скачать книгу бесплатно
Outsailed and outgunned as they were, the Badere-Zaffer’s crew gave place to no one when it came to courage, and the two ships continued to exchange broadsides until the Turkish cannon at last fell silent. As the Badere-Zaffer settled helpless in the water, shortly after I o’clock in the morning, her mizzen, fore and main topmasts all gone, her hull so badly shot up she could barely float, Stewart brought the Sea Horse under her stern and hailed her to surrender. A desultory fire from her after-guns was the only answer, and with one last starboard broadside, Stewart, ‘finding that his shattered opponent would neither answer nor fire, very prudently, and very humanely too, hauled off; and, after standing on a little further, brought to on the starboard tack to wait for daylight’.
It took one more broadside, and a mutiny of the Badere-Zaffer’s surviving officers – who hauled down her colours from the shattered stump of her mizzenmast while they held the half-mad Scandril in his chair – to end the engagement, but shortly after dawn it was over. ‘Sent the 1st Lieut to take possession of her,’ the Sea Horse’s log recorded, with a characteristically laconic indifference to the human drama: ‘she proved to be the Badere Zaffer a large Turkish frigate, a complement of 540 men commanded by Scandali Kichuc Ali, Captain. Her consort’s name was the Alex Fesan carrying 24 brass guns and two mortars. The enemy lost 170 killed and 200 wounded, ours 5 seamen killed [two next to Hastings when a gun blew up] & ten wounded and two dangerously.’
For all the good the Badere-Zaffer ever did the Sea Horse’s crew – the prize court refused to buy her for the navy – Scandril might as well have succeeded in a last-ditch attempt to scuttle her, but Stewart was determined to add her to the growing haul of bombards, brigs, schooners, wine, ‘senna and austrich feathers’ that he had already sent back to Malta. Over the next days her battered hull was made seaworthy enough to be towed, a skeleton crew was detained to man their prize on the voyage back to Valetta, and a Greek vessel bound for Constantinople ‘co-opted’ to repatriate their prisoners.
It was not long before the Sea Horse was following them, because with a demi-thaw in diplomatic relations between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, she was back again at Malta in September to receive on board another old friend of Sir Charles’s, Britain’s new ambassador to the Porte, Mr Robert Adair. Through the previous months the Turks had done all they could to stall negotiations, and even in a more conciliatory atmosphere it was the end of January 1809 before the ship’s company was again manning the yards to salute ‘His Excellency Mr Adair the Ambassador on his disembarking’ at Constantinople. ‘The walls of the Seraglio are like the walls of Newstead,’ another young English aristocrat, Lord Byron, on his travels with his old Cambridge friend and future philhellene John Cam Hobhouse, recorded of his first impressions of the ‘polis’,
but the ride by the walls of the city on the land side is beautiful, imagine four miles of immense triple battlements covered with Ivy, surmounted with 218 towers, and on the other side of the road Turkish burying grounds (the loveliest spots on earth) full of enormous cypresses, I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, and Delphi, I have traversed great parts of Turkey and many other parts of Europe and some of Asia, but I never beheld a work of Nature or Art, which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side, from the Seven Towers to the End of the Golden Horn.
To a young naval midshipman like Hastings, though, it was the seaward defences of Constantinople that would have been of most interest. The captains who formed part of Sir John Duckworth’s abortive expedition were adamant that the city had been there for the taking if they had only been allowed, and over the next two months of diplomatic inactivity and interminable salutes, Hastings had all the opportunity he could want to assess those defensive frailties that were still exercising his mind twenty years later.
These were all the more obvious, too, because the Sea Horse had arrived at Constantinople at a juncture in the city’s history that was bloody even by its own violent and unstable standards. The contorted negotiations with Britain had from the first been conducted against a background of riots and rebellion, and a frenzy of beheadings, strangulations, mutilations and traditional Ottoman family planning – two hundred women of Mustafa IV’s harem were drowned in the Bosphorus – that had only paused for the murder of the Sultan and the ascent to the throne of a man to whom terror was the supreme instrument of policy.
With his jet-black beard, his great breadth of shoulder, an eye that ‘awed’ strangers and an ‘air of indescribable majesty’, as Hobhouse put it, Mahmud II had the appearance to match his character. ‘Those who know him,’ Adair’s successor as ambassador to the Porte, Sir Robert Liston, wrote of the man against whom Hastings would expend his fortune and, ultimately, his life, ‘say he had considerable abilities, a vigorous and active mind, with such an idea of the elevation, perhaps of the sanctity of his station, and so strong a feeling of personal superiority that he deems all opposition criminal, all resistance vain and ultimate disappointment on his part impossible.’
It would be intriguing to know what the young Hastings said of him, and there is no doubt that he saw him at least once. ‘Mann’d the yards and saluted the Sultan with 21 guns upon his passing the ship in his caique,’ reads the Sea Horse log for 6 March, ‘mann’d the yards and saluted the Sultan on his return.’ In its way, that glimpse was as crucial as the single, fleeting vision of Nelson from the quarterdeck of Neptune. With great swathes of the city still smouldering from the fires of the Sultan’s mutinous Janissaries, and France and Russia both threatening Ottoman integrity, Hastings could be forgiven for underestimating the man, but he would have had no trouble in recognising a natural enemy. Corrupt, despotic, violent, vulnerable, Mahmud II was everything a young Whig aristocrat could ask for. And so, too, for a born incendiary like Hastings, was Constantinople. As the Sea Horse weighed for Malta, Robert Adair’s mission accomplished, the memory of its burning suburbs, enfeebled defences and – still only a glint in the eye of even the most far-seeing naval moderniser in 1809 – its vulnerability to any ship capable of forcing the Dardanelles, left an impression that made those months among the most important of Hastings’s life.
IV
For Frank and the Sea Horse the return to Malta in the spring of 1809 meant the welcome resumption of business as usual. After her long inactivity the ship finally quitted the Dardanelles at sunset on 29 March, and by 12 April was again in Valetta where Stewart mustered the ship’s company to make ‘known to them the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty’s approbation of their conduct in capturing the Turkish frigate’.
