Flying Fish 2012/2 - Ocean Cruising Club

SAILING TO THE CRIMEAN WAR
David Read Barker
(This is the second of David’s Tales from the Black Sea. The first, Xenophon’s Wake, will
be found on pages 105–117 of Flying Fish 2010/2. All the photographs are by Lisa Borre.)
Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred. “Forward the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d; Storm’d at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell Rode the six hundred.
The first three verses of The Charge Of The Light Brigade,
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Childhood memories of Tennyson’s poem came alive as we coasted into the harbour
of Balaclava, aptly named Beautiful Harbour (Bella Clava) by the Genoese whose
medieval fort still commands its entrance. Thus began a fascination with the Crimean
War, the last major international war in the age of sailing ships and the only one fought
on the Black Sea. During a circumnavigation of the Black Sea aboard our 37ft cutter
Gyatso in 2010 I found myself irresistibly drawn to the war’s main battlegrounds, all of
which remain havens for sailing boats. Over the course of four months and more than
2100 miles, my wife Lisa and I visited five of the six Black Sea countries, beginning in
Turkey and continuing in an anti-clockwise direction to Georgia, Ukraine, Romania
and Bulgaria before returning again to Turkey. We did not sail to Russia because there
are not yet any clearance procedures for yachts on the Russian Black Sea coast.
The Black Sea
The Black Sea is very deep, so it holds a very large volume of water compared to its
surface area. With a surface area of about 436,000 km² it is only 20 percent larger than
the Baltic, but holds 28 times as much water; it is roughly twice the area of the five
North American Great Lakes but has 24 times as much water. Its catchment area is
more than two million km², covering part or all of 22 countries, through which flow
the Danube, Dnieper, Dniester and Don rivers, as well as many smaller ones. More than
half the inflow comes down the Danube from western Europe, joining the Black Sea
amidst the vast wetlands of its delta, in Romania. The Black Sea is connected to the
Aegean through the 165 mile long Turkish Straits, flowing through the Bosphorus to
Istanbul, then through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. The sea is very young,
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The Danube delta near Constanta, Romania
and was probably created less than 7500 years ago when an immense earthquake broke
open the Bosphorus sill, flooding an ancient freshwater lake with salty Mediterranean
water and creating many large brackish wetlands at the river deltas.
The Crimean War
The Crimean War was the largest of dozens of wars that trace their origin to Tsar Peter
the Great’s determination to build year-round Russian ports on the Baltic and the Black
Sea, triggering a three century-long effort to reconquer the lands north of the Black
Sea which had been ‘lost’ to Islam and the Ottoman Empire. Russian expansionism
riled the British, who saw threats to the routes to their Indian empire, and the French,
the self-appointed protectors of (Catholic) Christians in the Holy Land. For the
Russians, Sevastopol, the great port city at the western end of the Crimean Peninsula,
was a sacred place, where Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, was baptised a Christian
in the year 988. This event caused the Tsar to see himself as the protector of all the
Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Personal and national pride propelled
events. Queen Victoria’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas I, still revelled in the destruction of
the French Emperor Napoleon’s army at Moscow forty years earlier and looked down
on Napoleon’s nephew, Emperor Napoleon III. Neither the British, the French nor
the Russians had much respect for the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid, whose empire
the Tsar called ‘the sick man of Europe’.
In the mid 19th century the area of modern Bulgaria and Romania that straddled the
lower Danube was known as the Danubian Principalities, a region whose Orthodox
population was often restive under Muslim Ottoman rule. In July 1853, Russian troops
of Tsar Nicholas I invaded and pushed the Ottoman army out. Three months later
Sultan Abdülmecid declared war, and the opponents faced off across the Danube. In
November 1853 Tsar Nicholas I responded by sending a fleet from his great naval base
at Sevastopol to attack an Ottoman squadron anchored at Sinop, some 150 miles to
the south. The surprise attack was a complete success, destroying a major portion of the
Ottoman Black Sea fleet, killing 2700 Ottoman sailors, and burning most of the town.
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The Battle
of Sinop
This marked
the first use of
explosive shells
in naval warfare.
Determined to
prevent Russia
from any further
encroach-ments
on Ottoman
territory and
possibly gaining
naval access to
the Mediterranean, the British and French responded by allying with the Sultan and
sending a large fleet and army to Varna, today the largest Bulgarian city on the Black
Sea coast. The Russian army retreated and the unlikely allies achieved their war aims.
But then, having invested so much effort, the allies decided to destroy the Russian
Black Sea fleet and its home port of Sevastopol, 255 miles to the northeast. The siege
of Sevastopol lasted for 349 days, from September 1854 to September 1855, during
which the British and French fired more than a million cannon balls into the city,
devastating it. The war ended with the city evacuated and the Russian Black Sea fleet
on the bottom.
