Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy

For obvious reasons the use of red-hot shot at sea had always alarmed the men who sailed wooden vessels, but Hastings had seen too clearly for himself the effects it could have on ships not to believe there were technical solutions to the dangers. ‘Of the destructive effect of hot shot on an enemy’s ship,’ he told Byron,

it is scarcely necessary for me to speak. The destruction of the Spanish fleet before Gibraltar is well known. But if I may be permitted to relate an example which came under my proper observation, it will perhaps tend to corroborate others. At New Orleans the Americans had a ship and schooner in the Mississippi that flanked our lines. In the commencement we had no cannon. However, after a couple of days, two field-pieces of 4 or 6lb and a howitzer were erected in battery. In ten minutes the schooner was on fire, and her comrade, seeing the effect of the hot shot, cut her cable and escaped under favour of a light wind. If such was the result of light shot imperfectly heated – for we had no forge – what would be the effect of such a volume as a 32-pounder? A single shot would set a ship in flames.

The risks, too – introducing the red-hot shot before laying the guns, the problems associated with firing shells, the dangers of a shell rolling in a horizontal bore, the transport of shells around the ship – were all more apparent than real, but it seems unlikely that anyone with a boredom threshold as low as Byron’s was still reading. The central message, though, had sunk in. Finlay once remarked that there was not one but two Byrons at Missolonghi: the ‘feminine’ (as he curiously and revealingly put it) Byron who performed in company – vain, frivolous, mercurial; and the ‘masculine’ Byron, all intellect and good sense, who came out in one-to-one conversation. It was this second Byron – whatever lies to the contrary were later told – whose attention Hastings had caught. It makes it all the more of a shame that the two men never met, but Hastings’s letter would bear its posthumous fruit. As Byron moved from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and his own sacrificial death, harried and importuned on all sides, Hastings was about to discover the terrible irony of Byron’s Greek adventure: alive, there was little the First Genius of the Age could do; dead, nothing he could not. All that Hastings had to do was wait. And in the meantime, another and closer death had already brought his vision a step nearer.

VIII

It seems impossible to know now what contact he had had with Willesley in the eighteen months since he had sailed for Greece but Hastings’s departure had badly hurt his ageing father. For many years the old general had been living out his days with a more or less stoical patience, a spectator at a play that had long lost his interest, saddened by years of war, ill-health, the death of friends, the failing sight of his wife and disappointment in his sons. ‘Were it not for the sake of my children I know not whether I should have taken that trouble’ – of visiting Cheltenham for the waters – he had written as early as 1808, ‘after all – for what? To prolong the dream a few years longer – and which dream after all has not been a pleasant one – no, I think I should prefer confining myself to my convenient room, surrounded by my family, books and maps, and strive to spin out this dream at least contentedly if not comfortably – so much for sermonising.’

It would be hard, he conceded in 1813, ‘to quit the Theatre before the play is over and the curtain drops’, but with the defeat of Napoleon and the Kangaroo incident there was less and less to hold him. There is the occasional trace of him in the local newspaper – a bullock presented to the town for ‘a patriotic feast’ to celebrate Wellington’s Peninsula victories, the festivities to welcome the Marquis of Hastings back from India – but from the odd letter that survives, the only consolations of his old age seem to have been laudanum and the presence at Willesley of a little girl, a natural daughter of Sir John Moore adopted by the Hastings family after Corunna. ‘The young orphan who was a very bright, interesting and charming girl,’ Baron Louis le Jeune, a French prisoner of war at Ashby and – in the easygoing ways of a provincial town far from the sea – a dinner guest at Willesley, recalled, ‘was quite the life of the circle which her host and hostess gathered about them. The courtesy and kindness with which I was received did much to cheer my spirits, prisoner though I was.’