There was prize-money to be distributed – if not as much as they reckoned their deserts – but after three years in the Sea Horse, and growing at long last, as Stewart wrote to tell his father, it was time for the fifteen-year-old Hastings to move on. In July 1808 he had completed the requisite sea-time to be rated midshipman, and back in England Sir Charles was already mobilising old Jersey connections to secure his son’s next ship. ‘I shall be anxious to know when you have settled with Sir J. Saumarez about Frank,’ Stewart wrote to Sir Charles from Sicily in December 1809, at the end of another successful summer and autumn cruise that included two brilliant assaults on the fortresses on Isola di Giannutri and Pianosa,
as unless something particular occurs I do not propose coming home next year unless it may be late in it & I would send Frank to you in April with a discharge into Sir J’s ship which would secure his time: I have this last time at Malta given Frank a sum of money and made him buy his own clothes which by the by are now very expensive … I have now wound up all his accounts to this day & find him still £16 in my debt but he shall not draw till he finally goes as he will necessarily want some more. I have been as moderate in his expenses as I could consistent with the high price of things and his going & living like a Gentleman. He behaves exceedingly well & I like him much.
If Admiralty records are to be believed, Frank was not discharged from the Sea Horse into Victory until 6 May 1810, but between the two ships there was Willesley, a ‘delighted’ mother and a determined father to see. He ‘understood from Lady Hardy’, Sir Charles was soon writing to Warren Hastings’s son-in-law,
that you and Lady Imhoff are both intimate with the Captain of Victory, on board of whom my son Frank is to go, will you have the goodness (previous to your quitting town) to leave him a letter of recommendation to your friend. He will find it very useful when on board as thro’ the Captain’s means he may be placed under the care of some Lieut. which is what I would wish as I cannot expect Sir James Saumarez will do any more than admit him on board.
After the excitements of the Sea Horse, and the light and the colour of Sicily, the Aegean and the Dardanelles, it was a return for Frank to the dull realities of home ports and blockade duties with the Baltic Fleet. In spite of the official entry date he did not join Victory until October 1810, and he was back at Willesley again by 15 December – ‘the date of the Regency’, as Sir Charles triumphantly dated Frank’s arrival – putting his father to work to find him something more interesting than a winter’s guard duty at Spithead. ‘I have been in town for a few days in consequence of my youngest son,’ Sir Charles wrote to Warren Hastings a month later, ‘who required my exertions to place him on board a sloop of war to cruise the channel … It was his own choice to employ the few months he has to finish his time in studying that most important though very dangerous navigation.’
This was a period of feverish political expectations for the extended Hastings clan, as Lord Moira came within a whisker of forming a government, but for Frank the next two years were probably the quietest of his whole career. It is difficult to trace his exact movements during this time through the usual Admiralty records, but by the autumn of 1812, after another summer at Willesley studying with a clergyman tutor, he was again exploiting family interest to smooth over the next step in his career. ‘I am obliged to be in town the 1st week in Sept,’ Sir Charles explained to Warren Hastings, ‘on acct of my younger son, whose time of serving as a midshipman will be near expired and I must not be out of the way.’
The first great hurdle for any midshipman, ideally taken at the age of twenty after the requisite six years’ sea-time, was the demanding examination to make lieutenant. In exceptional cases – or where powerful interest could be brought to bear – the age criterion might be fudged or falsified, but even a boy as well connected as Frank would seem to have had to do it the hard way, and to wait until just after his twentieth birthday in April 1814 for his promotion.
(#litres_trial_promo)
Hastings was on the North America station at the time – the United States had declared war on Britain two years earlier – but it was only a matter of luck that he was alive to make lieutenant at all. Sometime late in 1813 he had taken a passage out to join the sloop Atalante under the command of Frederick Hickey, and early in November, as a nineteen-year-old acting lieutenant, found himself in heavy fog off Halifax when the distant sounds of a frigate’s cannon were mistaken for the signal guns at the lighthouse on Sambro Island.
There was often clearer weather close in to shore at Halifax, and with lookouts posted on the bowsprit-end and jib boom, a leadsman in the chains taking constant soundings, and her signal guns firing every quarter-hour, the Atalante nudged under easy sail into the thickening fog. For forty-five minutes Hickey coaxed her towards the safety of harbour, and with the guns of Sambro Island – as he still fondly imagined them – silent, and the leadsman reporting nothing at twenty fathoms, had just begun to think his ship clear of danger when there was a sudden warning cry of ‘Starboard the helm!’ and the Atalante was in breakers. In a matter of minutes ‘the rudder, the stern-post and part of the keel’ had been ripped away by the rocks of the Eastern Shelf off Sambro Island, Hickey reported at his court martial, ‘and perceiving immediately that there was no hope of saving the ship, my whole attention was turned to saving the lives of my valuable crew; to effect which, I directed, in the first place, the quarter boats to be lowered, and the jolly boat to be launched from the poop. I had also given directions for the guns to be thrown overboard; but the ship filled before any of them could be cut loose.’
There was just time to fire off a distress signal from the guns still above the water, and to order his men to the exposed larboard side of the ship, when with a crash of masts, the Atalante broke into three. ‘In twelve minutes she was literally torn to pieces,’ Jeremiah O’Sullivan, a passenger on board recalled, as the crew fought against the crashing breakers to get to the ship’s pinnace, tangled up helplessly in the wreck of the Atalante’s booms, ‘… and to see so many poor souls struggling for life, some naked, others on spars, casks, or anything tenable was a scene painful beyond description.’
One of their boats had already gone down – not to mention Hastings’s sea chest with all his possessions and papers – and with some sixty of the crew struggling to get into the pinnace, it seemed only a matter of moments before most of them went the same way. It was rapidly obvious to Hickey that not all of them could possibly escape in her, and ordering twenty or thirty of them out onto the booms, he succeeded in freeing her from the wreckage and – ‘in a most miraculous manner’ – launching her to safety.
