Michael Talbot
Having recently started a job at the University of Greenwich in London, I have spent some time over the past few months thinking about possible connections between the Ottoman Empire and my new institution, one campus of which is based in the stunning setting of Maritime Greenwich, which has at its heart a Baroque complex built by Sir Christopher Wren at the end of the seventeenth century to serve as a naval hospital, but from 1873 site of the Royal Naval College. It is also home to the Royal Observatory, famous for marking global time through the Prime Meridian. The most obvious Ottoman presence on campus is the 5.5 tonne cannon bearing the tuğra of Sultan Selim III (1789-1808), captured by the British navy during the British-Ottoman War of 1807-1809, for much of its history positioned outside the Greenwich Hospital School (now a visitor centre). As befits a war trophy, the cannon bears the names of a number of British naval victories, including the Battle of the Nile (1798), Algiers (1816), and St Jean d'Acre (1840). By the late nineteenth century, Ottoman students themselves were coming to attend classes at Greenwich beside this emblem of their defeat, and it is one of these students and his apparent love of astronomy - that this post will trace.
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| The 'Turkish' cannon, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich |
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Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich (via Wikipedia)
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With the establishment of the Royal Naval College in 1873, Ottoman arrivals to Greenwich increased in the form of naval officers seeking education in all aspects of modern naval warfare. The Ottoman navy of the late nineteenth century was an expanding and dynamic force, and modernisation was the order of the day. In addition to bringing the imperial ships up-to-date, the Ottoman admiralty wanted their officers to be educated to the highest standard possible. It is for this reason that Ottoman naval officers were sent for education in Britain, which of course boasted a famously formidable navy in the nineteenth century, and links were developed through the efforts of Sir Henry Felix Woods, a former naval attaché to the British embassy in Istanbul and later an admiral in the Ottoman navy. One of those young officers sent to Britain was Ali Naci Bey, a sublieutenant in the early stages of his career.
A letter from the British Foreign Office to the Ottoman embassy in London from 27 September 1893 shows Ali Naci's acceptance onto the prestigious course for foreign officers at the Royal Naval College:
HR.SFR.3 409/90
'I lost no time in referring to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty Your Excellency's request that Sublieutenant Ali Bey of the Imperial Ottoman Navy might be allowed to attend lectures on astronomy and the drawing of charts at Greenwich Observatory. I have now been informed by Their Lordships that no lectures are given at the Royal Observatory. I have, however, the satisfaction to inform Your Excellency that there will be no objection to Sublieutenant Ali Bey joining the Royal Naval College, Greenwich for the ordinary course of study prescribed for foreign officers, provided he complies with the requirements stated in the inclosed paper of instructions. The College Session commences on October 1st. No special lectures are given in Astronomy at the College, but lectures on Nautical Astronomy are included in the ordinary course of study.'
The criteria for foreign officers, which you can see below, essentially said that places were limited, the course would take nine months, cost £31 10s (around £3,100 or US$4,800 today), that the students had to live outside the College, and, crucially, had to be proficient in English and mathematics.
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| HR.SFR.3 198/22 |
Rüstem Paşa, the Ottoman ambassador, responded on 2 October that arrangements would be made for Ali Naci to begin the course, and on 17 October wrote another note confirming that provision had been made for the course fees to be paid. The Imperial Ottoman Bank in London advanced the fees, which Rüstem Paşa arranged to be reimbursed from Istanbul. After some bureaucratic bumbling, Ali Naci's abilities in English and mathematics were deemed to be of a high enough level for him to begin instruction. The correspondence also starts calling him a first lieutenant, indicating that he had received a promotion at some point that month.
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| HR.SFR.3 409/99 |
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| HR.SFR.3 408/63 |
HR.SFR.3 409/100
HR.SFR.3 409/101
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| HR.SFR.3 408/70 |
Once enrolled at the Royal Naval College, Ali Naci's courses would have been gruelling, with the study book Problems in Navigation and Nautical Astronomy proposed in the Examinations for Rank of Lieutenant (1887) giving a sense of the sort of problems he would have had to solve using trigonometry, navigation techniques involving sextants, the moon, and the compass, and a huge variety of other skills essential for an accomplished naval officer. Here is an example from August 1882 of the sort of questions Ali Naci and his classmates were expected to answer, which would send a mathematically-challenged person such as myself running for cover:
Q. A ship sails from a place A in latitude 48˚ 31' N., longitude 37˚ 30' W., due South 89 miles, and then due East till she arrives at place B in longitude 35˚ 32' W. Another ship sails from A to B on a direct course. Both ships start together and arrive together. Compare their rates of sailing.
A. The distance run by the first ship is 89 miles south, and then 80.4 miles east; the total being 169.4 miles. The distance run by the second ship will be found to be 119.2 miles. Thus the rates of speed are nearly as 1.421 to 1.