It is a poignant and elusive image – how she came, who her mother was, where she went, all seem mysteries – but whatever compensation the young Eliza Moore brought for the disgrace of Sir Charles’s ‘Trafalgar Hero’ it was tragically not enough. ‘My dear dear Mother,’ Frank’s older brother, Charles, wrote from Geneva on 9 October 1823, eighteen months after Frank’s departure for Greece:

This instant a courier has arrived with Mr McDonall’s letter, & the most melancholy intelligence it contains the sudden manner of its communication to me has thrown me into the greatest grief & sorrow – I am fearful to agitate your feelings my dear Mother by giving vent to my own, & I hardly know what I write or how to express myself … Keep yourself up my dearest Mother I beg of you … It is to me a great consolation that no one can have a moment’s doubt that my poor Father’s mind was quite gone …

The new Sir Charles might well have been right – ‘Oct 2’, the wonderfully named Derbyshire Coroner Charnel Bateman wrote in his accounts, ‘Willesley to view the body of Sir Charles Hastings Bart, who shot himself, being at the time in a state of temporary derangement, 21 miles £1.15s 9d.’ – but there was certainly nothing insane about the man who had made his will only months before. ‘I desire my body may be opened after my death,’ he declared, with the same robust, pagan instincts that made him so contemptuous that Bonaparte should have surrendered rather than fallen on his sword,

and buried without a coffin upon the Grove Hill on a spot marked by me, wrapped up in either woollen, oil cloth or any such perishable materials as will keep my body together until deposited in my grave by six of my most deserving poorest labourers to whom one pound will be given … and several acorns to be planted over my grave that one good tree may be chosen [the rusting iron railings still surround a tree near where Willesley Hall once stood] and preserved and that I may have the satisfaction of knowing that after my death my body may not be quite useless but serve to rear a good English Oak.

The same mixture of singularity, clarity and generosity runs through the rest of the will, and if Sir Charles Hastings died insane, then he had probably lived that way too. There is a curious – and very Hastings – codicil disinheriting his elder son in favour of Frank should Charles ever employ their old steward again, but the clause that most affected his estranged favourite – and transformed his bargaining power with his Greek masters – came right at the beginning.

As my youngest son Frank Hastings has been provided for by a clause in the Marriage Settlement I shall entrust him to the care of his Mother and Brother who will act towards him as he behaves and I grant him my blessing and entire forgiveness … I leave to my eldest son Charles Hastings five thousand pounds to enable him to pay his brother that sum due to him by the Marriage Settlement.

‘I have written three letters to my brother,’ Charles told his mother in that same letter from Geneva, ‘in which I urge in the kindest and strongest manner I can his immediate return to England – & have desired him to draw on me for any sums of money he may want. The 3 letters go by different channels, & I think safe one’s [sic].’

There is no mention of his father’s death in Frank’s journal – although there is a copy of the will among his papers – but if it did reach him before the end of the year his brother’s plea went ignored. It seems likely in fact that Charles’s letters did not catch up with him until well into the next year, because by the end of October 1823 he had left Hydra for Athens, sailing north via Corinth with another disenchanted product of the Royal Navy, Byron’s secretary, imitator, traducer and future biographer, Edward John Trelawny.

It says something about the diversity of philhellene life that two men as diametrically opposed in character and ambition as Trelawny and Hastings could find themselves on the same side, let alone in the same boat. They had entered the navy as boys in the same year, but whereas Hastings had served in the Neptune at Trafalgar, Trelawny – to his bitter regret – had missed out on the battle, beginning a downward spiral of resentments and failures that was made bearable only by a fantasy existence of sub-Byronic adventures that he half came to believe in himself.

There was no shortage of fabulists among philhellene volunteers, but what set Trelawny apart was his genius for co-opting others into his fantasy world. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars he had found himself in the same position as thousands of other unemployed lieutenants, but not even a humiliating marriage and divorce could keep him down, and in 1822, armed with little more than his dramatic good looks and a genius for story-telling, he succeeded in ‘bamming’ and talking his way into Byron’s Pisan circle in time to preside at the cremation of Shelley’s drowned corpse on the beach near Livorno.