With the pinnace freed there was one last, desperate attempt to lash the booms into a makeshift raft, but almost immediately they began to drift into still heavier breakers. ‘I signalled to the small boats to come near us,’ Hickey continued his evidence,
and each to take in a few more men, distributing them with each other and the pinnace till I succeeded in getting every man and boy off the raft, when, with three cheers, the wreck was abandoned. After pulling near two hours without seeing the land, guided only by a small dial compass, which one of the quartermasters had in his pocket, we picked up a fisherman, who piloted the boat safe into Portuguese cove … It now becomes a pleasing task to me to state in the fullest manner that the conduct of my officers and ship’s company, under the most trying circumstances in which human beings could be placed, was orderly, obedient and respectful, to the last extremity.
The loss of the Atalante probably had as much to do with her seaworthiness as anything else, and if Hastings was lucky to get away with his life and reputation – Hickey and his officers were honourably acquitted of all blame at the court martial – it was an omen of things to come. For the first seven years of his naval career he had known nothing but success, but over these next two he was to see the other side of his profession and learn the lessons of defeat in a war that exposed inadequacies in the Royal Navy that twenty years of almost seamless triumph had successfully masked.
There were any number of issues that lay behind the War of 1812 – the right to search and impressment, republican sympathies, Yankee designs on British Canada, mutual dislike – but at the heart of the struggle lay the system of economic warfare between Napoleonic France and Britain that threatened American merchant interests. In 1806 Napoleon had promulgated the first of his decrees designed to cripple British trade, and when Britain retaliated with her own Orders in Council that effectively closed Continental ports to neutral shipping there were inevitably a thousand potential flashpoints for war. ‘With respect to America,’ Stewart had written prophetically to Sir Charles Hastings in 1808,
we may possibly by concessions put off the evil day but the arrogance, highhandedness & I may say ungentlemanlike conduct of that nation will sooner or later force us to quarrel with them; we have always put up with things from them we would not have suffered from any other nation in the world, many instances of which I saw in the last war, & our forbearance only increases the insolence of the mob, which seems to me the only real government in that country.
None of this can disguise what a ‘bad’ war the War of 1812 was, but to an ambitious young naval officer there is no such thing, and within weeks of the Atalante going down Hastings was lucky enough to join the newly commissioned Anaconda under the command of the twenty-eight-year-old George Westphal. There had been nothing wrong with Hickey – except that he seems to have been a permanently unlucky officer – but of all Frank’s captains George Westphal, a protégé of the Duke of Kent and scion of an aristocratic German family of Hastingsesque antiquity, was by some margin the most remarkable.
As a young midshipman at Trafalgar he had lain next to the dying Nelson in the cockpit of Victory, and that was just the first and most romantic of his battle honours. In 1807 he had again been severely wounded and was captured after a long and bloody action, but making his escape in an open boat from a Guadeloupe prison ship, had worked his way back to England – courtesy of an American merchantman and an English privateer – in time to join in the reduction of Martinique and to take a prominent and heroic part in the attack on Flushing.
Fleet actions, espionage, ship-to-ship, siege work, land skirmishes, Westphal had fought in over a hundred engagements in all, and had continued in the same vein on American soil. ‘On first landing,’ a contemporary biography recorded one typical incident,
Mr Westphal, having dismounted an American officer, set off on the captured horse in pursuit of the fugitives; forgetting, in the ardour of the moment, that it was not possible for his men to keep pace with him – a circumstance indeed that did not present itself to him until he found himself, unsupported, in the midst of a body of armed men. Firing his pistols right and left, however, and slashing his sword in all directions, he dashed through them and succeeded, although wounded by a shot through the hand, in effecting his escape, bearing away with him at the same time as his prisoner a Captain in the militia.
Hastings’s new posting was doubly fortunate for him, because it was not as if the navy’s performance against the Americans had been of a kind that would guarantee him a ship like the Anaconda, or a captain like George Westphal. For the previous decade the service had exercised a virtual mastery over its European enemies, but when in the first year of war English ships had taken on more heavily armed enemies with crews – as often as not British and Irish – of more or less equal skill, the result had been a series of defeats that became an equally fertile source of American myth-making and British soul-searching.
At the heart of the British performance – when all the socio-moral nonsense about Republican Virtue and New World Vigour is forgotten – were failures in long-range gunnery, and it was this that turned Hastings into the impassioned evangelist of gunnery reform he became. After twenty wearing years of warfare there were clearly other factors at work, but in a service in which ‘any knowledge … of gunnery [was] obtained gratuitously’, as Hastings – precursor to all those prophets of gunnery change who would cry in the naval wilderness over the next hundred years – contemptuously put it, ‘all the Seaman’s help in the world will avail little, if your artillery practice is inferior to the enemy’.
The war at sea had been largely turned around by the time Hastings joined the Anaconda, but though he got his fair share of prizes there was still one more brutal lesson before he could quit America. In the first twelve months after he had joined Westphal and the Anaconda he was principally engaged in the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, and as the conflict ground to its inevitable and pointless conclusion – the status quo ante, with no gains and no concessions on either side – he found himself at anchor with the main British fleet off the Louisiana coast in support of Britain’s last punitive effort of the war.
If anything can epitomise the uselessness of the conflict, it is the Battle of New Orleans, fought at the beginning of January 1815, two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed at Ghent. For some months before this the opposition to war had been growing in Britain, but the abdication of Napoleon had given the government a belated opportunity to send out an army of Peninsular veterans under the command of Wellington’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham, to strengthen its position at the negotiating table.
In the middle of December 1814 the navy began to ferry the army to its advance base on the Île de Poix in Lake Borgne, but from the start the operation was bedevilled by delays – Pakenham had not even arrived – logistical shortages, command failures and overconfidence. After the pusillanimous American performance before Washington that last was at least understandable, yet as so often it was only the courage and endurance of the army’s rank and file that redeemed a battle plan which condemned them to a sixty-mile slog across lake, bayou, bank, shoal, swamp and the mud of a half-cut canal in some of the filthiest weather Louisiana could throw at them.
