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and on this occasion a total want of order, and the disrespect habitually shown to the officers, had very nearly caused the loss of the vessel. The whole crew sought shelter from the Turkish fire under the bulwarks, and no one could be induced to obey the orders which every one issued … Hastings was the only person on deck who remained silently watching the ship slowly drifting towards the rocks. He was fortunately the first to perceive the change in the direction of a light breeze which sprang up, and by immediately springing forward on the bowsprit, he succeeded in getting the ship’s head round. Her sails soon filled, and she moved out of her awkward position. As upwards of two hundred and fifty Turks were assembled on the rocks above, and fresh men were arriving every moment … her destruction seemed inevitable, had she remained an hour within gun-shot of the cliff … Though they had refused to avail themselves of his skill, and neglected his advice, they now showed no jealousy in acknowledging his gallant exploit. Though he treated all with great reserve and coldness, as a means of insuring respect, there was not a man on board that was not ready to do him any service. Indeed the candid and hearty way in which they acknowledged the courage of Hastings, and blamed their own conduct in allowing a stranger to expose his life in so dangerous a manner to save them, afforded unquestionable proof that so much real generosity was inseparable from courage, and that, with proper discipline and good officers, the sailors of the Greek fleet would have had few superiors.
It was something, but not what Hastings had come east to achieve. But then, the Greece that was taking shape while he fretted away the summer on the Themistocles was hardly the country that even the most pragmatic philhellene had hoped for. Little might have happened at sea, but on land it had been a different story. On 16 July a philhellene army under the command of General Normann, a German veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had fought at Austerlitz on the side of the Austrians, and on the retreat from Moscow with Napoleon, was destroyed at Petta, and with it went the last vestiges of authority remaining to the central government and the Westernised Mavrocordato. From now on the revolution and the new Greece would belong to the victors of Tripolis and a dozen other massacres – to the captains who had reneged on every guarantee of safe conduct they had ever given; who had roasted Jews at the fall of Tripolis, and transposed the severed heads of dogs and women; to the men who could spin out the death of a suspected informant at Nauplia for six days, breaking his fingers, burning out his nails and boiling him alive before smearing his face with honey and burying him up to his neck. It was enough, as one embittered English philhellene put it, to make a volunteer pray for battle, in the hope of seeing the Greeks on his own side killed.
VI
There is no year in the history of the Greek War of Independence so difficult to comprehend as that of 1822. In the first months of the rebellion the Ottoman armies had been too busy with the rebel Albanian Ali Pasha in Ioannina to give the Greeks their full attention, but from the day in early February that Ali’s head was delivered to the Porte and two armies were despatched southwards from their base in Larissa – one down the western side towards Missolonghi, and a second down the east towards Corinth, Nauplia and the Morean heartland of the insurgency – Greece and the Greek revolt looked almost certainly doomed.
The stuttering failure of the western army would not directly involve Hastings, but the collapse of the eastern expedition under the command of Dramali Pasha was another matter. Early in July 1822 Dramali’s army of 23,000 men and 60,000 horses had swept unchecked across the isthmus and on to Argos, but within weeks it had virtually ceased to exist as a fighting force, reduced by starvation, disease, incompetence and unripened fruit to an enfeebled rabble facing the dangers of a humiliating retreat through the passes, crags and narrow gorges of the Dervenakia to the south of Corinth.
The retreat of Dramali’s army was to give the Greeks under Colocotrones – the ruthless scion of a long line of Turk-hating bandit chiefs – their greatest victory of the war, and one that would have been still greater without the lure of the Ottoman baggage trains. With more discipline not a single Turkish soldier could have made it back to Corinth alive; even as it was the bones of Dramali’s troops would litter the mountainsides and gullies for years to come, left to whiten where they had fallen, hacked down in flight or – a tableau mort that titillated the imagination of Edward Trelawny – perched astride the skeletons of their animals, fingers still clenched around the rotting leather of their reins.
The one great prize along the eastern coast still in Ottoman hands at the end of July was the citadel of Nauplia, and that too was only courtesy of their Greek enemy. If the Greek captains had honoured some of their earlier promises the town would have given in long before, but with nothing to hope for from surrender but death or worse, its emaciated garrison – too weak even to man the upper ramparts – had held on even after all hope of rescue was gone, a pitiable testament to the cruelty, ineptitude and greed of their besiegers.