Istanbul
Yachts can reach the Black Sea by either the ‘downstream’ route down the Danube, or
the ‘upstream’ route from the Aegean via the Turkish Straits to Istanbul. The city offers
excellent marinas on both the European and the Asian sides of the Straits, and the first
contact with the Crimean War – the huge Selimiye Barracks, formerly known to the
British army as the Scutari Barracks, where Florence Nightingale and her 38 volunteer
nurses established a hospital for wounded British soldiers. Though the barracks today
The Scutari Barracks on the Bosphorus in Istanbul
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The Bosphorus
from Istanbul
are the headquarters
of the Turkish First
Army, one of the
corner towers houses
a museum to her.
A gifted publicist
and statistician as
well as a dedicated
nurse, Florence
Nightingale
mobilised public
support for better medical care for wounded soldiers and showed that more died from
disease than from battle wounds, but she never fully understood that many of her patients
were dying of dysentery and cholera from the bad sanitation at the hospital.
On reaching the Black Sea at the Bosphorus, yachts can turn left and sail past the
sandy beaches of the west coast, passing European Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, to
Odessa in the Ukraine. But the Black Sea’s anti-clockwise rim current makes the righthand turn, along the rugged Turkish coast, the route preferred by those who want to
explore more of the Sea.
Sinop
The picturesque and historic town of Amasra is 165 miles east of the Bosphorus, with
at least six harbours suitable for yachts along the way. Sinop, the site of the spectacular
battle at the start of the war, is another 140 miles farther east. There are a large number
of new man-made fishing harbours en route, and two of only four natural harbours on
the entire Black Sea coast.
The modern day fishing and
yacht harbour at Sinop
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The beach in Sozopol, Bulgaria
Sinop is an important Turkish port of entry and an ancient Black Sea port, with a
crowded fishing harbour that offers excellent all-around shelter and accommodates
more than 200 boats, including visiting yachts. It is commonly the jumping off point
for yachts making passage to Yalta or Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine.
It also forms an invisible threshold on the Turkish coast, beyond which few yachts
venture farther east. The town has excellent provisions and restaurants.
The West Coast
Turning left out of the Bosphorus, the first 67 miles of the west coast route lead
along the Turkish coast to the port of Iğneada, just south of the border with Bulgaria.
Unfortunately, there is no Turkish port of entry on this coast, so yachts must clear out
in Istanbul (not an easy or inexpensive undertaking) and are in a bureaucratic limbo
until clearing into Bulgaria at Tsarevo. Continuing north, Bulgaria and Romania are
both EU countries with entry and exit formalities that are a bit more assiduous than
in Italy or Spain but much more professional than in Greece, for instance.
Burgas Bay, the finest (really the only) ‘cruising grounds’ on the Black Sea, begins
about 25 miles north of the Turkish border. Here, the ancient towns of Sozopol and
Nessebar offer world-class architecture and excellent marinas. Nessebar is a UNESCO
World Heritage site but is overrun with souvenir kiosks and tour groups. Sozopol is
just as attractive and much more relaxed – it was one of our favourite towns on the
whole Black Sea coast. Burgas is an attractive small city with a large commercial port
containing a small yacht club that welcomes visiting foreign yachts.
Another 55 miles north is Varna Bay, two miles into which is Varna, Bulgaria’s largest
coastal city. Burgas and Varna have virtually identical commercial ports, yacht clubs and
yacht marinas, and have competed against each other for at least the last two centuries.
In 1854 they were much smaller and technologically simpler. Varna suddenly became
the main base for the British and French support for their Ottoman allies, but when the
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Local yachts at
the Varna Yacht Club
Russians backed down and the bulk of the ships and soldiers departed for the new front
it quickly declined to become only a support base for the siege of Sevastopol. Varna is
at the southern edge of the vast Danube River delta, in the 19th century infamous for
disease, so it was inevitable that many soldiers became sick here. Today one is surprised
by the European feel of the place with its pavement cafés in the city centre.
North of Bulgaria, Romania’s 140 mile coastline is dominated by the immense delta
of the Danube River. Today, Romania’s main port, Constanta, includes an excellent
yacht harbour at Port Tomis. Farther north, the town of Sulina is just upstream from
the mouth of the main Danube channel. From Sulina, fast hydrofoils carry passengers
up to Tulcea, the headquarters of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve Authority,
which issues permits to visit the immense biosphere reserve.
The Crimean Peninsula
From Sinop, at the northern tip of Turkey, Yalta is 180 miles to the north, at the
The Crimean Peninsula
near Yalta
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southern tip of the Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. From Constanta, Sevastopol is 250
miles to the east, some 30 miles northwest of Yalta across the peninsula.
Balaclava
Balaclava is by far the best of the natural harbours on the Black Sea – only Sevastopol,
which is really a series of harbours, offers greater variety and shelter. It has been a
strategic mooring for millennia, first developed by the ancient Greeks, fortified by
the Genoese during the Middle Ages, taken over by the British as their base for the
siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, and then such an important submarine base
for the USSR that it was abandoned only in 1996, and was not open to foreign yachts
until after 2001. The submarine tunnels, built to withstand a direct nuclear blast,
have now been stripped bare and are a local tourist attraction.