It had never occurred to Andrew Jackson, in command of New Orleans’s defence, that an attack could come from this quarter, but by December the British army and commander were at last united on a narrow strip of firm ground between the Mississippi on their left flank and a cypress swamp on their right, just seven miles downriver from New Orleans. ‘In the endeavours to place the small vessels of war as near as possible to the point of landing,’ Sir Alexander Cochrane, the Commander-in-Chief, wrote of the Anaconda’s role in the operation,
Captain Westphal was particularly conspicuous in his zeal and success towards the effecting of this important object; he having, by the utmost perseverance, skill, and exertion, hove the ANACONDA over a bank nearly five miles in extent (upon which there were only eight feet of water), into Lac Borgne, and there occupied a station that enabled that sloop to render the most essential aid and protection to the open boats conveying troops and supplies from the fleet; which were frequently rescued by her assistance from the imminent danger to which they were reduced by the severity of the weather.
With Jackson’s defenders now entrenched behind a strong defensive wall stretching from river to swamp, however, and his right flank supported by the naval guns of the Carolina and Louisiana, Pakenham delayed his final assault until more artillery could be brought up from the fleet. Under the command of Sir Thomas Troubridge, a naval brigade that included Hastings dragged and canoed their cannon up from Lake Borgne, and on 27 December – using the hot shot that would become so dear to Hastings’s heart – set fire to the Carolina and blew her out of the water in a matter of only minutes. ‘His conduct as a Gallant, able, attentive, Obedient, and Zealous young officer, claims my highest approbation,’ Westphal wrote of Hastings’s part in the action. ‘On several occasions his zeel [sic] & activity attracted the notice of Sir Thomas Troubridge, who commanded the Brigade of Seamen and of Lt Col Dixon commanding the artillery, both of whom caused me to express to Lieutenant Hastings (on several occasions) their thanks for his persevering activity, and promptitude in the execution of the several tasks with which he was entrusted.’
The spectacular destruction of the Carolina was the last real British success of the campaign. A humiliating defeat in an artillery duel on 1 January gave a grim pointer to what was to come, but it was a warning wasted on Pakenham. Reinforced by the arrival of two more of Wellington’s best regiments he ordered a frontal assault against the entrenched American line for dawn on the eighth. It was an assault that Hastings and the navy were well out of. The failure of a diversionary attack across the river to go off on time, or an appalling blunder that left the forlorn hope without fascines or scaling ladders, might have deterred another commander, but Pakenham was made of sterner stuff. With the morning light already streaking the Louisiana sky he gave the command for the attack to begin.
The previous day Jackson had watched British preparations for the battle, and as the rocket signal went up, and the fog cleared from the British troops advancing in close order, the turkey shoot began. At five hundred yards the first twelve-pounder exploded into life, followed by the whole of the artillery and – at two hundred yards – by Jackson’s Tennessee riflemen. There was no missing and no escape. The attackers were soldiers who had fought their way up Spain under Wellington, but under the sustained fire of the whole American line the right began to edge left and the British assault to falter. General Gibbs got to within twenty yards of the defences before he fell with four bullets in him. A few even made it as far as the ditch in front of the earthworks before they died. As the troops fell back, they found themselves caught between their own guns behind them and the American in front in a chaotic shambles of their commanders’ making. And for once British troops were not going to bale their generals out. ‘For shame!’ cried Pakenham, trying to rally them again, ‘Remember you are British soldiers!’ but it was no use. As he spurred them on a bullet shattered his knee and brought down his horse. Mounting another, he was immediately hit again in the groin and spine and collapsed to the ground, his last, unavailing orders expiring on his lips with him.
This was the end of the assault, and at just 8 o’clock, and in spite of the eventual success of the diversionary attack, the effective end of the battle. At the cost of eight – or perhaps thirteen – casualties, the Americans had killed two thousand British troops in the most lopsided defeat ever inflicted on British arms. And with the coming of peace there would be no time for redemption. ‘Hoisted the English and American ensign in conjunction,’ reads the Anaconda’s log for 16 March 1815, ‘& fired a grand salute in commemoration of Peace with America.’
It was a bitter end to a criminally pointless war. And for Hastings it was not just the end of the war but, except for the odd skirmish with Malay pirates in the Far East, the last time he would see action as a Royal Navy officer. Family interest and family money would keep him from the fate of those thousands of lieutenants thrown on the scrapheap by Waterloo, but from now on he would have to go looking for his excitement. ‘I feel that in addressing your Lordship I am taking upon myself an unwarrantable liberty,’ he wrote to Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, after sixteen months in the Orlando on the Eastern station and the best part of an uneventful year aboard the Pelican in the West Indies had brought him again to London with his begging bowl out:
perhaps no excuse can easily justify it; I throw myself on your Lordship’s well known clemency and trust that you will not attribute it to impertinence, but an anxiety to attain that eminence in any profession which is the object of every enterprizing officer … this has emboldened me to solicit employment in the expedition which your Lordship may, perhaps, decline, to prosecute their discoveries to the Northward at a favourable season. If I am so happy as to enjoy a place in your lordship’s good opinion, sufficiently favourable to induce you to grant my request, no exertion on my part shall be wanting to qualify myself for this arduous undertaking. Till the period of sailing my labours shall be directed to the acquisition of such knowledge as is likely to prove serviceable – you may perhaps find those more capable but none more devotedly willing to acquit themselves with credit.
It is a fascinating thought that Hastings might have ended up in the North-West Passage – the cradle and the grave of so many nineteenth-century naval reputations – but while there was no vacancy on that expedition Melville had not forgotten him. On the return of the Pelican in 1818 Hastings had gone up to Willesley, and while he borrowed his brother’s gun and played the country gentleman – ‘Frank is trying to be a sportsman,’ his mother reported in a spidery hand made worse by gathering blindness, ‘he has killed a hare & brace of Partridges’ – Lord Melville’s goodwill filtered down through the channels of Admiralty preferment: ‘Lieut F. Hastings to be appointed to the Frigate destined to relieve the Forth,’ a minute for 9 January 1819 reads, ‘it being Ld Melville’s intention to recommend the Lieut to the Bd on that station.’
