The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Anthoine’s enterprise was booming. The next year, twenty ships arrived at Marseilles from Kherson, and nearly that many set sail with French goods in the opposite direction. For his efforts to promote this new commerce, Anthoine was raised to the French hereditary nobility. Through his commercial connections with the Black Sea, he and his children entered the rarefied heights of French society, now introduced as the family of the baron Saint-Joseph.

  Storm clouds soon began to gather, however. Kherson was a miserable place, and despite the best efforts of the Russian authorities to make it a thriving commercial port, it could not escape its geography. It was situated away from the coast, up the Dnepr where the river’s many channels fingered their way toward the estuary. In July and August, the heat and stale air were unbearable, and summer floods produced pools of stagnant water that were breeding grounds for disease. In 1787 two of Anthoine’s brothers, who had joined him in his business, fell ill and died. “Kherson resembled a vast hospital,” Anthoine recalled. “All one could see were the dead and the dying.”34

  International politics also began to interfere. The Ottomans had formally opened the Black Sea to foreign commerce, but shippers still had to rely on the sultan’s grace and favor for passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Officials would often determine that a ship exceeded the maximum allowable lading and then impound it in Istanbul. Then there were the British. What Anthoine called lajalousie anglaise—the desire of England to goad Russia into fighting the Ottomans, block French expansion in the sea, and conclude a preferential trade agreement with Istanbul—meant that the threat of war between the two Black Sea empires was ever present.

  Conflict finally came in the summer of 1787. Seeking to take control of Crimea from the Russians, the Ottomans opened the second major war during Catherine’s reign. Anthoine was caught in the middle. Some of his vessels were at sea when war was declared, and since they were flying Russian flags, they were promptly captured by Ottoman warships. Only a few made it back safely to Marseilles. When the war ended in 1792, Anthoine managed briefly to reestablish his trading house in Kherson, but things did not work in his favor. The disease-ridden port and the lackluster interest of European powers in establishing commercial houses there seemed to argue for transferring the center of Black Sea commerce elsewhere. (The Admiralty, in fact, was moved to Nikolaev in 1794.) In the end, the turmoil of the French revolutionary wars and the banning of French products from Russian ports in the early 1790s—Catherine’s response to the unruly mobs now governing Paris—forced him to close shop. Anthoine returned to Marseilles where he eventually became mayor of the city and devoted his off hours to writing an account of his adventures in Russia.

  Anthoine’s Historical Essay on the Commerce and Navigation of the Black Sea is one of the best first-hand descriptions of the opening up of the sea to European shipping and the state of Russia’s conquests under Catherine. It was widely known to travelers and diplomats of the period as a reliable guide to the northern coast and a practical primer on conducting business with the Russian empire via the Black Sea, especially when a vigorous trade with the Mediterranean began to pick up again in the early nineteenth century. But people read Anthoine’s book less for his colorful anecdotes and descriptions of port facilities than for the magnificent maps bound with the text.

  In planning his own voyage, Anthoine had difficulty acquiring accurate maps for his captains and had to rely on French charts from the 1770s, a time when the soundings and anchorages were still imperfectly known.35 He commissioned Jean Denis Barbie de Bocage, a talented cartographer at the French ministry of foreign affairs, to draw custom charts. Barbie produced three extraordinarily detailed engravings of the Black Sea region, based on the latest reports of the Russian Admiralty. One showed the interior navigation of European Russia and Poland, a beautiful map of the waterways of the western empire and still awe-inspiring in its detail. Another showed the overland trading routes between the Black Sea and northern Europe. A third depicted the cataracts of the Dnepr river, the same series of rapids that traders had portaged around for a millennium or more, now clearly described and artistically presented.

  It is not hard to see why Anthoine approached Barbie. The cartographer was already practiced in drawing the Black Sea. In the 1760s he had been commissioned by a Jesuit to draw a series of maps depicting a fantastic journey from southern Russia—“Scythia,” as the Jesuit called it—to all the major sites of classical Greece.36 Barbie, as it turns out, was the illustrator of the Abbe Barthelemy’s bestseller about a barbarian named Anacharsis and his search for civilization beyond the shores of the Pontus Euxinus. On Barbie’s drawing table, the old Scythia of Anacharsis literally overlapped with the new one of imperial Russia—a Scythia now almost denuded of its picturesque pastoral peoples but still tantalizingly wild to the many entrepreneurs, travelers, and soldiers who began to explore the sea and its environs.

