Took the ball squad ashore again today and played to a gaping crowd of about 700 Arabs. They were a dumb lot and persisted in crowding right up to the base lines and around the catcher. One of them got knocked out by a foul tip.
—Ens. Dan Gallery of Pittsburgh, in Alexandria
As a reported five hundred to a thousand Russians died daily of starvation in Odessa in May of 1922, American sailors from McFarland (whose officers were helping to coordinate the delivery of grain) played pickup games of football or indoor baseball right on the dock. About the same time, while American officials at Trebizond debated whether local Greek males being “deported to the interior” was a serious issue or not, crew members of the same destroyer played baseball and held boxing matches.1 Wherever an American naval vessel docked, in fact, and whatever the local circumstances, sports were always a great interest of its crew.
Those who watched the Americans often wondered at the variety and strangeness of their sports, especially on American holidays. In Varna, Bulgaria, perplexed locals wondered at the mad American sailors from the destroyer Goff running back and forth carrying potatoes in spoons, eating pie and whistling with their hands tied behind them, climbing greased poles, and running races with their legs in flour sacks. It was Washington’s birthday, 1923. In 1920, in Samsun, the crew of the destroyer Whipple had celebrated July 4th by challenging HMS Dianthus to swimming races, this followed by competition at diving and racing with punts. A few days before, several divisions of Whipple had played practice baseball games against one another on a newly constructed diamond, and Whipple and Barker had played a match game. After the turkey dinner on the 4th itself, the Navy crews watched the locals compete at soccer matches and horseracing, which featured fine Arabian thoroughbreds.2
In comparison, cut off in Urfa in March of 1921 and hearing of the election of President Warren Harding, the small circle of American missionaries in that city, mainly women, celebrated by inviting the Turkish officials to eat with them on the day of the inauguration. At dinner they drank toasts (in lemonade) to the new president, and until midnight they played parlor games like Up Jenkins, the latter proving especially popular among the Turks. Ens. Dan Gallery’s extensive personal diary of this same period indicates that he typically scoffed at such “parlor stunts.” However, when among young American women, he sometimes participated in them.3
Back in Constantinople, the Navy occasionally celebrated holidays in “crossing the line” fashion. On New Year’s Day, 1921, Scorpion signaled St. Louis to prepare to receive the admiral and his staff. Soon Charles Olsen saw a motor sailer painted up like a warship and filled with pirates come alongside the cruiser. “It was a lot of gobs [sailors] dressed as pirates in all descriptions of dress, The Admiral, King Neptune, his wife and baby. It was a scream. We gave them regular side honors as they came over the gangway. . . . Then they held a courtmartial on Commander Linden, calling him Commander England, sentencing him to whitewash the ship with something or other. The baby, a big fat man dressed in a pair of ladies pajamas cried out, ‘Papa, I want to go to the head.’ The aide took her off. I nearly split laughing.” Charles wrote Edna that whaleboat races were supposed to follow, but the officers who should have been in charge had gotten in at six or eight in the morning (one of them so drunk he had to crawl back to the ship on his hands and knees), and nobody was in shape for further celebration.4
Nevertheless, whaleboat crews from American ships often did race one another, as many as eight at once, and often with great enthusiasm.5 Despite the many other attractions of Constantinople, when their ships were moored there, the crews kept competing, particularly at baseball. Working recreational schedules around ships’ movements, the “Far Seas League” organized games between crews of homeported and visiting naval ships alike from 1920 to 1923.6 Other sports usually took a backseat at the old Ottoman capital. (The drinking, the music, and the astonishing Russian women there had so captured sailors’ and officers’ interest.) However, occasionally Navy people played basketball at the Robert College gym or at one of the YMCA centers in the city. Indeed, sometimes Navy fives played against native teams there.