A fortnight later, on 23 January, the appointment was ratified: ‘Lieut Frank Hastings to be appointed to the command of the Kangaroo Surveying Vessel at Deptford.’ Within another two weeks Hastings was in London, and on 8 February he began entering men into his new ship. At just twenty-four, he had his first command. Four months later it would come to its disastrous end in the harbour of Port Royal. How different the history of the nineteenth-century navy, possibly of Arctic exploration, might have been had John Barrow found room for him on his expedition to the North-West Passage is a matter of poignant speculation: how different Greek history would be is a matter of fact.
V
On 6 March 1821, a Russian general of Greek extraction crossed the River Pruth from Bessarabia into Moldavia, raised his standard emblazoned with a phoenix, and called on the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire to throw off their Turkish oppressors.
At first glance, the banks of the Pruth might seem a perverse place to start a Greek revolution, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century the abject condition of Greece itself meant that any revival would have to come from without. In the early fifteenth century there had been one last, great flowering of Byzantine culture at Mystra in the southern Peloponnese, but over the four hundred years since Mystra’s fall the geographical area of what is now modern Greece had sunk into a state of oppressed and degraded misery, its traditions of freedom withered to the bandit culture of the mountain regions and all memory of its political and artistic birthright buried under centuries of foreign tyranny.
It was inevitably from western Europe, where there had been a rebirth of scholarly interest in Greek art, that this memory was given back to Greece and to the scattered communities of the Greek diaspora. Throughout the eighteenth century these colonies had flourished at ports and cities throughout the mercantile world, and as this renewed sense of identity became a fixed part of the émigré consciousness, the fashionable Hellenism of the dilettante was transformed into a heady cocktail of political theory, revolutionary fervour and Byzantine nostalgia.
For the nineteenth-century Greek, it was supremely Constantinople – the ‘polis’ – and not Athens that was the historical centre of the Greek world, and it was no coincidence that the movement for Greek freedom found its focus and leadership there. For the best part of four centuries the great Christian families of the Phanar
(#litres_trial_promo) had arrogated to themselves all the tasks that Muslim indolence or fastidiousness would allow them, and it was the wretchedly inept son of one of these princely families, the one-armed Alexander Ypsilanti, who in the spring of 1821 crossed the Pruth to spark off a Greek revolt that only the Turks themselves cannot have seen coming.
Ypsilanti’s campaign was a fiasco – by June it was over and he had shamefully fled to Austria – but as news of the uprising spread and the Greek flag was raised on Peloponnesian soil, fantasy had suddenly become fact. For centuries Greeks and Turks had been living within the empire side by side, and within weeks the Ottoman-Greek world was in flames, as community turned on community in a religious and racial war of a hatred and savagery that would have beggared the imagination of a Goya.
And as massacre followed massacre – Athens, Constantinople, Tripolis, Smyrna, Nicosia, Kos, Rhodes – it was inevitably the plight of the Greeks that excited the sympathy and indignation of the Christian West. In its earliest days European philhellenism was largely an academic pastime, but under the influence of Byron’s verse it became a popular cause that within months had inspired the first volunteers – Swedes, Danes, Bavarians, Saxons, Prussians, Italians, Russians, French, British and Americans – to raise, beg and borrow the money to make their way east to save the cradle of Western culture and political freedoms. ‘Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!’ wrote Byron,
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,
And long accustom’d bondage uncreate?
Not such thy sons who whilome did await,
The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,
In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait –
Oh! Who that gallant spirit shall resume,
Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?
‘We are all Greeks now,’ Shelley proudly proclaimed from the cosy safety of Italy, but if this sounded good, what was actually meant by it would have been hard to define. Among the first volunteers who sailed out to fight were refugees from monarchical despotism who would have thrilled to the language of Shelley’s ‘Hellas’, yet side by side with them were academic dreamers and romantic fantasists, Byronic poseurs and aristocratic democrats, deluded Benthamites and disenchanted Bonapartists, charlatans and orthodox co-religionists, fortune-hunters, mercenaries and unemployed and unemployable military professionals, the flotsam and jetsam of a whole European generation who had known nothing but war. ‘What a queer set,’ the American doctor, Samuel Gridley Howe, one of the greatest of all philhellenes, wrote of these men – heirs at once in their mix of naïveté and depravity to the Children’s Crusade and the condottieri of fourteenth-century Europe. ‘What an assemblage of romantic, adventurous, restless, crack-brained young men from the four corners of the world. How much courage and talent is to be found among them, but how much more of pompous vanity, of weak intellect, of mean selfishness, of utter depravity … Little have Philhellenes done towards raising the reputation of Europeans here.’
The disappointment was not all one-way, because if these were seldom the kind of volunteers to inspire the Greeks with a keen sense of gratitude, the feeling of disillusionment on their arrival was invariably mutual. The one belief that sustained most philhellenes was the conviction that they were defending the heirs to ancient Greece, and when instead of Pericles and Epaminondas they found a nation of mountain bandit warriors as ready to behead, baptise or sodomise their Ottoman victims as the Turks were to enslave, circumcise and impale theirs, the revulsion was as intense and irrational as the enthusiasm it replaced.
In the whole history of the Greek War of Independence no more than a handful of foreigners ever bridged the cultural gap between the Greece of the imagination and the Greece of reality, and incomparably the greatest of these after Byron was Frank Abney Hastings. In many ways Hastings belonged to the mainstream of philhellene life, but even as a citizen with a grudge and a fighting man without a war there were crucial differences about him – differences of wealth, talent and temperament – that equipped him to survive a Homeric world of factionalism, greed, treachery and violence with a resilience that few other foreigners could match.
