Battle of Sinop, 1853: the Ottoman squadron burned at anchor

The Ottoman ships fired first, and they never had a chance. Six Russian ships of the line came into the bay against a squadron that had nothing bigger than a frigate. By the time the guns fell silent, thousands of Ottoman sailors were dead, and within days the London papers would be calling it a massacre.²

Who won the Battle of Sinop and why?

Russia won decisively. Nakhimov brought six ships of the line, several armed with heavy shell guns, against frigates, corvettes and small steamers anchored under weak shore batteries, so the Ottomans were outgunned from the first broadside. The Ottoman squadron had chosen to wait at anchor rather than run for home, and no help came from Constantinople or the allied fleets.³

Background: a war on the Danube and a squadron at sea

The Crimean War began as a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In the summer of 1853 Russian troops occupied the Danubian principalities, and that autumn the Ottomans declared war. Britain and France backed the Sultan, and their fleets lay at the entrance to the Dardanelles to guard Constantinople, but they were not yet at war with Russia.⁴

That autumn the Ottoman navy sent a squadron into the Black Sea under Patrona Osman Pasha, with Riyale Hüseyin Pasha as his second in command. What it was for depends on who tells the story. Adolphus Slade, the British officer who served as an adviser to the Ottoman navy, wrote that the Czar believed it was carrying ammunition to the Circassians fighting Russia in the Caucasus; Russian accounts, from the historian Evgeny Tarle to the Presidential Library in Moscow, say it was meant to cover a landing of troops on the Caucasus coast.⁵

The Russian Black Sea Fleet was already at sea. On 17 November, by the Western calendar, the paddle frigate Vladimir, with Vice Admiral Vladimir Kornilov on board, fought and captured the Ottoman steamer Pervaz-i Bahri after a three-hour action. More ships of the line were sent from Sevastopol to join Nakhimov, who was cruising off the Anatolian coast.⁶

Sinop was a natural choice of refuge. Its sheltered southern harbor was the best natural anchorage on the Anatolian coast of the Black Sea, and its shipyard had built ships for the Ottoman navy for centuries.⁷

On the way a gale scattered the squadron, and the ships ran for Sinop to gather again. They arrived damaged, the flagship with a sprung mainyard, and their crews, poorly clothed for winter, were so worn by cold and wet that for hours they could not go aloft to furl the sails.⁸

Armies and commanders: two unequal squadrons

The Ottoman squadron at Sinop consisted of seven frigates, among them the Egyptian Dimyad, with three corvettes, two small steamers and transports, and not a single ship of the line. Fırat Küskü of Sinop University, who traced the battle through Ottoman archives and the British press, counts twelve ships with 434 guns and about 4,490 men; Slade gives 430 guns and 4,200 men. The Russian naval chronicle of 1948 lists the frigates by name and gives the squadron 472 guns.⁹

The shore offered little help. Slade describes the batteries of Sinop as a few small works with old guns, one of them masked by its own ships and another soon out of cartridges, and the British press noted that the town's defenses had been neglected for decades. The Russian chronicle counts six batteries with 24 guns, the Presidential Library 38 guns.¹⁰

Against them came the Russian Black Sea Fleet under Vice Admiral Pavel Nakhimov. From 23 November his three ships of the line watched the harbor from the open sea. By 29 November Rear Admiral Fyodor Novosilsky had joined him from Sevastopol with three more ships of the line and two frigates, and Nakhimov then had six ships of the line, the Imperatritsa Maria, Parizh, Velikii Knyaz Konstantin, Tri Sviatitelia, Rostislav and Chesma, and the frigates Kagul and Kulevchi. His heaviest guns were 68-pounders, and they fired explosive shells.¹¹

The two sides counted the guns differently, but the gap was wide whichever way. The Russian chronicle gives Nakhimov's eight sailing ships 710 guns, 76 of them shell guns; the Presidential Library gives 720 Russian guns against 510 Ottoman ones; Tarle puts the Russian total at 716.¹²

Two commanders, two decisions

The Ottoman commander saw what was coming. He reported the Russian ships off the port and warned that without reinforcements disaster could follow, but no help came from Constantinople or from the British and French fleets. Slade writes that Osman Pasha, distrusting his captains' ability to keep station in a running fight and unwilling to face another gale, chose to wait for the enemy at anchor.¹³

He drew his ships up in a curve along the shore of the town, and that choice cost him. Tarle notes that the line followed the concave quay and hid many of the shore batteries behind the ships; Slade found one battery masked by its own squadron, and the British press reported that the ships blocked the line of fire of the guns on land.¹⁴

Nakhimov chose to attack the squadron in its own harbor. The Presidential Library explains that at sea it might have been joined by the British and French ships lying in Besika Bay; the Russian chronicle dates the decision to the arrival of Novosilsky's ships. On 29 November he issued a written order with the plan of attack: where each ship was to anchor, how to fire and which targets to take.¹⁵

The ships would go in under sail in two columns, which shortened the time they spent under fire and let them drop anchor quickly in their places. Nakhimov led one column in the Imperatritsa Maria, followed by the Konstantin and the Chesma; Novosilsky led the other in the Parizh, followed by the Tri Sviatitelia and the Rostislav. The frigates Kagul and Kulevchi stayed outside under sail to watch the Ottoman steamers and stop them from escaping.¹⁶

The battle in phases

The approach. About noon on 30 November the Russian ships of the line stood into the bay under all sail before a light wind. The morning had been foggy, which let the Russians come close before they could be clearly seen. As the Russians came in, the governor and the town's officials fled inland.¹⁷