It had seemed axiomatic to the Byron circle that Trelawny should fill the role – hadn’t he, after all, burned the body of his Eastern child-bride after she had been attacked by a shark? – but while Byron remained fond enough of Trelawny to take him to Greece, the creature had soon outgrown his creator. He had crossed the Morea initially in order to report back on the political and military situation, but with every mile put between himself and Byron the old ties and loyalties had weakened, and long before Hydra Trelawny had resolved to throw in his lot with a man who was the antithesis of all that the dilatory Byron represented. ‘I am to be a kind of aide de camp to [Odyssesus Androutses],’ he proudly wrote to Mary Shelley in a characteristic blend of fact and fantasy. ‘The General gives me as many men as I choose to command, and I am to be always with him … I am habited exactly like Ulysses, in red and gold vest, with sheep-skin capote, gun, pistols, sabre, & a few dollars or doubloons; my early habits will be resumed, and nothing new, but dirt and privations, with mountain sleeping, are a good exchange for the parched desert, dry locusts and camels’ milk.’

Trelawny would not have known camel’s milk if he had taken a bath in it – the Wahhabi – Ottoman desert wars, though, were prominent among his fictional battle honours – but his whole life is such a triumph of imagination over reality that it would be pedantic to hold that against him. From the first time he had read a Byron poem he had modelled himself on the Byronic hero, and here at last was the chance for life to catch up with art, for reality finally to deliver among the crags and bandit lairs of Parnassus the excitements and notoriety that ten years of the navy or Bristol boarding houses had so signally failed to provide.

Trelawny’s hopes were to be realised, too – life was briefly, tardily but dramatically about to give him everything down to the statutory Byronic child-bride he craved – and even in embryo he was a riskily outlandish companion with whom to travel. He and Hastings had arrived at the Corinth isthmus on the eve of the formal capitulation of the citadel, and in the heightened tensions that always followed a surrender the mere appearance of anyone as theatrically exotic as ‘Greek’ or ‘Turk’ Trelawny was enough to get the pair of them almost shot as spies.

It cannot have escaped Hastings, however, as they picked their way through the whitening bones of Dramali’s men and horses – 10,000 of them, he reckoned – and crossed for Athens, that for all his absurd posturing Trelawny was probably closer to the philhellene ‘type’ than he was himself. For the best part of two years Hastings had railed against Greek ingratitude, but with only one or two exceptions he remained as much a loner in volunteer company – coldly remote with his own countrymen, contemptuously suspicious of ‘soi disant’ French ‘experts’, and perfectly ready, in the face of Jarvis’s American vulgarity, to enforce a proper respect at the end of a duelling pistol if necessary.

There was as ever, though, a resilience about Hastings that kept him going, and with the imminent promise of ‘English gold’ he was no sooner in Athens than he was again writing to exhort Byron to prevent the money falling into a bottomless Greek sink. In the months since his first letter nothing had occurred to make him change his mind, but he had seen enough of the country’s politics to know that with every snout in the trough – as he elegantly put it – it was going to be hard enough to persuade the Greeks to finance a single steamship, let alone a fleet, if they had control of their own gold.

£20,000, that was all he needed – all Greece needed if she was ‘yet to be saved’ – and for once Hastings seemed lucky in his timing. ‘Trelawny gave a dinner to Goura’ – just about the basest of all the Greek leaders – he noted on 13 December, exultant after hearing that Byron and Colonel Napier, the Resident on Cephalonia and a soldier with a distinguished past and a sinful future, had at last ‘approved’ his plan: ‘… in the middle Mr Finlay arrived … Mr Finlay is quite a young man – he has studied in Germany & pleases me much … Mr Brown informs me by letter that he is likely to return to England & I may get a steamer – I hope to God he may succeed and in that case it is not impossible I may be named to the command of her if so my destruction … of the Turkish fleet must ensue in the summer.’

The young George Finlay had made an even stronger impression on Byron – he thought the ghost of Shelley had walked in when he first met him – and over the next four years he was to become Hastings’s closest friend and ally in Greece. The following day the two men went to ‘visit the antiquities’ together, but it is a fairly safe bet that if Hastings had his way the conversation was all tactics, hot shot and the ‘one or two Steam vessels’ with which he had promised Byron he could destroy ‘even Constantinople’.