Glory, revenge and the joy of battle – the brazen tripod that holds up the Homeric world – these were the urges that drove Hastings, and the Greek War was as much made for him as he was for the Greeks. Like any good Whig aristocrat he was a firm believer in Greece’s ancient liberties, yet if he fed off her classical past it was not off the Greece of Demosthenes or Aristogeiton – ‘Harry Stodgiton’ as one enthusiastic Scottish MP called him – but off an older and more elemental code. ‘That Glory is in a great measure the object I propose to myself I cannot deny,’ he would tell Lord Byron, ‘& I must acknowledge that independent of the satisfaction I should receive from establishing a European reputation … ’twould be delicious revenge to prove to those who have deprived me of my rank in the British service that the object of their persecution is not altogether devoid of Naval merit.’
There seems no way of recovering the exact steps that led Hastings to Greece – he was in France, learning the language and ‘qualifying’ himself for the kind of foreign service Cochrane had made so glamorous in South America when war broke out – but the one certainty is that without the humiliation of the Kangaroo he would never have gone. ‘My lord,’ he had written pathetically to Lord Melville, ‘only those who like me have thirsted for glory, who like me have lived in the anticipation of fame can tell how intolerable it is to find the tender bud nipped when about to bloom.’
It is arguable that Hastings never recovered from the humiliation of the Port Royal inquiry, and he certainly emerged from it a different man, less anxious to please, less open to people and in some ways less likeable than the small lad who made friends so easily in Neptune. It is possible of course that this was no more than the natural consequence of age, but between the ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘exemplary’ young officer all his captains spoke of so warmly in their testimonials and the often harsh, judgemental, self-sufficient loner who we at last get to know in Greece it is hard not to detect the shadow of the Kangaroo.
For all his sense of rejection, however, Hastings’s dismissal from the service only confirmed and strengthened in him that blinkered obsession with his profession that had never left room in his life for much else. It is clear from the early diaries of Thomas Fremantle that the brothels of Naples were a staple part of a Mediterranean officer’s world, and yet apart from a single woman’s name scrawled in a pocket notebook – and she turns out to have been a boat moored in the Thames – there is not even a momentary hint among Hastings’s surviving papers that he was any more interested in Mediterranean women than he was in his father’s housemaids or those ‘pretty daughters’ of Halifax who ‘made such sad havoc with the hearts of both the army and navy’.
Hastings was capable of strong and loyal male friendship – Edward Scott in the Orlando, to whom he would leave his sword, George Finlay later in Greece – but there seems no reason to read any more into this than into anything else. It is always possible that letters will turn up to reveal a lover or a brace of children somewhere in France or the Morea, but until they do nothing is going to crack the adamantine image of a man who sublimated all his energies and ambitions – sexual, social, emotional, professional – into the all-consuming business of warfare.
It was not that there was ever anything cold about Hastings – the Greek marble bust of ‘ ’ gives very little away – on the contrary, he was a generous and highly-strung creature of endless moods, passions, angers, noble impulses and nervous energies. To the end of his life he would always crave recognition and fame, but as he sat in his metaphorical tent brooding or raging over real or imagined wrongs, his notion of achievement – like his idea of justice – went along with a profound sense of self that needed no grubby endorsement from the common run.
In this fierce and proud individualism, this refusal to sit at any bar but that of his own conscience, Hastings was supremely a child of his time – this is, after all, the age of Byron – and onto the natural hauteur of the eighteenth-century aristocrat was grafted the isolation of the romantic. ‘It was not out of consideration for others, but respect for himself, that he always bluntly told the truth,’ the philosopher-novelist William Godwin wrote of his fictional hero Borromeo – a portrait of another Byronic philhellene, Edward Trelawny, that in important respects is a far truer likeness of Hastings – ‘… Yet this man was eminently a moral being. He had certain rules of right to which he rigorously adhered, not for the sake of good to result to others, but, as certain theologians inculcate in their systems, from the simple love of justice, and without care for the consequences.’
It was, then, this Hastings – age twenty-seven, height five feet seven inches, eyes blue, hair and whiskers fair, forehead bold, nose ‘grand et aquilain’, as his French passport describes him – who in March 1822 boarded a Swedish merchant vessel at Marseilles bound for the eastern Mediterranean and Constantinople. From the earliest days of the revolt Marseilles had been a popular staging post for philhellenes, and travelling with him in the Trontheim was another volunteer, a coarse-grained but insinuating anglophobe American zealot blessed with just the right blend of physical toughness and moral laxity to equip him for the intrigues, warfare and vermin ahead, called George Jarvis.
From his father’s will it is clear that Hastings had volunteered without his blessing, but with the security of his mother’s marriage settlement – worth £5,000 – behind him and £300 in gold concealed round his person, he was in a strong position to travel on his own terms. In a typical piece of generosity he had paid for Jarvis’s passage to Greece, and on the evening of 3 April, after a journey of just over three weeks, the two men were landed with all their baggage on the barren northern tip of Hydra off the north-east coast of the Peloponnese.
The Greece and the revolution into which Hastings and Jarvis sailed in the spring of 1822 was in as precarious a state as it had been at any time since Ypsilanti had raised his standard. In the first months of the war the Ottoman government had been too busy with other problems to give the rebels its full attention, but with Athens and the historical fortresses of Nauplia, Patras, Rion, Modon and Coron – the ‘eyes of Venice’ – still in Muslim hands, and two Ottoman armies massing in the north-west and north-east to revenge the massacres of 1821, no newly arrived volunteer could be quite sure how or where he would find the Greece he had come to save.
And if the Turks were at last taking their war seriously, the Greeks were no nearer presenting a unified and coherent front than they had been in the first confused days of revolution. At the beginning of 1822 an Assembly at Epidaurus had drawn up a modern constitution for the country, but while the laws might have been framed in the image of Greece’s first president – the educated, frock-coated, bespectacled, Phanariot exile Alexander Mavrocordato – real power still lay with the island merchants, local primates, captains and klephtic chiefs whose loyalty to a central government or a united Greece was as notional as the constitution itself.