  Rear Admiral Dzhons

  When Anthoine established his business in Kherson, the sea was open to Russian-flagged commercial vessels, but it was still technically closed to Russian warships. The victories in the war of 1768—74, as well as the appearance of merchantmen such as those outfitted by Anthoine, marked a major shift in the type of vessels seen on the Black Sea. The age of sail had dawned long before in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, where ships-of-the-line—large vessels with multiple decks, masts, and courses of square sails—had been the mainstay of European fleets for half a century or more. They were still a rarity farther to the east. But the end of Catherine’s first war against the Ottomans inaugurated a period of monumental change.

  Full-rigged ships, rather than rowed galleys and small sailing vessels, were seen more and more frequently, not only among merchant fleets, but also among the navies of both the Ottomans and the Russians. The Russian fleet was, according to treaty, not allowed to stray beyond the mouth of the Dnepr and the harbor at Sevastopol, but when hostilities once again broke out in Catherine’s second war with the Ottomans (1787—92), the change from earlier times was evident. One of the most detailed accounts of the beginnings of the age of sail comes from one of Anthoine’s contemporaries, someone whom he may well have met, a rear admiral in the Russian imperial navy by the name of Dzhons.

  Pavel Ivanovich Dzhons—or John Paul Jones (1747—92), as he is better known—was, of course, the captain of the famous Bonhomme Richard, hero of the American War of Independence, and father of the United States Navy. His ornate tomb in the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy has been solemnly visited by generations of midshipmen. In 1788 Jones agreed to join the Russian side in Catherine’s new war against the sultan, which had come about after an Ottoman ultimatum to quit Crimea and return it to its previous independent status. The inducement was that Jones would be given supreme command of the new Black Sea fleet, now wintering at Kherson and at Sevastopol. Jones was part of a long line of foreign officers in the employ of the Russian navy—going back to the Swiss Lefort in Peter’s Azov fleet—and since the new United States had still not established a navy of its own, the opportunity for gaining a major command, even if under a foreign ensign, must have seemed an opportunity too good to miss.

  Jones arrived in Kherson in the spring of 1788 to find the Russian force in disarray. Russia’s southern navy consisted of the main fleet at Sevastopol, diminished after a storm at sea the previous autumn, and a small outfit now anchored at Kherson. Jones was placed in charge of the Kherson squadron, a dozen or so sailing vessels variously rigged, including his flagship, the Vladimir. All the other available ships, mainly light Cossack boats and cannon-fitted galleys—some of them simply recommissioned ceremonial galleys which had earlier floated Catherine down the Dnepr—were assembled in a flotilla designed by the British naval engineer Samuel Bentham (brother of the philosopher Jeremy) and commanded by another soldier of fortune, Prince Charles of Nassau-Siegen. Although Jones believed that he had been given command of the entire Black Sea fleet, his authority seemed to extend over only h
is squadron; Nassau took orders directly from the supreme commander of all land and sea forces, Potemkin, while the main fleet at Sevastopol was commanded by a Russian rear admiral, Voinovich.

  The complexities of command and deployment were a particular problem for the Russians because, as Jones soon discovered, the Dnepr estuary, or liman, was to be the key to the entire war on the water. The two naval detachments were prevented from combining their forces by the strait which separated the estuary from the wider sea. Twin fortresses faced each other across the narrow strait. The one on the south side of the outlet, Kinburn, was held by the Russians, a prize that had been won in the Kucuk Kaynarca treaty, but the fortress on the northern point, Ochakov, was commanded by the Ottomans. At the opening to the sea, the space between the fortresses was only about 3 km wide. The strategies of the two navies were thus determined by the conditions in which they were to fight. The Russians needed to open up the strait by suppressing or capturing Ochakov; the Ottomans needed to close it off to Russian egress while maintaining a supply line to the garrison on the northern point. The Ottomans were clearly in a superior position. Their naval force was united under a single commander, the talented admiral Gazi Hasan Pasa, a Georgian by birth. Even if the Russian forces had been concentrated, the Ottomans would probably have outnumbered them in both ships and guns, even though most of the Ottoman vessels were rowed galleys rather than sailing ships.37