On occasion, crew members even took part in international competition. A couple of excellent American boxers fought the White Russian Kirpichev (Kirpit), for instance—but he beat them. By the way, the Allied navies with their huge contingents (which always dwarfed the American numbers) also had regular athletic contests. Many fine athletes were on hand to compete in a sort of mini-Olympics that was held at Taxim Stadium in June of 1922, for instance. Organized by the YMCA, this contest featured track and field most prominently, but also included many other sports.7
The YMCA in Constantinople at that time was wholly under American leadership. With six college-trained physical directors on its staff in 1921 and with five well-equipped centers, the YMCA could offer sports ranging from basketball and volleyball to boxing and fencing to young men of all ethnic groups. The centers featured many other kinds of recreation too, among them music, dramatics, nature study, pool, and billiards. Reading rooms with libraries, clubrooms, lounges that doubled as movie theaters, and small restaurants could also be found at these centers. Educational and religious classes were an important part of the mix.8
A special YMCA “American Sailor’s Club,” located on the Grande Rue de Pera, sponsored activities similar to those of the other clubs. However, it had been created with the American sailor in mind and was in essence an early USO (United Service Organization). In a letter home from this club’s reading room, Charles Olsen described the club: “Several empty writing places on each side of me. In the other room are several sailors playing pool on the only table. On the floor below a piano is being played and the chairs all set for a movie show. . . . The Y is the only American place here in Constantinople, and every night it has the better behaved boys gather for some entertainment or chow. On the first floor is a restaurant and a Russian string orchestra. Something new. . . . I had for dinner Roast Chicken, Mashed potatoes, peas, Bread, Coffee, Ice Cream and Cake for 67¢. Can you beat that!”9 The cheap American food made the sailors’ Y very popular both among sailors and American civilians: in April of 1921, it served twelve thousand meals. Another of its attractions: it let sailors sign chits for their meals and pay later. In 1923 writer Bill Ellis witnessed sailors, officers, and civilians all gathering to dine and play in fellowship at this, “the most popular and most American place of resort in the city.” He regarded the sailor’s Y as a brilliant success.10
Of course, few American males visited only the Y. Many had lower tastes, while others were more particular. Mentioned in officers’ letters and diaries more often than the Y was the Club de Constantinople (or simply The Club), which was also located in the heart of Pera. Many an American diplomat, naval officer and businessman anted up the membership fee required to eat, drink, read, play tennis, play cards, gamble, or simply socialize at this institution. In contrast, few Americans joined the several British athletic clubs in Constantinople or at nearby Prinkipo, though these clubs offered rowing, yachting, squash, swimming, tennis, and other such “officer sports.”
Several American residents did take advantage of the American-founded Bosporus Golf Club, the links of which lay near the American colleges above Arnaoutkeuy. Admiral Bristol, many embassy staff members, several American businessmen, and some professors played here. One of the hazards of the game at this site was the practice of small Greek boys to lie in wait and then swoop down and carry a ball away.11
There was also a good British club at Therapia, a swanky suburb several miles up the Bosporus, near which virtually every European country had a summer embassy. Occasionally Americans (naval and civilian) would visit this club. During his trip through the region, writer John Dos Passos sat on the terrace with the green Bosporus flowing in front of him, watching Englishmen who were wearing white flannels play tennis, this on a hot, stagnant afternoon. Then he walked to the bar. “A British major with a face like the harvest moon was shaking up Alexanders. A man in a frock coat was trying to catch in his mouth olives that an American relief worker was tossing in the air. The talk in the bar was English, Oxford drawl, Chicago burr, Yankee twang, English and American as spoken by Greeks, Armenians, Frenchmen, Italians. Only the soberer people in the corners spoke French.”12
A bit further up the strait from Therapia, at a village called Buyukdere (the large bay in the Bosporus here was named Buyukdere Bay), was a large field that the British used for horseracing, cricket, and polo. Many Americans enjoyed these spectator sports, mingling with great crowds of fans over the weekends. Of course there was a good bar near the race track, and here Lt. Robbie Dunn of the embassy staff once met some Arabs who spoke English and loved whiskey. (He was later to realize they were members of the Hussein family.) During drinks, Dunn said something about his always professing the religion of the country in which he happened to be at the moment. At that, they had him raise his right hand and swear belief in the one God and Mohammed his prophet. “Now you are in Islam. One of the faithful, and no fooling.” Just for Dunn, the Arabs waived the mandatory circumcision, and also did not require him to renounce any former religion. Dunn took the name “Mohammed Ali Bey.”13
Dunn himself was ever bent on having a great time at the “great game” of spying. Whether off alone on horseback in the midst of Asia Minor, shooting the breeze in the race track bar at Buyukdere, traveling on the destroyers across the Black Sea, or conversing with the whores and madams in Constantinople’s vice district, he found his work totally captivating. Later he would comment that he “wouldn’t have traded with that Lawrence fellow.” Hence, his conversion to Islam seems to have been a piece of the good time he was having, a mere joke. (Indeed, given the generally irreverent character he manifests in his memoir, it could hardly have been anything else.)14 However, rumors of his new allegiance got passed around, and in some quarters it was taken seriously. Eventually, with other unorthodox behavior on his part, this “conversion” would help to do him in.