Hastings was not certain, until a group of islanders materialised out of the rocky landscape, whether Hydra was a part of the revolution, and even the offer of a boat and a guide to the town was not sufficient to still his suspicions. He had served long enough in these waters as a midshipman to be almost as wary of Greeks as of Turks, and when it transpired that there was room in the boat only for Jarvis and their baggage, he prepared himself for the worst. ‘I was amongst three,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘each had a knife – it is true I was armed “jusqu’au dent” but before I could have cocked a pistol, the man next me might have stabbed me & there appeared every probability I should pass the night in this bay – I therefore resolved to abandon my effects to their fate & go over land to the Town.’
This was easier said than done, but weighed down by his guns, sabre and gold, he hauled himself up the two hundred feet of almost sheer cliff and, ‘fatigued to death’, finally stumbled across a shepherd’s cot ‘and made signs for water’. For the first time since his landing he came across the other side of the Greek character, and strengthened by bread and cheese and the ‘real disinterested hospitality’ of the shepherd, made the last hour’s ‘painful march’ across country with life and money still mercifully intact.
When the sun rose the next morning, Hastings found himself in one of the handsomest and most prosperous towns in the whole of the Levant. The merchant families of the island had done well out of the economic blockades of the Napoleonic War, and the neat white houses and great Genoese and Venetian residences of Hydra’s ‘primates’ – great names of the revolution like Tombazis and Conduriottis – rose up from its secretive harbour in a natural amphitheatre that provided a gleaming contrast with the scenes of desolation only miles away on the coast of the Morea.
From the first months of the revolution the island had been one of the three centres of Greek naval power, but if Hastings imagined that his professional credentials or his knowledge would secure him a welcome, he was in for a rapid disillusionment. In the months he had spent in France he had been studying the latest developments in gunnery and ship design, and he arrived full of ideas and innovations, desperate to try out his new sights and paddle boats on an island community equally determined to resist the advice and habits of an English Messiah whose sole experience of command had ended in his dismissal for gross insubordination.
Perhaps only a young English aristocrat could have arrived with the confidence and assumptions that Hastings brought, but at the root of his dilemma was that same cultural gap that every philhellene faced. From the age of eleven he had known nothing but the disciplines and practices of the Royal Navy, and on Hydra he found a world in which war was a matter of profit and not honour, in which captains went to sea when and if they pleased, crews hired or withheld their services at their whim, and any notion of a ‘fleet’ – or cooperation between the islands – was more a voluntary and self-interested association of equals than a patriotic duty.
But even if this ‘bigoted’ Hydriot community was a world unto itself – impervious to anything Hastings had to offer, complacently sure of its own superiority, and independent of any central authority – it was still all there was, and at first light on 20 April Hastings and Jarvis sailed over to the desolate Corinth isthmus to present their credentials to Greece’s new president. On their first arrival they were received with a distinctly cautious civility by Mavrocordato, but it was only after further audiences with the Ministers of Marine and War had produced nothing that Hastings learned why. ‘Monsieur le Prince,’ he immediately wrote in protest – and one can hear a certain irony in the use of that title from a descendant of Edward III addressing the heir to a long line of Turkish ‘hired helps’ in the Danubian provinces –
I have determined to take the liberty of addressing your Highness in writing, as I found you occupied when I had the honour of presenting myself at your residence yesterday. I shall speak with freedom, convinced that your Highness will reply in the same manner.
I will not amuse you with recounting the sacrifices I have made to come to serve Greece. I came without being invited, and have no right to complain if my services are not accepted. In that case, I shall only regret that I cannot add my name to those of the liberators of Greece; I shall not cease to wish for the triumph of liberty and civilization over tyranny and barbarism. But I believe that I may say to your Highness without failing in respect, that I have a right to have my services either accepted or refused, for (as you may easily suppose) I can spend my money quite as agreeably elsewhere.
It seems that I am a suspected person because I am an Englishman. Among people without education I expected to meet with some prejudice against Englishmen, in consequence of the conduct of the British government, but I confess that I was not prepared to find such prejudice among men of rank and education. I was far from supposing that the Greek government would believe that every individual in the country adopted the same political opinions. I am the younger son of Sir Charles Hastings, Baronet, general in the army, and in possession of a landed estate of nearly £10,000 a year. The Marquis of Hastings, Governor-General of India, was brought up by my grandfather along with my father, and they have been as brothers. If I were in search of a place I might surely find one more lucrative under the British government in India, and less dangerous as well as more respectable than that of a spy among the Greeks. I venture to say, your Highness, that if the English government wishes to employ a spy here, it would not address a person of my condition, while there are so many strangers in the country who would sell the whole of Greece for a bottle of brandy …
What I demand of your Highness is only to serve, without having the power to injure, your country. What injury can I inflict on Greece, being alone in a ship of war? I must share the fate of the ship, and if it sink I shall be drowned with the rest on board.
Hastings was never to know that Jarvis was behind his cool reception – he had warned Mavrocordato against the help of Perfidious Albion – but the letter had its effect, and on 30 April he at last got permission to sail with the fleet in Tombazis’ corvette, the Themistocles. He recorded his belated introduction to the laissez-faire time-keeping of the Greek navy with characteristic irritation: ‘In the morning we commenced getting under way & hauling out of the harbour. In fifteen years of service I never beheld such a scene. Those of the crew who chose to come on board did so – the rest remained on shore & came off as it suited their convenience.’
If Hastings’s exasperation was understandable, it was hopelessly academic, because by the time the Hydriot fleet finally sailed, they were not just hours but weeks too late to prevent the single greatest tragedy of the whole revolution. The initial object of the fleet was the Greek maritime power base of Psara, but beyond that, just four miles from the Asian mainland, lay another island with a profoundly different tradition and population, whose name over the next months was to become a byword across Europe and America for barbarism and horror.