The first shots. The Ottoman ships fired first, the flagship Avnillah leading, and as the Russians came in, several of their ships suffered badly from the Ottoman fire. Then the Russian ships of the line anchored in their appointed places and replied with full broadsides.¹⁸

The destruction. Line-of-battle ships firing 68-pounder shells into frigates and corvettes had only one possible result. Ships caught fire, and men drowned trying to swim ashore. The Nizamiye burned and was destroyed, and on the frigate Navek-i Bahri her captain, Ali Bey, blew up his own ship rather than let her be taken; the Russian chronicle and Tarle credit her destruction to the guns of the Chesma and the Konstantin. One by one the burning frigates and corvettes cut their cables and drifted ashore.¹⁹

How long it lasted. Slade writes that the action was decided in an hour and a half. Russian accounts, which count until the last shore battery fell silent, give about four hours.²⁰

The steamer that got away. One ship escaped. The steamer Taif slipped her cable, broke out past the frigates waiting outside the bay and then ran into Kornilov's steamers, which had come from Sevastopol to reinforce Nakhimov; she fought her way past them too and carried the news to Constantinople. Slade says she reached the Bosphorus on the afternoon of 2 December; Küskü dates the arrival of the news in Istanbul to 3 December. A long-told story put Slade himself aboard her, a story repeated even in recent accounts, but Küskü shows that he was not, and Slade's own narrative places him in Constantinople when the news came.²¹

Turning point: fire on the town

What turned a victory into a scandal was what came after. Slade writes that if Nakhimov had ceased fire once the action was decided, his credit would have been unmixed. Instead the Russians kept up their fire with shot, shell and incendiary carcasses on the stranded wrecks and their crews, and on the town behind them, until its Turkish quarter was ablaze.²²

Slade, a sailor himself, also blamed the Ottoman side. In his judgment the squadron should have moored close inshore in shallow water, landed some of its guns to build batteries on the cliffs and sent ashore its boats, spars and sails, everything that could burn or splinter; anchored where it was, it was a target.²³

Counting the losses

The Ottoman toll was terrible, though no figure is certain. Slade put the dead at 2,700 out of 4,200; Kinglake reported that men in authority believed 4,000 had been killed; Mehmet Öz, in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, gives over 2,000; Küskü cites the historian Enver Ziya Karal for more than half of a crew of about 4,000; the Russian chronicle gives two thirds of 4,500, and the Presidential Library more than 3,000 killed and drowned.²⁴

Osman Pasha was carried away wounded, a prisoner. Slade counts five officers, the commander among them, and about 150 men taken by the Russians; the Presidential Library gives about 200 prisoners. About a thousand Ottoman sailors, Slade adds, had gone off into the interior on the evening of the battle.²⁵

The Russians lost no ships. The chronicle of 1948 counts 37 killed and 229 wounded, the Presidential Library 37 killed and 235 wounded, and Tarle 38 killed and 240 wounded. An officer quoted by Tarle recalled that the Imperatritsa Maria, which led the way and anchored closest to the Ottoman broadsides, suffered most.²⁶

When the British steamer Retribution and the French Mogador reached Sinop days later, with Slade aboard to bring help, they found the shore of the bay lined with wrecks and strewn with corpses. Not a mast was standing, and the town looked, in Slade's words, like a town after an assault. The wounded had lain for days with little care; the allied ships brought surgeons and began carrying survivors to Constantinople.²⁷

Aftermath: from Sinop to war

The victors sailed home. Nakhimov's squadron left for Sevastopol on 2 December, and despite the damage every ship made the stormy crossing. Nicholas I gave Nakhimov the Order of St George, second class, one of the rarest Russian military awards.²⁸

The news reached London and Paris on 11 December and filled the British papers from the next day. The press called it the massacre of Sinope, and as Kinglake put it, few men in England doubted that it had been a treacherous deed.²⁹

The government in London, pressed by Napoleon III and by its own public, decided that such a disaster must not happen again. The admirals were told to secure the command of the Black Sea and keep the Russian fleet in its harbors.³⁰

Kinglake himself judged that charge unjust. In his view the attack was no stealthy surprise, since the Russian fleet had cruised openly off Sinop for days, and Russia had every right to destroy an enemy squadron once the Ottomans were fighting on the Danube. Public anger, he argued, was turned against the Czar instead of the British ministers, ambassadors and admirals who had let the squadron lie unprotected.³¹

Whatever the justice of it, the effect was decisive. The British and French fleets entered the Black Sea early in January 1854, and at the end of March Britain and France declared war on Russia. The war that followed would be fought above all in the Crimea, around the base from which Nakhimov had sailed.³² › Siege of Sevastopol, 1854

Legacy and memory

Sinop showed what shells could do to wooden ships. The Russian ships of the line carried 68-pounder shell guns on their lower decks, 76 of them by the chronicle's count, and the Presidential Library calls Sinop the first battle in which such guns were used on a large scale and the last great battle of the age of sail.³³ › Battle of Kinburn, 1855

For Sinop the cost was lasting. Trade moved to Samsun and Trabzon, and the town never regained its old place on the Black Sea. In memory of the sailors who died, the Ottoman state built a Martyrs' Fountain near the shipyard, paid for by Sultan Abdülmecid, and it still stands in the town.³⁴

Russia remembers the day as the greatest victory of its Black Sea Fleet. The anniversary, 18 November in the old Russian calendar, is kept as 1 December, a Day of Military Glory under a federal law of 1995.³⁵