Near the field at Buyukdere, in 1921 the YMCA and American Navy (with the admiral the chief sponsor) combined to created an American sailor’s camp, this at the reputed campsite of the Christian knights on their sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade.15 Relief and YWCA workers Anna Mitchell and Helen Ogden were among the crowd that attended the opening of “Camp Mark Bristol” in May of that year. Anna admired the house that the Americans had taken over, in which some of the meals were served. “It is an old house quite ramshackle but with beautifully sized and lighted Turkish rooms, and delicious touches in them of old Turkish life, and glorious terraces (with pine trees overlooking the Bosphorus) on which they have pitched tents. . . . The interesting part is that it is open to all Americans as well as sailors, and that for what amounts to seven dollars one can engage a tent for the season, which we instantly did, so we now have a weekend summer resort as well as a town residence.” Helen Ogden pointed out that the camp was nearly up to the Black Sea and about a mile and half trek from the landing: “It is in a lovely spot nestled down among the hills. . . . The camp is all of tents, a big tent for eating and another for recreation, that is piano, victrola and writing and reading, and in this tent there is a part reserved for girls who may come up to help or to have a rest or good time, only American girls of course.” How did the American sailors celebrate the camp’s opening? Naturally, by playing baseball.16
In June of that year, Bill Leahy watched boxing matches at this camp between American and British sailors. So did many of the sailors’ girlfriends, who were, of course, not usually Americans. The event seemed quite a success. In July Anna Mitchell finally got around to using her tent for a weekend. “We found it perfectly charming. They had pitched it way off by itself as we asked, in a spot with a heavenly view, and it was so nice to lie under pine trees, and feel really ‘in the country.’” An American woman who had brought her two babies to Constantinople was offended by the poor quality of what housing her husband could find in the city. She said she was determined to forego housing in Constantinople and instead settle in two tents at Camp Mark Bristol, an announcement that was taken quite seriously. The camp was a rather nice place.17
Although the Bristols only visited and did not stay at the sailors’ camp, they did spend considerable time up the Bosporus every summer. As mentioned before, unlike other foreign powers, the United States owned no summer embassy, but Bristol does seem to have rented at least part of a “summer palace” at Therapia, a building that is marked the “summer embassy” in the Kinkaid family photographs, while the Scorpion is shown anchored right off-shore.18 Even though this yacht was still manned by seventy or so smart bluejackets, by this time it was essentially an excursion boat. Living ashore or on the Scorpion, commuting to the city by Navy “barge,” and using the local facilities up and down the strait, the admiral was enabled fully to enjoy the summer. He played tennis and swam every afternoon and he played golf twice a week.19
Helen Bristol also enjoyed herself, playing tennis and swimming with many an embassy party at various spots up the Bosporus. (Like several other American women, Helen had learned to swim since coming to Turkey.) Few Americans could afford to spend a whole season at such resorts, but Chief of Staff Japy Hepburn with his wife, Louisa, rented a chalet on the grounds of the Russian summer embassy. He traveled each morning to the embassy on the duty Navy launch. Allen and Clover Dulles took a hotel room in Therapia during the summer they spent in Turkey. This allowed them to keep close touch with the European embassies, to get in some tennis and swimming, and to enjoy the regular breezes from the Black Sea.20
The Bristols entertained frequently aboard Scorpion. Liquor was strictly prohibited aboard naval vessels, but this difficulty was handled (at least for a time) by Chicago Daily News correspondent Constantine Brown, though probably the idea came from Bristol’s knowledge of the customary practice of the Navy’s Yangtze Patrol. Looking for comfortable summer quarters in Therapia and finding only expensive, vermin-infested cottages, Brown bought a sixty-foot lighter in Constantinople’s harbor and had it furnished nicely as a houseboat, “the first floating domicile of her sort ever seen in Constantinople,” he would claim. He christened his houseboat Nelly and had it towed to Therapia for the summer.
When he learned of the admiral’s problem with liquor, he moored the Nelly right alongside the Scorpion. As a result, “it was an easy matter to place a few planks between the yacht and the houseboat and for the guests to wander back and forth from one to the other. A sailor who had once tended bar in the Palmer House in Chicago would preside at a table stretched along the length of the Nelly’s fifteen-foot saloon.”21 In such arrangements most partygoers would end up on the lighter, rather than on the Scorpion. After the party, some of the Bristols’ guests would stay aboard overnight (on the Scorpion, one guesses); others would be sent back down the Bosporus in the lovely moonlight by Navy launch.22
Parties and picnics were frequent at Therapia, but residents of Constantinople could visit many other delightful picnic spots. “Every Sunday there’s a picnic somewhere,” Jeannette Edwards wrote happily. Helen Ogden wrote, “One of the nice things, indeed I can say the nicest thing about Constant. is the getting away from it, for there are lovely trips in every direction, sometimes by water and sometimes by train.”23 For instance, the hillsides overlooking the mouth of the Black Sea, complete with wartime fort and trenches, were quite remarkable, if you or your friend had a yacht to take you there—and some did.24 The large Belgrade Forest, which lay between the city and the Black Sea, was another favorite picnic (and hunting) destination. However, the more famous recreation spots were closer to the city.
