7. The Sarhoş Selim and Ottoman Decline: illustrated history of landships, 1858-2008
Author’s note: As far as we are aware, all images are taken from public domain sources; please inform the author of any mistakes in this regard. In terms of any original sketches, these are amateur attempts based on the author’s own archival research. He welcomes improvement from any professional illustrators interested in enhancing this work. ~ CAH, 2023
In memory of Dad, who taught me a love for all things historical, and in homage to William Pène du Bois, who opened up my imagination.
Part One: Introduction and the Great Gravitational Shift
Part Two: The Sally Ann and Westward Expansion
Part Three: The Boudreaux Circus Ship and Reconstruction
Part Four: HML Transvaal and British Colonialism
Part Five: Le Maréchal Murat and the Helium Wars
Part Six: São Fitzcarrald and the Naughts Arms Race
The Sarhoş Selim, 1909
The Sarhoş Selim was a touring goodwill landship built to enhance Ottoman influence on the Arabian peninsula. She was built for beauty but lost in war.
Class & Type: Galata Class (one of two built)
Crew: Peacetime - 5 officers, 18 enlisted. Wartime - 4 officers, 39 enlisted
Capacity/Complement: c. 23 tons of gifts and cargo
Construction: Haliç and Sons, Damascus
Hull: wood
Buoyancy: 2 x hydrogen balloons; 1 x hydrogen zeppelin, semi-rigid, lofted
Buoyancy source: external pumps while in camp or port
Wheels/track: 2 wheels, 5 skis
Propulsion: wind, propeller, hand pump
Sail Plan: Barbary Schooner
Power plant: man-power, as needed
Length: 190 ft
Beam: 32 ft
Decks: 2, incl. aft tower
Weight (empty): 82 tons
Clearance: 3 ft
Steering: spinnaker, front rudder ski, obverse back wheels as needed
Speed: 1-10 mph
Armor: n/a
Armament: 2 x 75mm cannons; 4 Maxim machine guns added later
Communications: signal lights
Other Transportation: n/a, camels
Amenities: dates grown onboard
Fate: destroyed by Italian Zeppelins, 1916
The Sarhoş Selim was modeled after earlier landship classes, hearkening back to the simpler days of wind and balloon. Never built for war, she was nevertheless crewed by the Ottoman Army to act as an official representative of the government. The ship’s purpose was to further the Empire’s interests within its more distant vilayets and sanjaks. In her brief career, the Selim largely toured the Arab sanjaks on the Western coast of the Arabian peninsular. A sister ship, the Galata, toured the Mesopotamian districts.
Both landships were built as the personal project of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, even though his reign ended before he could see them to conclusion. In a speech before the Ottoman Parliament, Abdul-Hamid claimed that while meditating, he was inspired by a vision of the great Ottoman feat of transporting ships overland in Galata during the siege of Constantinople in 1453. These temporary “landships” thus circumvented the Byzantine chains laid across the Golden Horn inlet, enabling the great city’s fall. As every of fan of They Might Be Giants knows, this victory is why now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople.
The truth is that Abdul-Hamid was facing a great deal of pressure from the Young Turk movement, and this was part of his program to reinvigorate Ottoman glory. The Sultan’s idea was to build a fleet of these landships to tour across the Sahara, Persia and India, something like Roosevelt’s famous “Great White Fleet” of 1907. However, in an important contrast, the Sultan wanted his ships to be as colorful as possible to represent Ottoman benevolence and wealth.
Designed by ship architect, Demir Baltaoğlu, and constructed in Damascus, the Selim was built in imitation of pre-pre-dreadnaught landships, hoping to inspire the far reaches of the Empire with her elegant innocence. Nevertheless, Sarhoş Selim boasted some innovations taken up by some later architects. These included a rear-heavy design with skis in front to better “hop” over the sands of the Arabian desert as the large frontward balloons lifted the ship. When the winds were favorable she was also as fast as any sizable landship then built.
For buoyancy, Baltaoğlu had hoped the foreward hydrogen balloons would be enough, but various sand trials called for greater lift. A third buoy, in the shape of a zeppelin was added aft. Baltaoğlu embraced the zeppelin once he realized he could place a propeller on its front to aid the ship’s speed. To further assist propulsion in low-wind situations, Baltaoğlu added an old-school axle hand pump which could be operated by 4-5 men. These aks taşlama (axle-grinders) could also assist with steering if caught in a wadi. This was accomplished by disengaging the wheels from one another and then rotating them in opposite directions. A rustic, but effective solution for the wiles of the Saudi desert.
