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The Ottoman squadron and the waterfront burn as one fire. Explosive shells against oak ended the argument about wooden navies.

On the last day of November 1853, in the harbor of Sinop on the Turkish Black Sea coast, Admiral Nakhimov brought six Russian ships of the line in through the rain squalls and anchored opposite the Ottoman frigate squadron sheltering under the town's batteries. What followed was called a battle for diplomatic reasons. The Russian line carried something the wooden world had not yet absorbed: Paixhans guns, firing explosive shells instead of solid shot, and in a little over an hour the Ottoman squadron did not sink so much as burn to the waterline where it lay. Seven frigates and corvettes were destroyed, close to 3,000 Ottoman sailors died, and the town's waterfront burned with the fleet; one steam frigate, the only ship there not dependent on wind, escaped to Istanbul with the news. The Russians lost 37 men and no ships, and the wounded Ottoman admiral was fished from the water and treated, by Nakhimov's courtesy, as a house guest. The completeness was the catastrophe. In London and Paris the newspapers ran the engagement as the massacre of Sinope, proof that Russia would swallow the failing Ottoman world unless stopped, and within four months Britain and France had declared war and the age was named for the peninsula where their armies landed: the Crimea, this museum's Light Brigade hangs from the same war. The other consequence ran deeper than any front. Explosive shells against oak settled an argument navies had been avoiding: within six years France launched the first ironclad and Britain answered with an iron one, and the fleets that had fought from Lepanto to Trafalgar in wooden walls were obsolete in a decade. Sinop was the last fleet action ever fought entirely under sail, and both facts, the last and the reason it was the last, are in the flames. Aivazovsky, the Black Sea's own painter, had the night version on canvas within weeks and showed it to the fleet at Sevastopol; Nakhimov approved the accuracy. He painted the harbor as a furnace under a smoke sky, the Russian line dark and orderly at the left, and in the foreground a broken spar with survivors clinging, because he never painted a sea without insisting someone was in it. Nakhimov had less than two years left; a sharpshooter killed him on the ramparts of Sevastopol defending the base his victory had made a target. The war his hour at Sinop ignited cost three quarters of a million lives and modernized every navy on earth, which is a heavy bill for the tidiest victory in Russian naval history.