Near the western end of the Golden Horn, for example, was the small village of Eyoub. Americans were aware that Eyoub’s mosque was built over the grave of the Prophet’s “standard bearer,” which made it the holiest Muslim site in Constantinople.25 Yet they were more interested in the large cemetery on the nearby hillside, where French novelist Pierre Loti’s sweetheart was said to be buried. Many Americans picnicked in this cemetery, usually coming by caique, the Turkish rowboat. The tombstones were in a terrible state of dilapidation. Moreover, as the cemetery was still in use, your picnic might be interrupted by a Turkish burial party looking literally for a few inches of dirt in which to lay their dead.26 Still, such interruptions were infrequent, and from the hill at Eyoub most of Constantinople and the Golden Horn were spread out before you—a magnificent sight.
Captain Bill Leahy took part in several picnic expeditions organized by the embassy staff, one of which was to Eyoub. While eating supper in the great cemetery, the whole party admired the splendid view of Stamboul with its ancient defensive walls. After the sun went down, he and the Bristols and their other guests all visited a little coffee house in the village before heading home.27
Helen Ogden took her friend, Carrie, to this same cemetery late one afternoon, and after picnicking, they rode a caique back to Pera. “Unfortunately there was no moon but the row home was beautiful in the dark with singing here and there as the other small boats passed and the many lights both on shore and on the water. Then just as we were nearing the bridge we heard the priests calling the faithful to prayer. It was indeed a lovely day. We reached home about ten, tired but happy.”28
You could also go further up the water. The Golden Horn was an industrial harbor, the last thing from a romantic site, particularly in the daytime. However, if you followed on to its end, “past all the bone factories or glue factories of Turkey” (as Ogden put it), you would reach the famous “Sweet Waters of Europe.” The banks of this small stream (which trended back northeast) were no longer the tulip-lined pleasure grounds of the eighteenth century, “where the sultan’s guests wandered through the gardens and along the marble quays drinking sherbet while candle-bearing tortoises clambered among the flowerbeds, throwing lumbering flickers of light.”29 Still, a casino offered refreshments and music,30 and a great many people relaxed here, especially Turks.
When Helen saw the crowds both on the water and up on the banks, she considered this must be the outing spot of all the Turkish families in Constantinople. As the curfew required many natives to leave early, Helen and her friends were able to find a nice spot for a picnic late in the afternoon. She described the scene and her mixed feelings in a letter home. “There were hundreds of [small boats there,] big and little, some with whole communities in them and some with just twos, many with mandolins and queer sounding pipes and even one with a phonograph horn sticking over the side. The phonographs play the weird Turkish music so they are no better than the other sort and oh! what music it is. They had decorated their boats in greens and with the striped or white tops they use in summer it made it a very gay scene, and one which we were glad to see but won’t go to look at again in a hurry. We came back on a rippless water under a small but lovely moon and got home about eleven o’clock.”31
When Jeannette Edwards visited the Sweet Waters (again, Jeannette was the sister of a naval officer stationed at Constantinople), among all the peaceful Turks on the hillsides she noticed the Japanese high commissioner Baron Uchida peacefully fishing from the bank. Troubled by the Russian tragedy, Jeannette was relieved to see that there were some happy people in the city, anyway. Edna and Lt. (jg) Charles Olsen visited this same place one spring. As they drove the winding road into the small valley, they were delighted to find the trees filled with birds and the hillsides blue with forget-me-nots. They gathered great armfuls of flowers to take home.32
Another famous pleasure spot somewhat similar to the Sweet Waters of Europe was the Sweet Waters of Asia: this stream emptied into the Bosporus from the Asiatic side of the strait a few miles north of Constantinople. Charles and Edna took a boat up this winding creek the same spring that she had visited the Sweet Waters of Europe. Here, after turning a bend, she suddenly found herself in a “paradise valley.” The hillsides were lovely with poppies, she said, while the flowering Judas trees with their deep pink blooms composed the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. The same scenery reminded Anna Mitchell of peaceful American countrysides.33
In his 1922 book, the Turk Mufty-Zade Zia Bey was more guarded, though nostalgic. He described an afternoon that he and his American wife had spent here late one fall. “We went in the rowboat up this little stream—a miniature Bosphorus, with old tumbled-down houses by the water, big trees leaning their branches covered with autumnal golden leaves over old walls covered with vines, here and there a ramshackle wooden bridge spanning the stream and giving it the appearance of a Turkish Venice, and then large meadows on both sides, where groups of people were, like us, taking advantage of the last few days of summery sunshine of the year.” Although they enjoyed their picnic, Zia Bey reflected that this was no longer the “smartest place to go” on summer Friday and Sunday afternoons as it once had been. Similarly, the American naval captain Bill Leahy, there on yet another picnic with the Bristols, knew the place had once been fashionable, but he found the valley “brown and poor” in appearance.34
Ensign Gallery rowed his Greek girlfriend, Anthie Angelides, a couple of miles up this stream in early 1923 and then walked another mile, only suddenly to run into a sentry from the Nationalist army then threatening Constantinople. “We ran into a Kemalist sentry there with his gun slung over his shoulder and Anthie almost passed out with fright. I wanted to keep going but she wanted to run. The sentry gave us some dirty looks but I was in uniform so he didn’t do anything. We finally turned around and walked back. . . . The scenery was very pretty and romantic.”35 These two were not bothered despite being so far out from the capital, but others sometimes were. A couple of years earlier, John Dos Passos overheard this conversation up at the British Club at Therapia: “Did you hear the one about young Stafford was walking with a Red Cross nurse out on the road near the Sweet Waters and bandits held them up? They didn’t touch the girl but they stripped him down to the skin. . . . The girl made them give him back his drawers for decency.” 36 The latter episode occurred many months prior to the Nationalist army’s taking over the whole area.
