This is an artist’s impression of the torpedoing of the Turkish transport steamer Stamboul by the Royal Navy’s submarine E11 on 25 May 1915 at Istanbul. The warship had been operating in the Sea of Marmara when its captain, Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith, took it into the straits of the Bosphorus and the area of the Golden Horn itself. Here, alongside the wharves were Turkish military transports but Turkish naval vessels lay well up the harbour beyond the famous Galata swing bridge. As one writer has described it, Nasmith was in the ‘very heart of the Turkish Empire’. American diplomat Lewis Einstein was in Istanbul that day and described the events:
The submarine came up at twenty minutes to one o’clock about 300 yards from where the Scorpion [an American warship] lay moored, and was immediately fired on by the shore batteries. It shot off two torpedoes. The first missed a transport by about fifty yards, the second struck the Stamboul fair, passing under a barge moored alongside, which blew up. The Stamboul had a gap of twenty feet on her water line, but did not sink. She was promptly towed toward Beshiktash [Beşiktaş, a district of Istanbul on the Asian or Anatolian side of the Bosphorus] to lie at the bottom in shallow water.
The submarine meanwhile, under a perfect hail of fire which passed uncomfortably close to the Scorpion, dived and got away, steering up the Bosphorus. At Galata there was a panic, everyone closing their shops. The troops, who were already on two transports, were promptly disembarked, but later re-embarked, and still later landed once more. The total damage was inconsiderable, but the moral effect very real.
[Lewis Einstein, Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist’s Diary during the Dardanelles Expedition, April-September 1915, London, 1917, pp.66-67. Artist’s impression from Granville Fortescue, Russia, the Balkans and the Dardanelles, London, 1915]