  The appearance of the Ottoman fleet at the end of May opened the fighting. Jones and Nassau moved their ships along the northern shore of the estuary, attempting to keep in line with the slow advance of the land forces under Prince Alexander Suvorov, one of Potemkin’s ablest generals. There were a few small engagements, but it was not until a month later, in late June, that decisive action was joined. The Ottoman galleys made for the Russian lines, but the attack came to a standstill when the Ottoman flagship grounded in the estuary’s shallow water. The Russians, waiting for a favorable wind, could not take advantage of the mishap, and it was already the next morning before they were able to advance against the Ottomans, by which time the flagship had come unstuck and the galleys turned around.

  Nassau’s flotilla, especially the deadly Cossack gunboats with which the Ottomans were intimately familiar, proved to be the most effective against the galleys. The flotilla was able to harass the Ottoman ships and set them alight, especially when the large galleys ran aground in the shallows. On the night of June 17—18, the Ottomans attempted a retreat out of the estuary, but the Russian battery at Kinburn opened up against the fleet, forcing the galleys close to the northern shore, where even more ran aground. In the early light of morning, Nassau’s floating batteries and small boats set upon them and destroyed perhaps as many as fifteen vessels, including ten large ships. Ottoman losses were considerable: over 1,500 men taken prisoner and several hundred killed, versus fewer than a hundred Russian sailors killed or wounded.38

  With the Ottoman fleet decimated, the land forces could at last turn to the task of taking Ochakov. In July, Russian forces under Potemkin laid siege while the navy prevented resupply, a strategy that would culminate in the early winter in the capture of the fortress and the wholesale destruction of the town and its inhabitants. Thousands of Ottoman bodies, including those of the wives and children of the garrison soldiers, were loaded onto carts and taken to the frozen estuary, where they lay stacked on the ice until the spring thaw.39 Throughout the rest of the war, the other major Ottoman fortresses—Akkerman and Bender on the Dnestr river, Kilia and Ismail on the Danube—fell one by one as the army swept to the west and the Sevastapol fleet prevented the garrisons’ receiving supplies and fresh troops by sea.

  The estuary campaign was decidedly different from Jones’s experience during the American War of Independence. In his most famous naval engagement, the battle with the British frigate Serapis off the Yorkshire coast in September 1779, Jones had bested the British captain by outmaneuvering him, coming quick around the bow and grappling to the side, then pounding the ship with heavy fire directed at the masts, until the enemy vessel was dead in the water. There was nothing of the gallantry of the duel between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis in the campaign of 1788. There, military victory depended largely on drawing the Ottoman galleys into shallow water, waiting for them to ground, and then attacking and sinking them with incendiary devices—“brandcougles,” as Jones called them, a kind of grenade. As he later recounted, the results could be horrific to watch, as the Ottoman sailors, stuck fast on their immobile ships, “suffered themselves to be throttled like as many sheep.”40

  "In my whole life,” Jones wrote, “I have never suffered so much vexation as in this one Campaign of the Liman, which was nearly the death of me.”41 A rift developed between Jones and Nassau, who emerged as the clear favorite of both Potemkin and Catherine. When Jones gave orders, they were often ignored by Nassau or countermanded by Potemkin. The illustrious command of the entire Black Sea fleet, which Jones felt he had been promised from the outset of his service, never materialized; already before the storming of Ochakov, he was relieved of his limited command and recalled to St. Petersburg. After his return to the capital, Jones saw his star fall even farther. He was accused of having raped a prepubescent girl (his defense centered not on the commission of the act but on the girl’s alleged consent), and news of the scandal raced through Petersburg society. It was only because of the conflicting testimony of several ostensible witnesses that Jones was allowed to leave Russia without being court-martialed. He left the empire a laughing stock and died in Paris a few years later, in July 1792.