It was a tragedy that it would take Byron’s death in April 1824, and the subsequent wash of sympathy it caused, to realise Hastings’s vision, but even with the arrival of the first £40,000 of the loan he was still made to wait. ‘During the summer of 1824,’ Finlay wrote,

Hastings endeavoured to impress the necessity of rendering the national cause not entirely dependent on the disorderly and tumultuous merchant marine, which it was compelled to hire at an exorbitant price. It is needless to record all the difficulties and opposition he met with from a Government consisting in part of ship owners, eager to obtain a share of the loan as hire for their ships. The loan, however, appeared inexhaustible; and in the autumn of 1824, Hastings returned to England, with a promise that the Greek government would lose no time in instructing their deputies in London to procure a steam-vessel to be armed under his inspection, and of which he was promised the command.

It had taken more than two years for Hastings to get the promise of his steamship. It was just as well that he did not know, as he disembarked in England at the end of 1824, that it would be another two before he would have the chance to fight in her.

IX

If Hastings knew the Greek government too well to imagine that his problems were over, even his cynicism can have done little to prepare him for the vexations ahead. He had sailed back to England in the company of Edward Blaquiere, and within days had exchanged the open corruption of Greece for the more impenetrable mire of Blaquiere’s philhellene friends, the brazen robbery and violence of sectarian fighting for a financial world in which it is now almost impossible to define where greed shaded into outright criminality and incompetence into deliberate malpractice.

The sordid history of the English loan concerns Hastings only in so far as it affected the construction of the new Greek fleet, and all that needs stressing here is that of the £2,800,000 raised from British investors only a tiny fraction was ever converted into the arms or munitions that might have helped win the war. Hastings had himself promised £5,000 to the construction of a steam vessel, but even with that carrot dangling in front of them it was not until March 1825 that the Greek deputies finally authorised the construction of a ship on the Thames at Deptford and of an engine for her to be built by a man who would come to figure large in Hastings’s pantheon of criminal incompetents, the Smithfield engineer Alexander Galloway.

The commission came just in the nick of time – a month earlier, and Hastings had been resolving ‘neither to be a dupe or dupeur’, a month later and he would probably have been back in the Royal Navy – but he knew himself too well to pretend he was done with Greece. ‘I came to town at the instigation of my relations & Naval friends to endeavour to get re-established in the British Navy,’ he wrote soon after getting the invitation to command the steamship.

My brother had seen Lord Melville over the subject & there seems little difficulty attending it …

There is nothing I am aware of that would give me such sincere satisfaction as to aid the delivery of Greece & there never was perhaps an opportunity that offered itself of gaining such lasting renown at so little hazard – I mean there never was an exploit to which such credit was attached so easy of execution as the destruction of the Turkish fleet: & could I feel satisfied that the proper measures would be pursued for attaining that end I would not hesitate an instant to resign my commission was I even Admiral in the British Navy for the purpose of carrying those plans into execution. [If they accept his plan] I shall be that instant ready to renounce the British service & lay down at your disposal the sum of money I had proposed to the Greek Government.

And for any non-establishment naval man, let alone philhellene, there was one further inducement to fight for Greece when her government appointed Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald, to command her new fleet. If it had done nothing else the appointment would have signalled the final shift from a military to a naval strategy that Hastings had long been advocating, but it was above all the name of Cochrane – the most brilliant and controversial of the young sea captains to make their reputations during the French wars – that would most vividly have caught the imagination of a born warrior and innovator like Hastings.

On an infinitely grander and more flamboyant scale, Cochrane’s background, character, politics, cussedness, originality and naval career bear striking parallels to Hastings’s own. The tall, red-headed, angular-featured son of an impoverished and eccentric Scottish earl, Cochrane had fought from the outbreak of the French wars, winning himself a reputation for brilliance and insubordination in just about equal measure until a stock market scandal gave his political and professional enemies the excuse they needed to have him drummed out of the service, ceremonially stripped of his knighthood in a midnight ritual of degradation, and thrown into prison.

There seems every possibility that Cochrane was in some way involved in the swindle that brought him down; but, supremely litigious and stubborn by nature, he fought to establish his innocence with the same dogged ferocity that characterised his seamanship. He would have to wait for another generation and a different England to regain his domestic honours, but by the time his and Hastings’s paths crossed he had already made a second and even more glittering reputation in South America’s liberation wars, in command of the nascent Chilean fleet against the Spaniards and then of the Brazilian ships in that country’s struggle for independence from Portugal.