And to their cowardice, Hastings reckoned, because in spite of its towering position, grace and size – partly because of its size – Nauplia’s Palamidi citadel could never have been held by its Turkish garrison against any sustained assault. Hastings had first inspected the fortress from the deck of the Themistocles at the beginning of July, and in the last days before Dramali’s retreat had quitted Hydra with a ‘soi disant’ philhellene frigate captain and incendiary, Count Jourdain, to see if there was any more fighting to be had with the land army than there was with the fleet.
He and Jourdain had sailed to Mili, or ‘the Mills of Lerna’, on the western side of the gulf, and on 27 July were sent across to the tiny island fortress of Bourdzi to reconnoitre the position. ‘We found an irregular old Venetian fortress,’ Hastings noted of the island – the traditional home of the Nauplia executioner in peacetime and a suicidal death-trap to anyone trying to hold it in war –
mounting 13 guns of different calibres & in various conditions – it is entirely commanded by the citadel which could destroy it on any occasion – more particularly as all its heavy guns bear on the entrance of the harbour … The shore on the Northern side of this fort is not distant more than two thirds gun shot, so that the enemy could throw up batteries there which could open a cross fire on this miserable place & destroy it in one day as the walls [are] in a state of decay & the carriages of the guns scarcely able to bear three discharges.
For the next week this dilapidated and useless fortress, floating only a few hundred yards offshore under the guns of the Palamidi fortress, was home for Hastings and a motley crew of Greek and philhellene companions. There seemed no earthly reason why he or anyone else should be asked to hold the position, but there was a streak of masochistic pride about Hastings that served him well under duress, and the more ludicrous the task and the heavier the fire the more determined he was to sit it out ‘while any danger existed’.
The first incoming shots had been so wayward, in fact, that he assumed they were signal guns, but a ‘smart & not badly directed fire’ soon disabused him of that idea. ‘Our guns opened in return,’ he recorded, ‘but want of order obliged us shortly to desist – The men were not stationed at the different batteries so that each went where they pleased & it pleased the greater number to hide themselves.’
With their batteries ill-sited, the gradients sloping in the direction of the recoil, their mortars rusted through, Jourdain’s ‘inflamable balls’ useless, and the carriage wheels broken, this was perhaps no surprise, and one more smart artillery exchange was enough to send the fifty Greeks who had reinforced the fort scuttling for the other side of the gulf. ‘One of the Primates, Bulgari, observed that we were at liberty to quit or remain as we thought proper,’ Hastings recorded that night in his journal, alone now except for four other foreign volunteers equally determined to brave it out, ‘& begged us to consider that we remained by our own choice – We remained though convinced we could do nothing unless we were furnished with means of heating shot red for burning the houses.’
At a severely rationed rate of seven shots an hour, they had shells enough for seven days, but the Turks were under no such restraint and a heavy bombardment over the next two days rendered the fort virtually hors de combat. By 4 August Hastings was concerned enough to send a message across the bay that they risked being cut off, and two days later, to the distant sounds from the Dervenakia of the slaughter of Dramali’s army, he finally decided that they had done enough. ‘The reiterated insults I had received made it painful to a degree to remain,’ he wrote from the Mills after their escape in a Greek vessel,
& I should have left the place long ago, had the fire not been so continually kept up on the place. At 4 therefore I quitted the fort with the other gentlemen & proceeded alongside the Schooner but here they would not allow us to approach, however being highly outraged I seized a favourable opportunity & jumping from the boat seized the chain plates of the Schooner & mounted on deck – there I preferred my complaint to the Members of the Govt on board, they replied as usual with a shrug of the shoulders saying ‘what can you expect from people without education!!’
As Greece slid inexorably into chaos, with Colocotrones in the Morea and Odysseus Androutses, the most formidable and devious of the klephts, in mainland Roumeli, rampantly out of control, the next twelve months were as bleakly pointless as any in Hastings’s life. After five fruitless days at the Mills he had decided that he could be better employed on Hydra, but within the week he was again back on land, crossing and recrossing the Morea in a restless search for a leader who might impose some structure on the enveloping turmoil. ‘I was glad to find that Colocotroni’ – the ‘hero’ of Tripolis and the Dervenakia – ‘was disposed to make a beginning towards introducing a little regularity,’ he wrote on 5 October, in Tripolis in time to witness the town en fête for the grotesque anniversary celebrations of the horrors of 1821, ‘& I find that having been Major of the Greek corps in the English service [in the Ionian Isles], he is able to appreciate the advantages resulting from regular discipline … After mass we visited him, he appeared extremely acute & intelligent & perhaps (not withstanding the character which the Govt give him) is better able to govern than they are – the abuse heaped upon him by the Hydriots evidently arises from jealousy of his influence & success.’
