Austria on the High Seas
by The Austrian Mint
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It will come as something of a surprise to many, that little landlocked Austria was once numbered among the world's maritime powers. “Jane's Fighting Ships” ranked the Austro-Hungarian navy as the seventh most powerful in 1914. Of course, Austria then was a very different state. It had been the core of the Habsburg Empire since the Middle Ages, and since 1867 it had been half of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary with a population of some 55 millions and a coastline halfway down the Adriatic Sea.
To recall this fact to the minds of not only foreign collectors, but to those of the Austrians themselves, the Austrian Mint is producing a series of six silver 20 Euro coins over three years entitled “Austria on the High Seas”. The series commemorates not merely warships, but ships of exploration as well as passenger ships.
Austria's first contact with the sea was in 1382 when the Adriatic port of Trieste voluntarily place itself under the protection of Duke Leopold III of Austria. Trieste was to remain an (Italian-speaking) Austrian harbour until the end of the First World War in 1918. Austria's naval ambitions, however, slumbered on for centuries, and meanwhile the wealthy city of Venice dominated the Adriatic Sea and much of the Mediterranean.
The first abortive attempts to build a navy took place in the 18 th century. The aim was to provide protection for Austrian trade ships sailing mainly to the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Turkey) in the Eastern Mediterranean. The real breakthrough, however, came in the Napoleonic Wars with the acquisition of Venice itself and a large stretch of the Dalmatian coastline south of Trieste.
Venice became the naval harbour for the Austrian Empire with a small navy manned almost entirely by Italian locals. This meant that the majority of sailors sided with the nationalist revolutionaries in the 1848 Revolutions, thereby forcing a reappraisal of Austria's whole naval strategy. Out of some 5,000 men only 72 officers and 665 sailors remained loyal to the Emperor. This remnant of the fleet plus all ships at sea, were withdrawn to the port of Pola south of Trieste. Pola (today Pula in Croatia) would become the principal naval harbour down to the end of the Austrian Monarchy in 1918.
In March, 1849, the Danish admiral Hans Birch von Dahlerup was entrusted with the reorganisation of the Austrian navy. He immediately sent out the weakened fleet to actively blockade Venice from the sea in support of the besieging land forces. For the first time in history a city was bombed from the air – with the help of balloonists. Venice surrendered on 22 nd August, 1849, and would remain a part of the Austrian Empire until 1866, but it was never again trusted as the headquarters for the navy.
By 1852 there was a fleet of 14 Austrian ships cruising in the Mediterranean under the command of the Emperor's younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (the ill-fated Emperor of Mexico). Two years later the Archduke was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian navy. Under his direction a new ship building program was introduced, including the use of steam power, and a naval academy for officers was established at Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia).
Although the Archduke set up his headquarters in Trieste, building the romantic castle of Miramar there as his residence, he saw to it that the construction of the installations in Pola was driven on apace. Ferdinand Maximilian was also behind the dispatch of the frigate
S.M.S. Novara on the first circumnavigation of the globe by an Austrian ship. (She was also the last ship of the line to accomplish this feat entirely under sail.)
The Novara was commanded by Commodore Bernhard von Wüllerstorf-Urbair and had several scientists and one artist on board. She sailed from Trieste in April, 1857, and headed south. Near the Cape of Good Hope the Novara ran into heavy seas with 30 foot waves. Stopping for research on various islands, she continued to Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai before running down to Sydney. She crossed the Pacific via Tahiti to Valparaiso, where Wüllerstorf learned of the impending hostilities between Austria and France. It was decided to sail around Cape Horn and straight on to Gibraltar. In fact Napoleon III had given instructions to the French fleet to allow the Novara to pass in peace as she was on a scientific mission. (They were apparently more civilised times than our own.) The S.M.S. Novara returned to Trieste on 26 th August, 1859, triumphantly escorted by Archduke Ferdinand Max and the fleet. She had brought back some 30,000 objects for study and had sailed a total of 51,686 nautical miles.
