Japanese battleship Ise
On 12 April 1922, while at Yokohama, "Ise" hosted a delegation which included the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), who was accompanied by his second cousin, the future Lord Mountbatten of Burma. Captain Kanna Norikazu relieved Nagasawa on 1 December. The ship aided survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake in September 1923. From the early 1920s through the late 1930s, "Ise" mostly cruised off the coast of China. Little detailed information is available about her activities during the 1920s, although she helped sink the obsolete destroyer during gunnery training on 10 August 1926. The ship was overhauled in 1928–1929, during which her forward superstructure was enlarged and her aviation facilities improved.
Ise (river)
The old district of Isenhagen, now part of Gifhorn district, was partly named after the river and its local newspaper is the "Isenhagener Kreisblatt". In the vicinity, not far from the river, is the old Isenhagen Abbey. It was used as a monastery until the Protestant Reformation and has since become a Protestant convent.
In 1571 the Celle Duke, William the Younger, submitted a plan to float logs down the Ise, an activity known as timber rafting ("Flößerei"). Its purpose was to convey logs from the royal forests to the ducal "Residenz" town of Celle, where it was needed as fuel for heating Celle Castle and other royal buildings. On the Ise north of Gifhorn were several royal forests that could have been logged. For some reason the project was not carried out. In 1617 the rafting of logs to Celle was again proposed by the officials of Knesebeck and Gifhorn to the Duke of Celle, by this time Christian the Elder. Estimates at the time put the cost of transporting logs by horse and cart at about 10 times that of rafting them down the river. These plans foundered on the rocks of the Thirty Years War which started in 1618. As a result, timber rafting down the Ise was not introduced until the reign of Duke Christian Louis. For this he called for a senior forester from Harzburg and a mine surveyor from Clausthal to advise him. In the Harz mountains they had a lot of experience with timber rafting because logs were needed for the ironworks there. Based on the recommendations of the advisors, in 1659 the river was cleared of rubbish, bushes and mud by several hundred farmers conscripted for the purpose. Extensive earthworks were created in order to get rid of the many meanders and shorten the course of the river. The canal cuts in the Ise valley left artificial ox-bows. Wooden sluices with sluice channels were built at Wahrenholz and Gifhorn. The first test run was carried out in 1659 and timber rafting officially began on the Ise in 1661 when 4,400 stères of wood fuel was transported to Gifhorn and from there down the Aller to Celle.