For a good English Whig Hastings was perhaps becoming more tolerant of despotism and ‘strong government’ than was good for him, but then again a journey through the parched and devastated Morea in the autumn of 1822 was not going to provide a lesson in the virtues of constitutional government. After leaving Tripolis and Colocotrones he made his way south-west to Navarino and Messina, filling his journal as he went with anything and everything from the number of trees in Arcadia (28,000) to the sight of a Kalamata beggar – amputated feet in hands as he crawled through the marketplace – or the latest example of Greek perfidy. ‘The Turks had obtained terms of capitulation,’ he recorded of the surrender of Navarino’s Turkish garrison,
by which it was stipulated that the lives of the garrison should be spared, that they should be permitted to carry away
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of their property & be transferred to Asia on board Neutral Vessels – But no sooner had the Greeks taken possession of the Fortress than they massacred the greatest number of the inhabitants & transported the rest to a rock in the harbour where they were starved to death … It is confidently asserted that the bishop issued his malediction on those Greeks who failed to massacre the Turks.
The remarkable thing about all this is not how like every other embittered philhellene Hastings sounds in his journal, but how unlike them he acted. For most of his fellow travellers the shock of disillusionment was rapidly terminal, but it only took the slightest sniff of action or the sight of a fortress still in Turkish hands to bring Hastings back to the colours, as enthusiastic as ever.
If he had foreseen the role Navarino would play in the revolution, he might have paid it even more attention than he did, but it was above all Nauplia’s Palamidi that exercised his mind. On his return from his travels he had gone back to his old base on Hydra, and on 9 November he was joined there by another shadowy foreign volunteer called d’André, who had sought him out with a proposition that between them they should equip and lead a party of a hundred Greeks to storm the Palamidi.
For all his doubts about d’André, it was a proposition that left Hastings feeling not ‘a little ébloui’ – dazzled – and that same day he purchased fifty muskets at forty-eight piastres each and embarked with his new colleague for the Gulf of Argos. At the Mills d’André wrote to a dubious species of military ‘pimp’ in the business of troop procurement, and by the next day Hastings had his company to command – or at least forty-five of the fifty soldiers he had been promised, which was all that a ‘certain Mr Testat’ could produce at such notice. ‘I armed them,’ he recorded, with an optimism that he could still, bafflingly, bring to his military dealings with the Greeks, ‘causing to be read to them at the same time some articles by which they were informed of the conditions upon which I delivered them the arms.’
Although the government at Tripolis was prepared to grant Hastings a commission that cost them nothing, they were not ready to feed his men, and while d’André headed with their company for the Dervenakia, Hastings returned to Hydra for more funds. ‘I visited the Minister of War,’ he wrote indignantly on 30 November, ‘who did not receive me too well considering the expense I had been at – he seems to consider the arming of 50 men as something not worth the trouble of undertaking & urged me to form a corps of 300 – I replied I would undertake it if he would furnish me with the money – as to the money he said I could easily raise that sum.’
In one respect, at least, the Minister was right, because for all the good Greece or Hastings would get out of his investment he might have saved himself the bother. The next day he set off to the north to rejoin his troops, who were guarding the passes near Corinth, and found Testat in a state of permanent drunkenness, his second-in-command little better, and his unfed soldiers – ‘one & all’ – in such a state of mutinous discontent that only Hastings’s arrival came between d’André and their bayonets.
The real problem, as ever with Greek irregulars, was not fear of the Turks but the lure of plunder, and with rumours of the fall of Nauplia reaching them with every messenger Hastings had no hope of keeping them at their post. He managed to buy himself some time by dismissing d’André, but when news at last reached them that the Palamidi had surrendered without a shot being fired, there was nothing he could do but join in the general migration south and look for a chance to regain his muskets. ‘I made the soldiers pile their arms,’ he wrote on 20 December, grateful that he did not have ‘to resort to firing measures’ against his own men, ‘& then applied to Colocotroni who sent an officer who brought the arms & placed them in the room where Colocotroni held his council … The measure was quite unexpected by the soldiers & surprised them so completely that they did not even murmur.’