In 1864 the Novara carried the Archduke (now the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico) and his wife Charlotte across the Atlantic to Veracruz. At the behest of Napoleon III he had accepted the offer of the Mexican crown by the conservative landowners. It was a fatal decision for the well-intentioned and liberal Archduke. In 1867 the same Novara brought the body of the executed Emperor of Mexico back to a Trieste plunged into mourning.
One of Ferdinand Max's protégés was the talented William von Tegetthoff, who was to become Austria's most famous admiral. In 1866 Austria found herself at war with
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Bismarck's Prussia and the new Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy. Although defeated by Prussia, Austria beat the Italian troops in the north, and Tegetthoff won a resounding victory over a numerically superior Italian fleet off the Adriatic island of Lissa. His flagship was the S.M.S. Ferdinand Max in honour of his and the navy's great patron, at that time anxiously awaiting news of the outcome in Mexico City. It was Tegetthoff, too, who was sent to Mexico in 1867 to negotiate the release of Maximilian's remains and to bring them on the Novara back to the homeland for burial. When he became Commander-in-Chief himself, Tegetthoff continued his late patron's plans for the modernisation of the Austrian fleet.
While the main task of the navy was the defence of the coastline of the Empire, the far-ranging voyages of Austrian ships were usually in the service of exploration and scientific research, in the interest of trade and commerce, or merely to show the red-white-red flag on diplomatic missions.
Occasionally, some expeditions were not navy affairs, such as the Arctic expedition of 1872-1874. The ship was built privately in Bremerhaven, although the machinery was produced in Trieste. The ship was named Admiral Tegetthoff after the recently deceased hero of Lissa and commanded by Karl Weyprecht, who was an officer in the Austrian navy. His co-leader in the expedition was Julius Payer, an army officer and a talented painter. The goal was to find a northern passage from Scandinavia to the Bering Straits. They left Bremerhaven in June, 1872, but five weeks later the Tegetthoff was stuck fast in pack ice and was driven with the current northwards. Unexpectedly land was sighted, although it was months before the crew was able to manage a landing. The unknown islands in the midst of an icy wasteland were named “Franz Josephs Land” in honour of the Austrian Emperor and were explored and charted by the expedition. It was impossible to free the Tegetthoff from the grip of the ice, which constantly threatened to crush it. Weyprecht decided to abandon the ship in May, 1874, and to take the boats on sleds across the ice to the open sea. It was gruelling feat of endurance, but the expedition succeeded in reaching the Russian island of Nowaja Semlja and so safely back to their homeland.
The next member of the imperial family to discover the attraction of the sea was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who for reasons of health joined the S.M.S. Kaiserin Elisabeth in 1892-1893 on a voyage around the world. The experience deepened his already existing love for ships and the sea. Although Franz Ferdinand was an army officer and never received any naval training, he was to be one of the navy's greatest patrons and benefactors. After he became the heir apparent to the throne on the tragic death of Crown Prince Rudolph in 1889, he was in a better position to assist the naval Commander-in-Chief in projects to expand and modernise the fleet. In 1902 his uncle the Emperor appointed him to the rank of an admiral honoris causa in recognition of his efforts for the navy. The German Emperor, his friend William II, soon followed suit in granting him the same honorary rank in the German navy.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand always wore naval uniform on board ship or on official occasions like the launching of a ship. The Emperor Franz Joseph, however, always wore his military uniform, even when inspecting the fleet. He explained to his nephew, Franz Ferdinand: “I am not capable of directing even my grandson's boat on the pond in front of our Summer villa, and then I should dress myself up as an admiral?”
Although Austria's interests overseas were of a commercial or a diplomatic nature, the navy was occasionally required to do more than just “show the flag”. In 1900 sailors from S.M.S. Zenta , which happened to be in Chinese waters, were dispatched to Peking to act as guards of the Austro-Hungarian Embassy and of the Legation Quarter, which was under threat from the Boxer rebels. The situation deteriorated further until the foreign legations were besieged by Chinese imperial troops. An international relief expedition was quickly organised by the Great Powers and detachments of Austrian sailors from the Kaiserin und Königin Maria Theresia , the Kaiserin Elisabeth and the Aspern joined the relief force on its march on Peking. More by good luck than good management, the Legations were successfully relieved after a siege of 55 days.
