong Kong, Amoy, Shanghai, Nagasaki, and finally Yokohama. The return was pencilled in for October of the same year.
It did not go that way. On 26 July she ran aground in the Great Bitter Lake inside the Suez Canal, destroying her sternpost and losing her rudder. Repairs held her until 23 September. In the western Indian Ocean she began taking water through the bow, and the crew could not properly fix it until Singapore, where she sat until 22 March 1890. After ten days at Saigon she finally reached Yokohama on 7 June 1890 — eleven months out of Istanbul, against a schedule that had assumed about three.
Ali Osman was promoted to rear admiral along the way. On 13 June he and his officers were received by Emperor Meiji; the gifts and the Medal of High Honor were handed over, and Ali Osman Pasha was given the First Class Order of the Rising Sun. The next day the young Prince Yoshihito — the future Taishō Emperor — received him. Then came the receptions, the dinners, the ceremonies.
The mission had worked. What remained was the part nobody writes into the orders: getting home. Ertuğrul stayed three months in Japan and lost twelve men to an epidemic while she waited. She was a tired ship in a hot season, a very long way from the Taşkızak yard that built her, and the crossing back was still ahead of her.