Other sites on the Asiatic side were also visited. A Standard Oil couple the Bristols knew had a camp over where the Bosporus was clean, apparently right across from Therapia, and on a Sunday morning Russian relief worker Anna Mitchell rode over on the admiral’s barge. There she found the swimming “delicious.” Afterward she and her friends rode back to the European side on Scorpion, “the Bristols showing angel tempers in allowing themselves to be overrun by wet guests.” They stayed for Mrs. Bristol’s regular Sunday buffet lunch. (These lunches averaged about twenty guests.)
The spectacle on this particular occasion, by the way (in August of 1922), was a long line of British warships steaming down the Bosporus; this naval show of force was intended to help warn off a brief Greek army threat to Constantinople.37
On such swimming parties as sponsored by the Bristols, embassy people often let their hair down. A special personality among this group was Margaret Bryan, the lovely young bride of staff naval officer Hamilton Bryan. The two were notorious on Bristol’s staff for their heated arguments, and on this day theirs was the worst fight by a married couple that Lt. Julian Wheeler had ever witnessed, or would ever see again. Husband and wife berated each other furiously. Finally, Hamilton said he had had enough: “Now, Margaret, I’m not going to let any woman in the world talk to me like that.” After this announcement, though he was fully dressed, Hamilton dove over the ship’s side.
The Bosporus current was strong where Scorpion was anchored, and concern grew among the staff as the minutes ticked on and Bryan did not reappear. Curiously, though, Margaret did not seem particularly perturbed. After a bit she stood up, walked to the rail and, still irate, called out, “Hamilton, you come up here. I know you’re down there sitting on that rudder. . . . I haven’t finished with you yet.” Hamilton had indeed swum to the ship’s stern and was holding on there—but on Margaret calling his bluff, he was reduced to swimming back to the gangway, climbing aboard dripping, and slinking down to somebody’s cabin to find some dry clothes.38
A year earlier the Bristols had taken a picnic party to Mount Burgurlu, also on the Asiatic side, three or four miles inland behind Scutari. Though more out of the way, this place seemed yet another popular summer rendezvous, as Bill Leahy remarked; it certainly provided a great view of the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara.39 However, the recreation spot for the city was the group of Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara itself, located only a couple of hours’ boat ride from Constan’s quays.
Prinkipo, the largest island, featured shady groves, sports fields, and several cottages and hotels. Cdr. Harry Pence and a friend took a boat out to Prinkipo one afternoon in mid-1919, not long after the war and before the resort’s business had built up overmuch. He found it “one of the most enchanting places I have ever visited.” Like virtually everybody before and since, the two visitors drove away from the village in a carriage, rode peacefully past old villas and gardens, paced all through and around the island’s quiet pine groves, and circled back. The weather, the good breeze, and the surroundings were wonderfully peaceful and invigorating, he thought; he also slept well overnight. The bachelor’s only regret was that none of the girls at the small dance the hotel had hosted the evening of his visit had spoken English, so he had not been able to get acquainted.40
Bill Leahy also visited Prinkipo one day with shipmates, and his description was succinct: “We found it in the dilapidated condition of repair that seems to be universal in Turkey, took lunch at the Hotel Splendid, enjoyed marvelous views of the sea and shore in crystal clear air, and returned to Constantinople in time for a dinner at the American Embassy.”41 If Robbie Dunn’s account is to be believed, not all parties to Prinkipo went according to plan. “Maggie” Bryan had just arrived in Constantinople and was still wide-eyed when, with an embassy party and several guests, she debarked at noon from one of the admiral’s subchasers. The whole group traveled to an old estate, to a party sponsored by some local businessmen.