In 1907 the S.M.S. Sankt Georg and the S.M.S. Aspern were sent to America to represent Austria in the celebrations of the 300 th anniversary of the founding of settlement of Jamestown. The ships spent almost two months in American waters including a visit to New York (where some crew members deserted) and participation in the grand naval review on 10 th June before President Theodore Roosevelt.
Desertion was not the usual way of migrating to the New World. Two shipping lines ran passenger services out of Trieste. The Austrian Lloyd Line sailed the Adriatic and Mediterranean ports as well as to Egypt, the Middle East, India and China. The Austro-Americana Line sailed primarily to North and South America carrying not only tourists but loads of migrants. Between 1912 and 1914 they conveyed some 87,000 migrants across the Atlantic.
On the eve of the First World War the Austrian navy ranked seventh among the world's most powerful, although her duty was defined as merely the defence of the Adriatic coastline. In 1911 the first ship of the “dreadnought” class was launched in Trieste. Archduke Franz Ferdinand christened her S.M.S. Viribus Unitis (the Emperor's motto: with combined strength). Three more dreadnoughts followed: Tegetthoff (1912), Prinz Eugen (1912) and Szent István (Hungarian “Saint Stephen” 1914).
On 28 th June, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were murdered by Serbian terrorists in the streets of Sarajevo, leading to the outbreak of the First World War. The theater of operations for the Austrian navy remained extremely limited. Although technically an ally, Italy maintained an armed neutrality which denied Austrian ships the use of her ports, and in 1915 she actually entered the war against Austria. The range for Austrian ships was thus severely restricted. The distance from Pola to the Straits of Ontranto (the heel of the Italian “boot” and entrance into the Mediterranean Sea) was 355 nautical miles, it was 130 nautical miles from Austria's most southern port at Cattaro. Without friendly ports in the Mediterranean where they could anchor for repairs and refuelling, the Austria fleet was necessarily restricted to the Adriatic.
French and British ships blockading the Straits of Ontranto became objects for attack by Austrian ships and submarines, as did Italian Adriatic ports like Ancona and Venice. German submarines operating in the Mediterranean used Austrian ports as their bases. Otherwise the navy was reduced to supporting land forces on the Balkans from the sea and to protecting the long stretch of coastline.
By October, 1918, defeat was staring the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey in the face, something that the young Emperor Karl (who succeeded the old Emperor Franz Joseph in November, 1916) had warned from the beginning. On 16 th October, 1918, Emperor Karl issued the so-called October Manifesto which invited the various nationalities of the Empire to form units within a federal state. It was too late. Most groups took the manifesto as an invitation to declare absolute independence from each other and from the Habsburg Crown. Emperor Karl gave the navy to the newly formed Jugoslavia in the hope of keeping them connected to what remained of his multi-national state. Without a coastline Austria had no use for a navy anyway. On 31 st October, 1918, the red-white-red flag was hauled down for the last time on an Austrian warship. The once proud imperial navy had ceased to be.
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In a series of six silver coins over the next three years the Austrian Mint will celebrate the history of the old Austrian navy. The themes chosen are. “S.M.S. Novara” and “S.M.S. Erzherzog Ferdinand Max” 2004, “Arctic Expedition Tegetthoff” and “S.M.S. Sankt Georg” 2005, “Austrian Passenger Ships” and “S.M.S. Viribus Unitis” 2006. The coins have a face value of 20 Euro and are struck to a maximum mintage of 50,000 pieces in proof quality only. Each comes with a numbered certificate of authenticity and a prestigious collection case for “Austria on the High Seas” is available for purchase.© 2004 Euro Collections International