Enomoto Takeaki, vice-commander of the Shogunate Navy,…

Enomoto Takeaki, vice-commander of the Shogunate Navy, had refused to remit his fleet to the new government and had departed Shinagawa on August 20, with four steam warships (Kaiyō, Kaiten, Banryū, Chiyodagata) and four steam transports (Kanrin Maru, Mikaho, Shinsoku, Chōgei) as well as two thousand sailors, thirty-six members of the "Yugekitai" (guerilla corps) headed by Iba Hachiro, several officials of the former Bakufu government including the vice-commander in chief of the Shogunate Army Matsudaira Taro, Nakajima Saburozuke, and members of the French Military Mission to Japan, headed by Jules Brunet.

On August 21, the fleet had encountered a typhoon off Choshi, in which Mikaho was lost and Kanrin Maru, heavily damaged, had been forced to rally the coast, where she was captured at Shimizu.

The rest of the fleet had reached Sendai harbor on August 26, one of the centers of the Northern Coalition against the new government, composed of the fiefs of Sendai, Yonozawa, Aizu, Shōnai and Nagaoka.

Imperial troops have continued to progress north, taking the castle of Wakamatsu, and making the position in Sendai untenable.

On October 12, 1868, the fleet leaves Sendai, after having acquired two more ships (Oe and the Hou-Ou, previously borrowed by Sendai domain from the Shogunate), and about a thousand more troops: former-Bakufu troops under Otori Keisuke, Shinsengumi troops under Hijikata Toshizo, Yugekitai under Katsutaro Hitomi, as well as several more French advisors (Fortant, Marlin, Bouffier, Garde), who had reached Sendai overland.