The embassy staff had asked for beer, but instead, cases of brandy lay about everywhere, and there was little else to drink. Some sipped; a few drank deep of the stuff. Meanwhile, Maggie wanted to know who those corpulent Turks were, the ones with red slippers who had lain prone on the subchaser’s deck. “Palace eunuchs,” one of the naval staff guessed; “full of hashish, too,” whispered another. As the party progressed, an old, crocked Turkish admiral briefly astonished the Americans by professing his love for the (male) American vice consul, Kippy Tuck. Then one of the American naval wives (she had been gulping brandy) threw up her lunch over plates and table alike. “Oh, dear. What won’t these gossips say about that poor woman!” worried Maggie, in the general scurry away. She complained further to Dunn: “But, Bobby. It’s like ancient Rome! In the time of Nero!”42 And so it seemed, at times.
Embassy people and their guests frequently came to watch the American ships take target practice right near Prinkipo. Junior officer Orin Haskell complained about having “two secretaries from the legation, four other men and one wife” aboard; his ship was having “parties galore” and had become “a regular floating hotel.” The guests did not actually ride the destroyers while they fired, but instead boarded other Navy ships so positioned as to give a good view. On an earlier occasion, embassy secretaries F. L. Belin and Allen Dulles and their wives followed a better plan. They boarded a boat to Prinkipo one evening to celebrate Allen’s birthday. After staying at a hotel, the next morning they took a donkey ride all over the island and then up to the Monastery of St. George, at the crown of the hill. There they ate their lunch and continued to sit for hours in the sun, watching the sea and enjoying the Navy’s target practice down below.43
Preparing for these gunnery exercises wasn’t an especially recreational occasion for the Navy men who had to do it. As a division officer aboard a cruiser, Charles Olsen had watched the ship’s firing rehearsal one morning, and then supervised his men as they stripped ship for action, rebored sights, painted danger circles on the decks, and checked off a myriad of other details. “I hope everything goes right tomorrow. Lord knows I have drilled my men enough for it,” he wrote to Edna.
When the firing actually came off, Charles found it quite exciting. Olsen confessed he had never realized how much havoc big guns could wreak upon the firing ship itself:
The first shot lifted a wooden grating in the waterway, flying over the side. The eight shots fired wrecked the pay office on the boat deck, till it looked like a mass of debris. The wooden bulkheads or sides [of the office] were broken in two, and shelves ripped off, desks knocked down, papers, books, typewriters, everything down. The deck locker had its cover locked down and the concussion broke the latch off, opened the locker and knocked most of the contents overboard. The life preservers stowed by the pay office flew all over. . . . Dr. Tribou after we finished firing stood laughing at the paymaster over his office. Then he went down to his room and oh how mad he was, when he found that his room had been wrecked. You cannot speak to Tribou about his room now because he is so mad. Of course all the lights were broken aft.
Despite the shipboard wreckage, Olsen was delighted. His big guns had scored twenty-four hits out of twenty-four shots, the best score on the ship; it was “the prettiest shooting I have seen yet.” Though their time was slow, all his pointers had qualified. His division had won some ships’ competitions too—a third and a second prize—which not only meant some modest prize money for his men (five or ten dollars each), but it also provided the kind of boost in morale one gets from successful athletic competition. Even for his sailors, then, the firing exercise had been a kind of recreation.44
For Helen Ogden (again, Helen was a YWCA worker regularly befriended by the Bristols), bathing and swimming were tops. On trips to the Standard Oil camp on the Bosporus such as the embassy frequently organized, she found the water a little salty, but easy to swim in and generally delightful. The public beach at Florio was also great fun, even though “the beach slopes out so gradually that it is hard to get out far enough to swim; you just floated around.” Indeed, Helen thought, “If it were not for the Bosphorus Constantinople would be unbearable,” presumably because you could not get out of the summer heat in any other way. Hence she not only bathed and swam with friends but often took her YWCA girls to the beach with her. There was only one minor difficulty. “Yesterday we went again up the Bosphorus with a mixed lot of girls—very mixed—I had two Russians and the others were Greek, Armenians and Jews. My two girls insisted upon swimming, and finally undressed and dressed in such a public place that I was covered with confusion. . . . None of the other girls seemed much bothered by the Russians’ nakedness; they had long since gotten used to such things.”45