The absurd and the horrific were never far apart from each other in this conflict, however, and Hastings was determined to get out of Nauplia before the town fell to an expectant and mutinous army. Through the last weeks of the siege the garrison had been too weak even to climb up to the fortress, and as the Greek soldiers massed at the gates, determined to beat their own captains to the plunder, the Muslim sick and dying could only await their fate, eking out their final hours in the hopeless search among the unburied corpses of their dead children for a last, filthy scrap of food.
There is no doubt either – in spite of all the promises of safe-passage – that there would have been a repetition of Tripolis, Navarino, Athens and Monemvassia had not a British frigate, HMS Cambrian under the command of Captain Gawen Hamilton, sailed the next day into the Gulf of Nauplia. In these early years of the war there was a strong anti-English feeling in the Greek government, but even the most rabid anglophobe knew that in Hamilton they had a friend they could trust and an arbiter they could not ignore.
It is difficult, in fact, to believe that anyone else in the Aegean would have had the moral authority to impose his will in the way that Hamilton did at the surrender of Nauplia. ‘He held a conference with Kolokotrones and the Moreot chieftains,’ Finlay wrote,
whose Russian prejudices induced them to view the interference of an English officer with great jealousy. He was obliged to tell them in strong language, that if, on this occasion they failed to take effectual measures for the honourable execution of the capitulation, they would render the Greek name despicable in civilized Europe, and perhaps ruin the cause of Greece. The chiefs respected Hamilton’s character; the wild soldiers admired his martial bearing and the frankness with which he spoke the whole truth. He took advantage of the feeling he had created in his favour to act with energy. He insisted on the Greek government immediately chartering vessels to embark the Turks, and to facilitate their departure he took five hundred on board the Cambrian.
The news of the Cambrian reached Tripolis on 30 December, and that night Hastings recorded it in his journal: ‘We were informed that the Greeks had entered Nauplia, & an English frigate of war was in the roads … The Greeks of Tripolitza were in great choler agst the frigate for having insisted upon the immediate embarkation of the Turks & having declared that he would accompany them to their destination.’
It must have been a strange moment for Hastings, a poignant mix of pride, regret and alienation that the ‘choler’ of his new countrymen can only have heightened. There was a twist, too, awaiting him when on 1 January 1823 he made the long, bitter march through more than a foot of thawing snow to Nauplia and found there his old first lieutenant from the Orlando, Edward Scott. His journal does no more than note their ‘great surprise’ at the meeting, but the next day he went on board the Cambrian, the first time he can have been in an English man-of-war since his return from Port Royal more than four years earlier. ‘I went on board and saw Scott,’ he noted. ‘Much difference of opinion existed among the Greeks on the conduct of the English Capt but I feel convinced that he saved the lives of the Turks by his prompt measures & that he did a great service to Greece.’
It had been an unsettling way to see out an old year that had brought nothing and see in a new that promised less. There would come a time when Captain Hamilton would willingly have given a thousand pounds to be in Hastings’s shoes, but as the Cambrian, with its five hundred emaciated Turks, weighed for Smyrna, Hastings could only reflect on how utterly alone he was. He had no Greek friends, and a chance meeting with a party of Germans – some new arrivals, some survivors of the original Philhellene Battalion desperate to escape a country they had grown to hate – was enough to remind him how little he belonged to any philhellene world either. He had, though, thrown in his lot with his adopted country, and he was no quitter. ‘I now resolved to go to Hydra,’ he wrote the day after the Cambrian sailed, and two days later, on 7 January, nine months after his first arrival, he was back among the scenes of his first disappointment.
VII
The uncertainty that surrounded Hastings’s life at the beginning of 1823 was no more than a reflection of the state of Greece itself as it drifted towards the first of its civil wars. His courage in the Themistocles the previous summer had belatedly won him a Hydriot reputation of sorts, but as the stories emerged from the Morea of Colocotrones’s growing power and the endless rivalries – government against captain, captain against captain, captain against primate – an island exile seemed an indulgence that Hastings could not afford if he was ever going to get the chance to fight again.