The Sarhoş Selim was known to delight children along her path, and became famous for her Haliç peacocks, whirling rabbits and luscious date palms grown onboard. Prior to 1914, the Sarhoş Selim was particularly magnificent, sporting a Barbary Schooner’s sailplan of colorful sails with striped tents and thick carpets on deck. However, once the Great War broke out, the Selim’s colorful sails were struck in favor of pale khaki, and her peacocks sadly replaced with machine guns. In an ironic twist of history, beginning in the 1970s, fundamentalist Imams began to declare images of the Sarhoş Selim as haram (forbidden), as its colorful image was seen as promoting gay rights.
For the most part, Sarhoş Selim’s peacetime mission was successful, with various tribal chiefs and princes welcoming the cheerful landship into their communities. The only notable mishap occurred as the Selim approached the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1912, in what came to be known as the infamous Bashi-bazouk Incident.
The Sharif of Mecca was informed by his advisors that the landship’s captain, Lt. Colonel Aslan Agha, was a descendant of Janissaries and thus rumored to be a Baktashi Muslim, considered by some Sunni Muslims to be a heretical sect. It likewise did not help that Abdul-Hamid II, a Sufi, claimed that the ships were inspired by a mystical vision, an experience rejected by the Wahhabi Sunnis who governed Mecca.
To make matters worse, it was claimed that the 75mm guns onboard the Selim had been manufactured in non-Muslim Germany. While the Sharif was happy for these weapons to protect his lands, he was not happy for these “unclean” weapons to enter into the holy cities themselves. This objection was made all the more ironic by the fact that the guns had been included on the Selim solely for the purpose of offering ceremonial salutes to honor the various tribal leaders they visited. In the case of Mecca, the guns’ peaceable mission clearly backfired.
Some historians have likewise speculated that the ship’s name itself did no favors with the local mutaween. To reinforce its diplomatic mission, the landship was named after one of the Ottoman Empire’s great Sultans, Selim II, who reigned in the 16th century and was famous for negotiating many treaties. Known as both Selim the White (Sarı Selim), and Selim the Drunk (Selim Sarhoş), the latter name was chosen by the Ottoman general staff in hopes of communicating a spirit of hospitality. It seems that they forgot to consider the strict teetotalism of many of the Wahhabi tribes they were hoping to win over.
In 1916, the Sharif of Mecca rose up in rebellion against Ottoman rule. While it is likely that this had more to do with realpolitik than religious objections, historians are divided what effect the Bashi-bazouk Incident played. What we do know is that after the 1925 exodus of the Bektashi Order from Turkey to Albania, Dedebaba Salih Nijazi denied that Colonel Ahga was ever part of their order. This attention to fact was clearly lost under the shifting sands of the Bashi-Bazouk Incident and its aftermath.
As it turned out, this rebellion would lead to the destruction of the Sarhoş Selim, which had been outfitted for combat by the Ottomans in the Spring of 1915. As part of the Central Powers, the Ottomans found themselves fighting on several fronts at once against the Allies - Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Gallipoli and now, Arabia, as rebels were aided by the famous British officer, T.E. Lawrence. To counter these rebellions, the Ottomans sent the Selim south towards Mecca with a squadron of armored cars.
The Skirmish of Jeddah took place on August 2, 1916. Facing blistering heat, the new captain of the Selim, Binbaşi (Major) Aydin Kılıç, camped next to the coast outside of Jeddah to rest and restock. T.E. Lawrence was made aware of the Selim’s location and planned a raid with local Arab tribesmen.
The skirmish started off well enough for Kılıç and his crew when a loyal Arab scout spotted the raiders and alerted the ship. With their back protected against the sea, the Selim’s two 75’s and Maxim machine guns held of Lawrence and his raiders for the better part of an hour. His suprise foiled, Lawrence retreated East with four wounded and one killed.
However, unknown to either side, two Italian M1 Naval Airships were patrolling from northern Ethiopia on the hunt for the Ottoman submarine, Müstecip Onbaşı, which had been built in Aqaba and threatened allied shipping in the Red Sea. Commodoro Umberto Nobile spotted the gun flashes on the shore and directed his two Zeppelins high above the target, dropping bombs on the Sarhoş Selim camp. Two incendiary bombs stuck home, wounding several crewman, and burning the landship to the skis.
It is claimed by one biographer that T.E. Lawrence’s obsession wth air power began when he paused from his retreat atop a dune and looked back to see the zeppelin’s successful bombing run. As is well known, when Lawrence returned to England, he enlisted as a mechanic in the Royal Air Force under a pseudonym. This perhaps can be credited to the Skirmish of Jeddah.
Meanwhile, in the Saudi desert, the Sarhoş Selim’s intended purpose of goodwill and cheer ended in death and fire. Built in beauty, destroyed in war, we can thus say the Sarhoş Selim serves as a perfect metaphor for the glory that was the Ottoman Empire.
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