The American men, however, were not used to modern Russian habits; hence they were keenly interested when they observed the Russians bathing in the nude. Usually they saw this in Russia, at places like Yalta, or maybe at Batoum rather than near Constantinople. The Yanks would comment on such things in letters or diaries: “Visited bathing beach and saw a beautiful fairy sporting [about] with out a green cap on—figure quite remarkable,” recorded the intrigued Admiral McCully, for instance.46 While Harry Pence assured his diary that only foreigners paid any special attention to the nude swimmers, still he himself could report that the practice was not just a rumor, but a fact. (He had observed it “from a neutral spot.”) Sometimes American men would brag in the local bar about the sight: “Last time I was out in Batoum I seen upwards of six hundred women in swimmin’ an’ not one of ’em had a stitch on.” So John Dos Passos reported someone saying, a person, however, who was somewhat under the influence. Others would try to photograph the scene. In Lt. Matthias Gardner’s snapshots, for example, there weren’t six hundred or even ten naked women, but there was certainly some naked female flesh. His photos indicate, by the way, that not only would some men stand nearby to gaze on these large groups of women bathers, but that little boats would often come close inshore to check out the situation.47
As for their own bathing habits, in those days by no means was everybody in the Navy even able to swim. About this time a certain assistant secretary of the Navy was troubled to find drownings alarmingly high in the service simply because many sailors were nonswimmers. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt sponsored a fleet swimming trophy, hoping the visibility of this competition would improve the situation.48 Conversely, in some parts of Asia Minor through which Americans traveled, swimming was an unknown art. Riding with Armenian troops alongside Lake Sevang (deep in Eastern Turkey) on a hot day, the ever-adventurous Lieutenant Dunn stripped and plunged into the water and swam out to some nearby boats. The Armenian soldiers with him drew up their horses and cheered the American, which moved Dunn to perform some aquatic stunts. When he swam back to the shore, they explained their cheers. Before this they had never seen a man swim.49
The American officers who swam did so both for exercise and for the opportunity to build morale. In 1914, at age fifty-five and while commanding a battleship, Newton McCully had occasionally put on a suit, dived from his ship’s main deck, and then swam all the way around the vessel, this partly to promote the benefits of physical conditioning. When on duty in Russia after the war, he continued his aquatic activity. One day he signaled a destroyer under his command that was anchored out in the harbor that he would be coming aboard shortly. The officer of the deck ordered his lookouts to keep a sharp eye out for a boat. A while later the OOD was startled to hear shouts from the water. McCully and aide Cdr. Hugo Koehler had swum out to the ship in the buff. Later yet, during the dog days of the White Russian collapse, which McCully was helpless to prevent, he would continue swimming just to keep his own morale up. If, in the process, he sometimes shocked a destroyer’s captain, he was an admiral, he was in the middle of nowhere, and he couldn’t care less.50
Not all immersion was voluntary. Winfield Scott Cunningham was then a naval lieutenant stationed aboard Scorpion. One evening he and a fellow officer invited two young ladies to dinner aboard the Navy yacht. Afterward, “moved by the magic of the evening,” the four took one of Scorpion’s whaleboats out for a sail. They only overlooked two things: the six-knot current in the strait, and the squadron of five British battleships anchored just downstream. They successfully got under way, but their sail obscured the British ships, and they had failed to post a lookout in the bow. When somebody cried out, it was too late: they were riding down upon the ram of HMS Royal Sovereign. After a brief jar they found themselves swiftly carried along the side of this immense ship until the top of their mast hit the battleship’s hoisted boat and their sailing craft capsized.
Searchlights pierced the night, the British vessel launched powerboats, and, after having floated a good way further down the Bosporus, the four young people were ignominiously hauled to safety. Cunningham’s officer buddy in this episode was senior so that Cunningham did not have to face his captain personally—very fortunately, he thought. What the two young women thought of the whole episode is not recorded, but in general, Cunningham remembered, “The incident was considered something of a blow to American prestige.”51
Most Americans who purposely entered the strait’s famous waters were seeking a challenge. One summer, with a group of friends, embassy aide Lt. Julian Wheeler decided to swim “from Europe to Asia,” as he put it. (That phrase does have a certain ring, like General Harbord’s telling his U.S. Army troops one day to “Come, take a dip in the Euphrates.”) Beginning at the waterfront near the Tokatlian Hotel and accompanied by a boat, the young men swam toward the Standard Oil installation that was on the opposite bank, maybe a mile across. Despite the very swift current, they persevered and reached their goal. A couple of years later, further down the Bosporus at Romeli Hissar, George Young tried swimming across the strait from the same direction but found himself caught up in the “devil current” and swept back to Europe. In sharp contrast was the effort of the British commanding general in Constantinople, Tim Harington, for whom the strong current was not a major obstacle. On one occasion, he not only swam from his house at Therapia across to Yenikali on the Asiatic side, but also then immediately swam back, landing at Roumeli Hissar.52
However, the classic swim was not across the Bosporus, but instead across the Hellespont. The ancient story, of course, was that Leander had nightly swum the Hellespont to meet his beloved Hero, until one winter night when the nearby beacon went out, and he lost his way. Finding Leander’s inert body washed up on the shore, Hero killed herself.