On the Ottoman side, the trail of documents on Ali Naci runs somewhat cold after seeing him start at Greenwich, although I don't doubt that some further research in the archives in London would yield some information on his time at the Naval College. However, Ali Naci reappears in a number of documents in Istanbul, some ten years later in 1903. The description here, in a cover note from the office of the Grand Vizierate, shows that his nautical astronomy courses at Greenwich had had a lasting effect on his career development:
'An eminent declaration from the exalted imperial will was read in the special council of ministers concerning the plea for help to the lofty footstool of the Caliph made by Ali Naci Bey, one of the astronomy teachers at the Imperial Naval School, the son of Faik Paşa, who fled whilst he was Chief of the Naval Staff.'
(Erkan-i Harbiye-i Bahriye Reisi iken firar eden Faik Paşa'nın oğlu Mekteb-i Bahriye-i Şahane'de fenn-i heyet muallimlerinden Ali Naci Bey tarafından istitafı havi atabe-i ulya-yı hilafet-penahiye ref edilen arıza bir mantuk irade-i seniye-i cenab-ı mulukane meclis-i mahsus-u vükelada bilkarain ceryan eden.)
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| Y.A.RES 119/86 |
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| Y.A.RES 119/86 |
So young Ali Naci was now an astronomy teacher at the Mekteb-i Bahriye-i Şahane (Imperial Naval School), bringing the knowledge he gained at Greenwich to the next generation of naval officers. But what of his father, this Faik Paşa who had fled his post as Chief of the Naval Staff? Well, aside from the fact that we have a photo of him courtesy of the Abdülhamd II photograph collection (below), we also have Ali Naci's petition (above) to that sultan that gives his position on what had happened, beginning with the declaration 'I am the son of Faik Paşa, your slave who did the terrible act of fleeing in shame two years ago whilst he was Chief of the Naval Staff' (Kulları Erkan-ı Harbiye-i Bahriye Reisi iken iki sene evvel ar-ı ferarı irtikab eden Faik Paşa'nın oğluyum). What precisely caused this flight is not evident from the petition, which is, as with all such documents, so drenched in contrition and humility that it is difficult to wring hard facts from it, except that Faik Paşa's flight meant that his family found themselves in a dire financial situation. Some digging in the archives revealed that Faik Paşa was due to be sent to a position on the island of Rhodes in the summer of 1901 - something that he was obviously not keen on doing, instead fleeing to Malta and onwards to British-occupied Egypt. The implication here seems to be that Faik Paşa was seen as a threat to Abdülhamid II's regime, as Rhodes (as with other islands like Chios) was a place of internal political exile. Whether Faik Paşa was too reformist for the sultan's tastes or involved in one of the many opposition movements is unclear. Regardless, Faik Paşa skipped state-mandated exile for a self-imposed exile of his own, leaving Ali Naci to plead his family's loyalty to the imperial government.
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| Faik Paşa, from the Adbülhamid II Collection, Library of Congress |
In this he seems to have been successful for, as this set of documents reveals, Ali Naci had settled into a teaching job at the Mekteb-i Bahriye-i Şahane. Some hunting in the official Ottoman maritime yearbook (Salname-i Bahriye) reveals his career progression in that institution. He seems to have begun in 1897 – a mere three years after finishing his course at Greenwich – as an instructor in geometry (hendese muallimi). By the following year, he is recorded as a teacher in naval navigation and maritime astronomy (seyr-i sefain ve heyet-i bahriye muallimi), and what is more, he is given the rank of naval captain (kapudan) at the level of commander (binbaşı). In 1901 he was promoted again to the level of senior commander (kaimakam). By 1902 his teaching seems to have become specialised to maritime astronomy alone, but he added maritime surveying (mesaha-ı bahriye) to his course list in 1904. He was still in his position in the school after 1908, although I lose sight of him in the records after this point, with the next certain piece of information coming from a document of January 1917. The document is a tekaüt, that is, his formal discharge from service. Here, he was described as 'the corvette captain Fatihli Ali Naci bin Faik', giving us the information that he was from Fatih in Istanbul, and that, sixteen years after his father's flight, Ali Naci had risen to the rank of corvette captain, which does not necessarily mean that he had served at sea on a corvette, but rather, following in his father's footsteps, that he had risen in the ranks of the naval staff. Given the date of this document, we might assume that he had contributed in some manner to the organisation and operations of the Ottoman navy during the First World War, although no details are given here about the specifics of his service.
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| İ.DUİT 184/85 |
As with all of our snippets, drawing general conclusions from Ali Naci Bey's career is perhaps problematic, but his journey from student-lieutenant to senior staff officer does intersect some crucial moments in late Ottoman history. He was part of the educational drive to modernisation, initially through his courses at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, and later through his own teaching at the Mekteb-i Bahriye-i Şahane. His education paved the way for a role in the military-bureaucratic class that played such an important role in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire's existence. With such power came great risk, and the flight of his father Faik Paşa is indicative of the dangers facing the members of that class during the reign of Abdülhamid II, with the threat of internal exile ever-present. Ali Naci himself, due in no small part to the astronomical and mathematical knowledge he had worked so hard to acquire in London and spent so many years passing on to the next generation of officers in Istanbul, seems to have successfully navigated through these choppy waters to thrive and succeed in his naval career.
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| Mekteb-i Bahriye-i Şahanelerinde Fenn-i Heyet Muallimi abd-ı memlukları Ali Naci bin Faik |
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