  Although he could not have known it at the time, Jones was present at the end of an era. The battle of the Dnepr estuary was the last time that Russian warfare on the water would be restricted to the outer reaches of the Black Sea. The taking of Ochakov during the course of the war freed passage to the wider sea, and from then on contests between Russian, Ottoman, and other navies would take place on the open sea itself, not in its antechambers. It was also the last time that the rowed galley would be one of the major instruments of war. Nassau’s floating batteries and small gunboats were probably the real source of the Russian victory in the estuary; Jones’s sailing ships had been of marginal use in the shallows and narrows. But once action was extended to the open water, the full-rigged ship-of-the-line and, not much later, the armored steamer were to become the main vessels of both the Russian and Ottoman imperial navies.

  The age of sail turned out to be rather brief, however. The early wars of the nineteenth century—’806—’2 and 1828—9—were largely land campaigns, in which Russian forces rushed around the sea to attain the real prizes: access to the Danube and, were it not for the opposition of European powers, Istanbul and the Straits as well. Even later, during the Crimean war, the only major naval engagement, at Sinop in 1853, could hardly be counted as such; the Russians simply destroyed the Ottoman Black Sea fleet in port. Travelers throughout the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries commented on the parlous condition of both Russian and Ottoman sailing vessels. The ships were poorly outfitted and either under- or over-manned. It was not unusual for a new ship in either navy to rot in port before it had ever seen action.

  Like Jones, many observers blamed the state of the two navies on the inherent inadequacies of Russians and Turks as mariners, the former given to pomposity and tyranny, the latter the victims of a congenital Oriental insouciance. The real reasons were rather simpler. After the estuary campaign of 1788, neither the Ottomans nor the Russians considered the other power to be a serious naval threat. The Russians maintained a slight superiority in naval technology, but the Ottomans knew that their friends, particularly the British, would step in to prop up their fleet if need be. And since no other power around the sea ever managed to develop much of a naval presence at all—the only worry to speak of were smugglers along the Caucasus coast and Laz pirates in the southeast—the two major empires had little reason to concern themselves with anything beyond co
astal defense. One of the major goals of European diplomacy up to the First World War, and indeed to a degree even after, was to ensure that things stayed that way.

  New Russia

  In the treaty that ended Catherine’s second war with the Ottomans, the Russian empire gained control of the entire northern littoral, all the way from the Dnestr to the Kuban river, as well as formal Ottoman recognition of the loss of Crimea. Those gains were consolidated and expanded in two wars fought by Catherine’s successors. The lands between the Dnestr and Prut rivers (an area known as Bessarabia) was absorbed into the empire, and then much of the Caucasus coast and portions of historic Armenia and Georgia also came under Russian suzerainty. Russia not only commanded the northern coast but also claimed a right to protect the Christians of the Danubian principalities and formally annexed most of the south Caucasus. Within a little more than a generation, from the Kiiciik Kaynarca treaty (1774) to the treaty of Adrianople (1829), Catherine and her successors had come close to realizing the goal of reaching across the sea to take Constantinople itself. The northern coast and hinterland, far from being a frontier, was now made into a Russian province, a region that tsarist administrators came to call, with all the unabashed optimism of empirebuilders everywhere, New Russia (Novorossiia).

  Catherine had a particular concern with reshaping the natural world according to her views of rationality and order, and as with many Enlightenment rulers, classical antiquity was seen as the epitome of both. For the new class of administrators across New Russia, rediscovering—or inventing—a connection with ancient Greece became an obsession. Settlements were stripped of their previous Tatar names and given labels derived from classical roots. The Crimean administrative center of Akmechet (“white mosque”) became Simferopol (“the city of connections,” as in roads).42 A flood-prone village on the Dnepr river was christened Kherson (after Chersonesus Taurica, the old Megarian colony in Crimea) and designated the center of Russian commerce and the seat of a major naval arsenal. The village of Akhtiar and its protected harbor, near the old Chersonesus, was renamed Sevastopol (“august city”), and made the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. Of all the major towns in the south, only Bakhchisarai (“garden palace”) retained its Tatar name, with the khan’s palace and other buildings preserved as a museum of the Oriental splendor of a deposed sovereign. Crimea itself—the Tatar “Krym”—was rechristened Tavrida, the Russian version of its Greek name.