During his far-flung travels, the twenty-two-year-old Lord Byron in 1810 had found his ship becalmed for over a week in the Hellespont. Fascinated by Leander’s story (which had been celebrated by poets from Ovid to Marlowe) and finding himself at the legendary site between Sestos and Abydos, Byron decided to duplicate the feat. After one failed attempt (due to a north wind and a rapid tide), he and a friend succeeded in swimming from Asia to Europe, the direction that Leander had swum to visit Hero.53 Six days later he penned a poem about the exploit, “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,” which has been mildly popular ever since.54
Byron was congenitally lame, but a powerful swimmer. Navy Capt. Pratt Mannix was renowned in the Navy for his athletic prowess, particularly in the water. In 1907 at Manila Bay, a typhoon featuring winds of seventy to eighty miles an hour and waves of four to five feet blew up, and a seaman helping batten down the anchored Wilmington noticed a man swimming alongside Rainbow, which was anchored some six hundred yards away. He ran to the officer of the deck to report a man overboard, only to be told, “Oh, that’s Mannix at his morning exercise.” On a twenty-dollar bet, Mannix had swum from Rainbow to Wilmington, circled the latter vessel, and then swum back.55
As we have seen, the large repair ship Denebola that Mannix had maneuvered to get command of steamed to Constantinople in late 1922. As his ship steamed through the Hellespont, Mannix took note of the famous site of Leander’s and Lord Byron’s swim and began thinking about trying it himself.
By the time of his ship’s return to the States a year or so later, Mannix had read everything of relevance he could find, including tide tables, sailing directions, charts, and encyclopedias (besides famous poems). When Denebola was ordered out of Turkey, he arranged with Admiral Bristol to let him anchor for a day in the Dardanelles, thus allowing officers and men to visit Gallipoli, and coincidentally giving himself an opportunity to attempt the ancient feat. Having previously verified the location of ancient Abydos and Sestos, he had only to decide whether to swim with the great current and against the very strong sea and waves, or the reverse. He decided to buck the waves. He entered the strait on the European side and swam toward Asia. A boat from his ship pulled along with him, not just for safety’s sake but also to provide witness of the event. Before long the boat was half full of water and the crew had to bail. Despite waves slapping him in the face and some cramping of his legs, Mannix persevered. “I did all right until I approached the Asiatic shore where I encountered a counter current flowing strongly up toward the Sea of Marmora. When I first put my feet on the bottom they were snatched out from under me by this counter current and I found it impossible to stand up . . . but I finally made it.”56 Mannix had the four enlisted men in the boat sign a certificate that he had actually done the deed,57 and he also took steps to have the account published in the Naval Register of that year. Thus, when adventurer-writer Richard Halliburton circulated a report in 1925 that he had just become the first American to swim the Hellespont (to publicize his stunt, Halliburton reportedly spread rumors that he had died in the attempt), Mannix could produce evidence to papers like the New York Herald Tribune that supported his prior claim.58
Lord Byron, by the way, had not only swum the Hellespont while his ship waited in the Dardanelles for the wind to turn, but had visited the nearby Troad and also had shot some snipe. Recognizing that, one should not omit to mention that in the midst of all their other pastimes, American Navy men during the early twenties in the Middle East took many an opportunity to shoot—at partridge, ducks, quail in season, grail, hawks, eagle, wild boar (“very good,” according to a traveler whose hosts fed him this meat at Tarsus59), foxes, deer, even an occasional jumping porpoise. They went hunting in the Bosporus, on the Marmara (especially in the Gulf of Ismid), and throughout the coasts of mainland Turkey from Samsun on the Black Sea down to Marash in Cilicia, and south as far as Syria. In Russia, during the famine, Webb Trammell was offered the opportunity to “shoot wolves and other large game.”60 Later yet, in the midst of the human tragedy of mass evacuations throughout the coasts of Turkey, the destroyer Hatfield signaled Bristol, “No refugees Knojachesme or Kara Chali. [Yet] we evacuated 36 partridges, six hares one fox. Expect continue operations tomorrow.”61
And so it went. No matter what their formal naval duty, American Navy people always found ways to play a ball game, to picnic or go for a swim, or in some more creative way to keep their spirits up.
