2007–
What the seabed kept
Since 2007 archaeologists have been taking the ship apart on the seabed where she came apart on her own. What they keep finding is ammunition.
On 4 January 2007 an underwater excavation of the wreck began — a joint effort by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Bodrum, Yapı Kredi Retirement Partnership, and the Turkish Foundation of Nautical Archaeology, with American and Japanese archaeologists and historians on the team. The intent was to recover the ship and exhibit her remains at the museum beside the Ertuğrul monument at Kashino, Kushimoto.
On 28 January 2008, in the second phase, a team under Tufan Turanlı — then director of INA-Bodrum — reached the ammunition store.
A goodwill mission, armed
They brought up three cannonballs from the ship's Krupp naval guns, forty kilograms each, along with tens of bullets and pieces of naval mines. These were landed at the Port of Kushimoto, where explosive experts from the local police, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force and the Navy had a look at them, because century-old ordnance is still ordnance. The artefacts went to the Ertuğrul Research Institute for conservation. Two Winchester rifles recovered earlier are on display in the museum.
It is worth reading the ship's armament list against the word "goodwill." She carried eight 15 cm Krupp guns, five 150-pound Armstrong guns, smaller Krupp pieces, Hotchkiss and Nordenfelt multi-barrelled guns, rocket launchers, a torpedo launcher and torpedoes, a hundred Martini-Henry rifles, a hundred Winchesters, and forty pistols.
This was never only a friendly visit. It was a nineteenth-century state showing another nineteenth-century state that it could reach across an ocean under arms — the Grand Vizier said as much when he named the second aim of the voyage as showing the flag in the Indian Ocean. The generosity of Ōshima and the calculation in Istanbul are both true at once. Most of the retellings keep only one.
The museum, the anniversary, the film
A Turkish museum opened at Kushimoto in 1974 with a scale model of the ship, photographs, and statues of the sailors. The anniversary is commemorated there every five years on the day, with senior officials from both countries; in June 2008 President Abdullah Gül travelled from Tokyo to Kushimoto to attend one. In 2015 the Japanese–Turkish co-production 125 Years Memory — released in Turkey as Ertuğrul 1890 — put the wreck and the Tehran airlift in the same film and fixed the pairing in both countries' popular memory for a generation.
Why the wreck is still being read
The interesting thing about the excavation is that it is a correction machine. Every retelling of Ertuğrul — the poor village, the tea master, the plane out of Tehran — has been polished by people who wanted it to mean something. The seabed has no such interest. It has cannonballs in it, and a sternpost that had already been repaired once at Suez, and the physical fact of a twenty-five-year-old wooden ship sent eleven months from home on a schedule that assumed three.
What survives of the story after all that is still remarkable, and it does not need the polish. Villagers with nothing went into the rocks at midnight for men they could not speak to. Japan sent two corvettes it could ill spare to carry sixty-nine strangers home. A tea master carried a subscription across the world by hand. Someone renovated a monument in 1939. Volunteer aircrew flew into a shoot-down warning in 1985.
Those are all decisions people made, and none of them were inevitable. That is the better story — not that two countries were fated to be friends, but that for a hundred and thirty-five years, at intervals, particular people kept choosing to act as though they were.