He had been invited by Emmanuel Tombazi, one of the leading Hydriot captains, to join him on an expedition to Crete, but even that was dependent on decisions taken elsewhere, and in the middle of February Hastings returned to the Morea to be closer to the centre of power. Before he could sail an accident with a pistol almost cost him his head – and did cost him six teeth broken and two knocked out – but on the fourteenth he landed again at Nauplia, setting up house in a half-ruined shelter in the old town while he waited for government and island deputies to arrive for the second National Assembly.
With Colocotrones and his followers quitting Nauplia for Tripolis as soon as the deputies arrived, it was a miracle the Assembly met at all, but by mid-April the warring factions had at last buried their differences sufficiently to converge on Aspros on the east coast of the Morea. On the twenty-fifth of the month Hastings set off after them to fight his corner, and for the next week pitched his tent like some demented Viola in front of the house of the Cretan island’s deputies, ‘halloo-ing’ his cause and credentials until he finally got the appointment he was after as ‘Chef de l’état major de Artillerie’ (sic) on the forthcoming expedition to Crete.
Hastings might have known from the spurious grandeur of his title that he was in for another disappointment, but before the end of May he had sailed along with 1,500 troops and two Germans he had taken into his service at Hydra. On 3 June the expedition disembarked near the citadel of Kisamos on Crete, and within days he was back into the familiar and desultory rhythms of Greek campaign life, with weeks of frustration and inactivity punctuated by sporadic fits of violence and treachery.
The Turkish garrison of Kisamos – ravaged by plague – succumbed without either a fight or the usual reprisals, but from then on it was the old story of confusion, inter-island dissensions, bad faith, broken paroles, massacres, ‘atrocious treason’ and ‘cowardice’. ‘It is plain that they will not fight in a position in which there is a possibility of their being killed,’ Hastings was soon complaining, after his Greek soldiers had refused to sight his batteries in range of Turkish guns, ‘and I cannot persuade them that amongst all the modern inventions there is no secret of fighting without danger.’
The longer he fought with the Greeks, in fact, the more clearly he saw the virtues of the Turks – ‘a courageous and honourable people’ – though one partial exception he would always allow was in favour of the Cretan soldier. ‘A German arrived from Kiramos,’ he noted in his journal:
he says that the quality most esteemed in a soldier here is to run fast. When the gallant Ballasteros
(#litres_trial_promo) was abandoned by his soldiers & fell into the hands of the Turks who put him to death in the most cruel manner the Greeks remarked that it was no loss as he was worth nothing as a soldier [as] he could not run fast – I must however acknowledge that I [had] a very different feeling at Cadeno [on Crete]. As there was no cannon I took the musquet of my servant & advanced into the valley to a short pistol shot from the pyrgos – the Greeks then used all their endeavours to persuade me to retire saying it was not my business to get killed & that I did not understand their manner of making war & it would hurt them very much to lose me citing with much regret the fate of Balleste – this I must acknowledge gave me a favourable opinion of the Cretans – fortunately for me Tombazi recalled me from this position & thus I was (perhaps) saved from Balleste’s fate.
Hastings could have had no idea of it at the time but it was the last occasion on which he would fight alongside Greek soldiers on land. In the early days of the campaign fever had been rampant in the army, and by 10 August he had joined a mounting sick list, ‘suffering very much’ and the next day was still worse. ‘During the night I was stung by something in my handkerchief,’ he wrote, ‘and on the light being brought I found a scorpion in my handkerchief. The pain tho’ very great lasts only 5 or 6 hours.’
It would be another five weeks before Hastings was strong enough to move, and by that time he would have been grateful for any excuse to quit Crete with life and honour intact. In the early part of September a letter from Edward Scott had warned him of an Egyptian army heading for the Morea, but even before that – before the expedition had even sailed, in fact – a chance meeting with the indefatigable Irish philhellene and serial activist Edward Blaquiere, travelling in Greece on behalf of the newly formed London Greek Committee, had raised possibilities that made the prospect of a foot soldier’s death in a useless war a criminal abrogation of all Hastings’s headiest ambitions.
One of the most puzzling and ill-explained aspects of European philhellenism in the first days of the revolution had been the comparative indifference of Britain to affairs in Greece. In the historiography of the war there have been any number of reasons advanced for this coolness, but whether the answer was domestic politics, Castlereagh or simply some post-Napoleonic species of ‘compassion fatigue’, the truth remains that for all the pamphlets, speeches and moral indignation, no more than a dozen British philhellenes had actually gone out to fight for Greece by the end of 1822.