The only drawback to Cochrane, in fact, was that for all the grandiose titles that came his way – Vice-Admiral of Chile, Commander-in-Chief of the Naval Forces of the Republic, First Admiral of the Brazils and Marquess of Maranham – he had never commanded anything that remotely resembled a fleet. The novels of Frederick Marryat are evidence enough of his ability to inspire the men under his immediate command, but Cochrane’s virtues – audacity, ingenuity, courage, unorthodoxy, seamanship, individual flair (and no one ever had them in greater measure) – were supremely those of the frigate captain rather than admiral, the lone ‘sea wolf’ rather than the politician needed to navigate the notorious shallows of Greek naval life.

Given his impeccable radicalism, however, and his extraordinary record in South America – with just a couple of ships and a limitless supply of bluff he had achieved near-miracles – he was an inevitable choice, and if he did not come cheap no one in the summer of 1825 with any imagination could have regarded the £57,000 Greece paid him as anything but well spent. It might give some indication of the scale of this investment if it is remembered that the Greek national revenues for the same year were only £90,000, yet for that £57,000 they were getting the one man who, if past exploits were anything to go by, could deliver on even the wildest and most ambitious of the strategic promises Hastings had made in his letters to Lord Byron.

The detailed and complete destruction of the whole Turkish fleet, the liberation of Greece, the burning of Constantinople itself – Cochrane instinctively saw the same possibilities that Hastings did and, more importantly, the same methods to achieve them. ‘I have not been able to convince myself that, under existing circumstances, there is any means by which Greece can be saved as by a steady perseverance in equipping the steam vessels,’ Cochrane wrote to the Greek deputies, warning them that he would not budge until he had six steamships armed with Hastings’s sixty-eight-pound long guns under his command,

which are so admirably calculated to cut off the enemy’s communications with Alexandria and Constantinople and for towing fire vessels and explosion vessels [Cochrane specialities] by night into ports and places where the hostile squadrons anchor on the shores of Greece.

I wish I could give you, without writing a Volume, a clear view of the numerous reasons, derived from 35 years experience, which induce me to prefer a force which can move in the obscurity of the night, through narrow channels, in shoal water, and with silence and celerity, over a naval armament of the usual kind, though of far superior force.

[The steam vessel] will prove the most formidable means that has ever been employed in Naval warfare. It is my opinion that 24 vessels moved by steam … could commence at St Petersburg and finish at Constantinople the destruction of every ship of war in the several ports.

The agreement of the deputies to five new steamships seemed to clear the way to Cochrane’s appointment and the fulfilment of Hastings’s ambition, but nothing to do with the Greek Committee or the Greek deputies was ever as simple as that. It had taken almost three years’ advocacy for Hastings to secure himself even a single vessel, and now suddenly he found himself facing the bitter prospect of seeing his own pet project losing out to the more grandiloquent demands of Cochrane’s steam ‘fleet’. ‘I fancy you have lately received a letter from the Greek Deputies complaining of the delays of Mr Galloway in putting up the machinery on board of the vessel built by Mr Brent,’ he was soon writing to John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s old friend and a leading member of the Greek Committee, ‘& I consider the conduct of Mr Galloway so totally devoid of candour that I also feel myself obliged to appeal to you on the subject.’

For Hastings and Greece time and not money was the issue, and the gist of his complaint was that Galloway was stalling on his vessel so that he could economise by fitting all six engines at the same time. ‘The Greeks have long looked forward to a steam vessel as the arm that would assure them success,’ he went on, in a disingenuous projection of his own hopes, ‘& have been daily led to expect the arrival of one; what then is likely to be the impression on their minds when they behold the Egyptian fleet with a steam vessel without having one to oppose it? The Greeks (like all barbarous people) are easily depressed; are easily elated and the sight of a steam vessel under this flag would inspire them with unlimited confidence, the sight of the enemy one will inspire them with a corresponding terror.’