Balaclava served as a very crowded but ultimately effective base after the British
army arrived there in September 1854 to begin the encirclement of Sevastopol, less
than 20 miles to the northwest. The
most notorious skirmish occurred the
following month, when Lord Cardigan
led the charge of the Light Brigade,
which he commanded, immortalised
by Tennyson. Cardigan spent the
war in Balaclava aboard his immense
steam yacht Dryad, well-stocked with
cases of champagne in the hold and a
French chef in the galley. Dryad flew
Balaclava, 1854
the colours of the Royal Southern
Yacht Club, of which Cardigan later became Commodore. The Valley of Death,
located between the heights 2½ miles beyond the town of Balaclava, is where the
Russian cannons killed 107 of the 674 men of the Light Brigade. Today the land has
been given over to vineyards – the wine store in Balaclava sells a nice local bubbly at
a great price, but Lord Cardigan certainly wouldn’t have served it.
In Balaclava harbour, the last whiffs of the Cold War have given way to new
marinas where visiting yachts can find moorings on floating pontoons, secure from
all but drunken Slavs at the wheels of their superyachts.
Balaclava is now a popular yacht harbour
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Sevastopol Harbour near the city centre
Sevastopol
The modern city of Sevastopol is situated on the south side of a fjord approximately
3½ miles long and a mile wide. The fjord itself is at the eastern end of a deeply
indented 8 mile long peninsula. The terrain offers so many protected spots for ships
that it has been settled for millennia – the Greeks founded the town of Chersonesus
there in the 5th century BC, and it thrived as a place of pagan and then Christian
worship under the Byzantine Empire, reaching its peak of fame with the baptism of
Grand Prince Vladimir. The military potential of the fjord is so obvious that the
18th century Tsars chose it as the headquarters of their Black Sea fleet, which made
it – almost automatically – the target of the Ottoman/British/French allies following
their relatively easy victory in the Danubian principalities. The destruction of the
Russian Black Sea fleet and its port became their new war aim.
Poor Sevastopol! After besieging the city for 349 days and firing a million artillery
shells, the allies had so devastated the place that the Russians were forced to abandon
it by a pontoon bridge set up approximately where the modern harbour breakwaters
are. Geography is destiny, and history repeated itself less than a century later when the
Nazis levelled the place in their (unsuccessful) rush to grab the Caspian oil fields. The
final insult came in 1956, when the USSR’s only Ukrainian General Secretary, Nikita
Khrushchev, transferred
control of the port from
Russia to the Ukraine. This
sop to local pride created a
major headache after the
USSR broke up in August
1991, when the Ukraine
Russian Navy warships
in Sevastopol
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demanded that Russia remove the Black Sea fleet. Since no port on Russia’s Black
Sea coast can even begin to accommodate the fleet it still sits rusting at anchor in
Sevastopol, a prime tourist show for tripper boats.
Architecturally, modern Sevastopol radiates a neoclassical charm that is distinctly
lacking in most ex-Soviet cities, and it offers half a dozen yacht marinas with varying
degrees of amenities and cultural challenges. Sevastopol is a port of entry, but Yalta is a
friendlier place for yachts to go through the relatively expensive (US $200) and tedious
clearance process. Sevastopol suffers from the edginess that emerges when the pace of
change is greater than people’s ability to adjust. Ethnic tensions rumble between local
Ukrainians and Russians brought to Sevastopol by the USSR navy during the Cold
War years. For modern visitors, the Siege of Sevastopol Museum holds an immense
diorama of the Crimean War.
The Crimean War was the first to be fought with rifles rather than muskets, with
railroads rather than oxcarts, and with telegraphs rather than carrier pigeons. It was
the first to be driven by public opinion based on first-hand reports from independent
journalists, and it presaged the trench warfare of World War I, sixty years later. The
death toll was terrible – almost 700,000 of the war’s nearly 2 million soldiers. But in
the end, it was the end. No such war is plausible today, despite the enormous growth
of trade and tumultuous change.
For cruising yachts, co-operation among the six Black Sea countries is gradually
increasing, locals in the small harbours are friendly, and there are no pirates or smugglers.
Watch for yacht charters to take off in Burgas Bay and for more Blue Flag marinas all along
the west coast. With the 2014 winter Olympics coming to Sochi in Russia, there is hope that
the authorities will introduce entry procedures for yachts, as they have for St Petersburg.
Istanbul or Sozopol
make excellent base
camps for manageable
adventures on the
Black Sea. Getting
caught up in the
history of the Black
Sea was all part of a
great summer cruise.
David Read Barker
and Lisa Borre (right,
in Sozopol, Bulgaria)
are authors of The
Black Sea, published
by Imray Laurie Norie
& Wilson Ltd and the
RCC Pilotage Foundation, and reviewed on page 82 of this issue. The sailing log of their
Black Sea voyage will be found at http://www.gyatso.net/blog/the-black-sea/.
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