There had never been any shortage of sympathisers, though, and at the beginning of March 1823 an inaugural meeting of the new London Greek Committee was held at the Crown and Anchor in London’s Strand. The moving spirits behind its formation were the usual suspects associated with the liberal causes of the day, and their manifesto lacked nothing of the woolly sentiment that characterised the earliest ‘friends of humanity, civilization, and religion’. It was time to redress Britain’s record, it announced, and ‘time … to make a public appeal … in the name of Greece. It is in behalf of a country associated with every sacred and sublime recollection: – it is for a people formerly free and enlightened, but long retained by foreign despots in the chains of ignorance and barbarism!’
If this could just as easily have come from Boston or Berne as London, there were forces at work within the Committee that potentially distinguished it from its European or American equivalents. At the core of the small active membership was a group of skilled and practised politicians, and as Britain’s foreign policy under Castlereagh’s successor, George Canning, began to thaw towards Greek aspirations, the Committee found itself and its cause in an unlikely – if undisclosed – harmony with British national interests.
Without the tacit connivance of the authorities the London Committee could have done little, but in the short term of even greater importance to Greece was the potential access to the London money markets at a time when a drop in interest on government bonds was making foreign loans an attractive proposition. In its early days the Committee’s attempts to raise funds from voluntary donations had been modest at best, but by 1823 a heady mix of idle money, speculative greed and philhellenic high-mindedness had conjured up dreams of a Greek gold bonanza on a scale to dwarf anything that had gone before.
With the future colonial governor John Bowring, the radical MP Joseph Hume and the politician-money man Edward Ellice all deeply involved, there was no shortage of financial acumen available to the Committee, but what was required was a ‘name’, and for that only one would do. From the first founding of the Committee its most famous member had been the exiled Byron, and in a spectacular propaganda coup Blaquiere had broken off his journey to Greece at Pisa in order to persuade him to take on the leadership of the cause his verse had done so much to popularise.
It did not matter that there was not a single original idea in that verse; it did not matter that the exiled poet would as soon have gone to Spain or South America; it did not matter that he was a faddish and overweight thirty-six; or that it would take him another five months to get even as far as Cephalonia: it was the Byron name that the Committee had been after, and Hastings’s reaction showed how well they had gauged its effect. It would be hard to imagine anyone better equipped by birth or temperament to resist its lure, but from the day Hastings met Blaquiere the thought of Byron haunted his imagination, easing the frustrations and miseries of the Cretan campaign with visions of a role in the war and a strategy for winning it that suddenly seemed something more than dreams.
A ‘violent and dangerous’ relapse on his return to Hydra from Crete left it looking unlikely that Hastings would live long enough to see out the week, never mind to see Byron, but he had already prepared his brief. ‘Lord Byron’s companions Hamilton Brown & Mr Trelawny arrived & called on me,’ he noted in his journal on 11 October, after a meeting with the two ‘secretaries’ Byron had sent on ahead of him to report back from the ‘Seat of War’. ‘I gave Mr Brown my letter for Ld Byron containing my views on Greece & he engaged to forward it safely.’
Hastings’s letter had had a long and hard birth – draft after draft, heavily scored and annotated, survive among his papers – but the result is the most impressive and clear-sighted strategic document to emerge from the revolution. Behind it lies not just eighteen months’ experience of Greece, but fifteen years’ service in a navy whose strong empirical problem-solving tradition equipped him to move from the large picture to the detail with a persuasive authority.
‘Firstly,’ he wrote to Byron – having duly larded his arguments with the appropriate compliments to the ‘First Genius of the Age’, ‘I lay down as an axiom that Greece cannot obtain any decisive advantage over the Turks without a decided maritime superiority; for it is necessary to prevent them from relieving their fortresses and supplying their armies by sea.’
The only weapon against Turkish fortresses that the Greeks had, Hastings argued, was famine, and without it they would have achieved nothing. In those outposts where the Turks could resupply their garrisons – Patras, Modon, Coron, Negropont – the Greeks had been powerless, and in a terrain that made movement and supply difficult, an army without artillery, engineers or the finance to sustain itself in the field for any length of time was never going to be the answer.