In the first stages of the uprising, Chios – the peaceable, mastic-growing Shangri La of the Aegean where Occidental fantasy and Eastern reality came as close to being one as they ever have – had done all it could to keep out of a war it could not possibly hope to survive. In the years before the revolt the Turks had left the government of the island more or less completely to its inhabitants, but Ottoman indulgence always came with a bow-string attached, and when in March 1822 the island was reluctantly sucked into the conflict, the Porte responded as only it could. ‘Mercy was out of the question,’ wrote Thomas Gordon, the friend of Hastings and great philhellene historian of the war, ‘the victors butchering indiscriminately all who came in their way; shrieks rent the air, and the streets were strewed with the dead bodies of old men, women and children; even the inmates of the hospital, the madhouse, and the deaf and dumb institution, were inhumanely slaughtered.’
The Turks had landed on 11 April, and less than a month after a slaughter that had left 25,000 dead and slave markets from Constantinople to the Barbary coast glutted with Greek women and boys, all that was left of the old idyll was a wilderness of smouldering villages and unburied corpses. ‘We landed contrary to my opinion,’ Hastings wrote from the Themistocles on 8 May, his impotent anger, as it so often would, recoiling onto the Greek fleet and his fellow volunteers,
for we had no intelligence & … had reason to suppose the Turks were here in numbers … We landed & I wished to establish some order – place a sentinel on the eminence … keep the people together etc but I had to learn what Greeks were. Each man directed his course to the right or left as best pleased him. After rambling about without any object for two hours we reassembled near our boat & when about to embark, four refugees – men – appeared on the eminence above us creeping cautiously towards a wall & some muskets were seen. This was justly calculated to create suspicion. Our men called to us to get into the boat – we did so – all except Jarvis who always pretended to know better than his superiors & those who had seen service … No doubt when Jarvis [the two men had already almost come to a duel] has seen some service he will learn that the duty for an officer is to provide for the protection of his own men as well as the destruction of the enemy. However the confusion I saw reign during this alarm disgusted me with Greek boating – every one commanded – everyone halloed & prepared his musquet & no one took the oars – nobody attempted to get the boat afloat, so the boat was ground fore & aft.
The men on the clifftop turned out to be Greek, but with Hastings and his party finding only three other survivors – two women and a child hiding among the decomposing corpses – revenge was only a matter of time. ‘While I was on board the Admiral,’ he wrote four days later, at sea again in the narrow channel between Chios and mainland Asia,
I beheld a sight which never will be effaced from my memory – A Turkish prisoner was brought on board to be interrogated & after he had answered the questions to him, the crew came and surrounded him, insulting language was first used, the boys were made to pull him by the beard & beat him, he was then dragged several times round the deck by the beard & at length thrown living into the sea. During this horrid ceremony the crew appeared to take the greatest delight in the spectacle, laughing & rejoicing & when he was in the water the man in the boat astern struck him with the boat hook. This sight shocked me so much that I could not help letting them see I disapproved of it: but I was told it was impossible to prevent it & that letting the sailors see my disapproval would be apt to expose me to their revenge.
Mr Anemet a gentleman serving on board the Minerva was on board the Admiral & gave me shocking details of the massacre of the men of a boat they took that morning; after sinking the boat with grape shot they picked up some of the wounded who floated, with two Greek women who were prisoners in the boat & escaped unwounded. The wounded were senseless, but the Greeks did not consider that to kill them at that moment was cruel enough; they therefore revived them & afterwards one of the women with her own hands cut the throats of two of them; the others after torturing greatly, they hung & even heaped their revenge on the bodies. The Turks I was told defended themselves with great courage. The one I saw massacred, uttered no complaint, made no supplication nor acted meanly in any way, true he trembled greatly, but it must be remembered he was surrounded, had already been half drowned & hauled round the deck by the beard; as it was it is not surprising that his nerves should have a little failed him.
‘What marvellous patriotism is to be found in Greece!!!’ Hastings was soon scrawling – the words heavily underlined – on the twenty-fifth, after a rumour reached the ship that the Ottoman fleet were planning an assault on the most remote and exposed of the three Greek naval centres at Psara.
The report … greatly alarmed the men on board our ship, who appeared resolved gallantly to run away & leave their countrymen to have their throats cut in case the attack should take place – quells animaux! … I was sorry to find also that the Franks [i.e. the Western philhellenes] on board the other ships were conducting themselves in a manner not at all likely to gain the esteem of the Greeks, eating, drinking & smoking seemed to be their principal occupations.
All that Hastings asked was the chance to fight, but as the summer dragged on with only a single Greek success to show for it, that seemed as remote as ever. A half-hearted night attack on the Turkish ships under a bright May moon came to nothing, and after a stretch of blockading work off the Turkish-held Nauplia – where Hastings met ‘the famed Baboulina’, revolutionary Greece’s bloodthirsty cross between a Parisian tricôteuse and a vision-free Jeanne d’Arc – he made a final, Cochrane-esque bid to bully Miaulis, the Greek commander, into action. ‘I saw the Admiral this evening,’ he wrote on 6 July, back at Hydra again, where he found himself stranded among the scheming philhellene ‘scum of the earth’ that had made it their home while he had been away with the fleet,
and presented him with a plan for endeavouring to take a frigate – the idea was to direct a fireship & three other vessels upon a frigate during the night & when near the enemy to set fire to certain combustibles which should throw out a great flame; the enemy would naturally conclude they were all fire-ships … However, the admiral returned it to me … without even looking at it or permitting me to explain it to him and I observed a kind of insolent contempt in his manner, which no doubt arose from their late success [an action with a fireship against a Turkish vessel] – for the national character is insolence in success & cowardice in distress. This interview with the admiral disgusted me more than ever with the service – They place you in a position in which it is impossible to render any service, and then they boast (amongst themselves) of their own superiority and the uselessness of the Franks (as they call us).
There was in fact to be one last chance for Hastings, and it came almost before the vitriol in his journal had had time to dry. A couple of days after his rejection by Miaulis the Themistocles again put to sea, and on 15 July was giving chase to a small flotilla of enemy sakolevas south of Tenedos, when a rogue wind took her close in under a cliff heavily manned by Turks. ‘These troops opened a sharp but ill-directed fire of musketry on the deck of the Themistocles,’ George Finlay later wrote – there is, typically, no mention in Hastings’s journal of his own role in the action –
