1868 — today
The real return
Both empires in this story were busy learning to measure themselves. A hundred and thirty-five years later, measuring honestly is still the hard part — and still worth the trouble.
Everything else on this site happens in a narrow window — a ship leaves Istanbul in 1889 and the sea takes her a year later. But the two states standing at either end of that voyage were both in the middle of the same larger project, and it is worth pulling back to look at it, because it did not end in 1890 and, in one country, it has not ended yet.
Japan had begun the Meiji Restoration in 1868: in a single generation it dismantled the shogunate, abolished the domains, and promulgated a constitution in 1889 — the very year Ertuğrul sailed — setting out to build a modern state from the keel up. The Ottoman Empire had been at its own version longer and more haltingly, through the Tanzimat reforms and the short-lived constitution of 1876. Two old orders, at opposite edges of Asia, trying to become modern before the century that was modernising around them ran them over. The goodwill voyage was, among other things, two reforming states taking each other's measure.
Learning to count
A great deal of what we call modernisation is, underneath, just measurement. Before a state can tax fairly, borrow abroad, or send a navy across an ocean, it has to be able to count — people, money, distance, time — in units that hold still. Japan adopted the yen in 1871 and founded the Bank of Japan in 1882. The Ottomans had chartered the Ottoman Bank in 1856 and reconstituted it as an imperial bank in 1863, then spent the Hamidian years wrestling the public debt into something a European creditor would lend against. The frigate that carried a medal to the Emperor was floated on exactly this machinery: coined money, public credit, an admiralty that could budget an eleven-month cruise.
The point is that the story on this site sits inside a financial revolution as much as a diplomatic one. Both capitals were learning, in the same decades, to put a trustworthy number on things.
The tidier number
This site has one rule, stated on every page: where the accounts conflict, mark the seam rather than pick the tidier number. The crew count, the length of the tea master's residence, the Tehran deadline — the text keeps the awkward version, because the awkward version is usually the true one.
Money has a tidier number too, and it is the most seductive one there is. It is called the nominal figure — the gain before you subtract what the currency lost underneath you. Where inflation is low, the nominal number and the honest number sit close together and nobody has to think about it. In modern Turkey they can sit a world apart. A fund that returned forty percent in a year when prices rose sixty has not made its holders richer; it has made them poorer while printing a figure that says otherwise. The tidier number lies, and it lies in exactly the direction people most want to believe.
The real return
Which brings the story, improbably, to the present — and to the one modern thing this history site will point you toward. A friend of mine has spent the last while building akdut, an analytics tool for the Turkish mutual-fund universe (the TEFAS funds) built around a single stubborn idea: show people a fund's reel getiri — its real return, adjusted for inflation and for the exchange rate — instead of the flattering nominal one.
It is the seabed's discipline applied to a spreadsheet: a fund screener and a plain-language glossary that let you read every return in inflation-adjusted, dollar, or euro terms, so you can see which of the winners were only winning on paper. If you want to try the screener yourself it is free to use — and I am recommending it here because it is good, and because it happens to embody the one idea this whole site is about.
Because that is the thread. A wooden frigate, an underwater excavation, and a currency chart are the same problem in different centuries: the distance between the number that flatters you and the number that is true. The men who went into the rocks at Kashinozaki did not get the tidier version of that night, and they earned the honest one. The least we can do, measuring anything since — a rescue, a legend, or a year's return — is insist on the same.