If this seems self-evident now, it did not then – any number of British or European officers thought the war could be won on land – but Hastings had not finished there. ‘The localities of the countries are also such,’ he went on presciently, ‘and the difficulties of moving troops so great, that, without the aid of a fleet, all the efforts of an invading army would prove fruitless. But on the contrary, were an invading army followed by a fleet, I fear that all the efforts of the Greeks to oppose it would be ineffectual. The question stands thus, Has the Greek fleet hitherto prevented the Turks from supplying their fortresses, and is it likely to succeed in preventing them?’
The answer to both questions was ‘no’, and Hastings was one of the few to see that the comparative calm of 1823 had more to do with other pressures on the Ottoman Empire and the disastrous fire in her main arsenal at Tophana in March that year than with any real security. ‘Is it likely that the Greek marine will improve, or that the Turkish will retrograde?’ he asked, remembering, perhaps, that austere, relentless and unforgiving figure he had glimpsed from the deck of the Sea Horse thirteen years earlier.
The contrary is to be feared. We have seen the Greek fleet diminish in numbers every year since the commencement of the war, while that of the Turks has undeniably improved, from the experience they have gained in each campaign … Is the Greek fleet likely to become more formidable? On the contrary, the sails, riggings and hulls are all going out of repair; and in two years time thirty sail could hardly be sent to sea without an expense which the Greeks could not probably incur.
With the Ottoman fleet again at sea, and Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptians subduing Crete before turning their attention to the Morea, there was an unarguable force to Hastings’s argument. But he also had an answer. ‘We now come to the question, How can the Greeks obtain a decisive superiority over the Turks at sea?’ he continued.
I reply, By a steam-vessel armed as I shall describe … It would be necessary to build or purchase the vessel in England, and send her out to complete. She should be from 150 to 200 tons burden, of a construction sufficiently strong to bear two long 32-pounders, one forward and one aft, and two 68-pounder guns of seven inches bore, one on each side. The weight of shot appears to me of the greatest importance, for I think I can prove that half a dozen shot or shells of these calibres, and employed as I propose, would more than suffice to destroy the largest ship. In this case it is not the number of projectiles, but their nature and proper application that is required.
Although it would be another two years, and endless disappointments, refinements and changes, before Hastings got his steamship, here in essence is the vessel that made his name. Over the past generation there had been various experiments on both sides of the Atlantic with the military application of steam, but if Hastings could not claim absolute priority – Frederick Marryat, Cochrane protégé and future novelist, commanding the sixty-horsepower Diana in the First Burma War of 1824–26 has that – such a vast gulf in terms of scale, ambition and power separates the vessel Hastings was proposing from Marryat’s that the age of steam in naval warfare only properly begins with him.
At a juncture in naval architecture at which the frigate was poised to reach its final, elegant apogee, in fact, there is something brutally modernist in Hastings’s utter disregard for the aesthetics of sail and line. The potential advantages of steam power – independence, predictability – were all the more vital among the capricious breezes of the Aegean, and what it gave Hastings above all was a delivery system that would enable him to bring to bear against an enemy the full weight of his gunnery as quickly and effectively as possible. ‘We now come to the plan of attack,’ he continued to Byron, conjuring up some steaming whirling dervish of a vessel:
In executing this, I should go directly for the vessel most detached from the enemy’s fleet, and when at the distance of one mile, open with red-hot shot from the 32-pounder forward. The gun laid at point blank, with a reduced charge, would carry on board en ricochetant. I would then wheel round and give the enemy one of the 68-pounders with shell laid at the line of metal, which would also ricochet on board him. Then the stern 32-pounder with hot shot, and again 68-pounder of the other side with a shell. By this time the bow-gun would be again loaded, and a succession of fire might be kept up as brisk as from a vessel having four guns on a side. Here the importance of steam is evident.
There would be, of course, a danger of the engine being hit, he conceded,
but when we consider the small object a low steamer would present coming head on, and the manner in which the Turks have hitherto used their guns at sea, this risk really appears very trifling. The surprise caused by seeing a vessel move in a calm, offering only a breadth of about eighteen feet, and opening fire with heavy guns at a considerable distance, may also be taken in to account. I am persuaded, from what I have seen, that in many cases the Turks would run their ships ashore and abandon them, perhaps without having the presence of mind to set fire to them.
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.
