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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a son loitering in the ‘flesh-pots’ of Alexandria, as Hobhouse put it, Galloway’s philhellene loyalties came under regular suspicion, but Hastings’s more pressing concern was with an older and more familiar ‘enemy’ than the Egyptians. ‘If six vessels are equipping & getting in a warlike manner at the same time,’ he warned Hobhouse, ‘such an act of impudence will again call forth some strong measure on the part of our Government – rely upon it the Government knows everything about this affair which it desires to know, & if it chooses to stop it, will do so in spite of us – if the existing laws do not suffice others would be enacted, & if driven to extremities they would direct their naval commanders to arrest us even out there.’

With a Foreign Enlistment Act forbidding British nationals from serving under foreign flags, and the government’s continuing ambivalence towards the Greek insurgents, this was no idle fear. Since the suicide of Castlereagh in August 1822 there had certainly been a perceptible softening of official attitudes, yet at a time when Britain was seeking a negotiated settlement to the Greek problem, the prospect of British foundries producing weapons and British dockyards building ships to destroy the fleet and capital of an allied country was awkward enough without the inevitable publicity surrounding everything in which Cochrane was involved.

It would, in fact, have taken a brave government – probably braver than Lord Liverpool’s at any rate – to have moved against Cochrane as it had done ten years earlier, but for once in his life he too was taking no chances. At the beginning of November he was warned by the opposition Whig politician Henry Brougham that he risked arrest if he remained in England, and on 9 November 1825 – the same day that Hastings was writing to alert Hobhouse to the danger – he slipped across the Channel with his wife and son to continue his preparations beyond the reach of a Tory establishment he had been hounding and exasperating for more than twenty-five years.

With Cochrane now constantly on the move, and coded letters, government spies, hand-delivered communications the order of the day, the delays endemic to everything to do with Greek affairs could only be exacerbated. ‘My Lord, I had the honour of meeting your brother this day,’ Hastings wrote to Cochrane at the end of November,

who informed me that an opportunity would offer of writing to your lordship, so that I profit by it to inform you that the first vessel called the Perseverance is nearly ready inasmuch as it concerns Mr Brent. Mr Galloway is sadly behind – he now promises to be ready in one month, & his month may be considered as two. I have used every method & every argument to hasten him – the fact is the fate of Greece is in his hands & he will have a great responsibility on his shoulders if that cause is lost by his want of punctuality … If your Lordship would use your influence with Mr Galloway to hasten the Perseverance you would render very important service to the cause & to me if Greece is yet to be saved – but I fear ’tis too late.

The guns were now ready, he told Cochrane – Hastings favoured shipping them out to Greece via America – but even at his gloomiest his estimates for the ship’s completion were hopelessly optimistic. By the middle of December Galloway’s idea of a month had grown to six weeks, and as February 1826 turned into March and April, the engineer gradually metamorphosed from a self-deluding optimist into the ‘incorrigible … impudent liar’ and criminal incompetent of Hastings’s increasingly furious complaints.

With the delays and setbacks to the engines, and the endless work supervising the design and building of the ship’s boats, or liaising between the Greek Committee and their absentee admiral, it would have taken a more patient man than Hastings to control his temper. Galloway, he thought, should be hanged. Orlando, one of the Greek deputies, was an ‘insupportable blockhead’ more interested – like all the rest of them – in ‘some affaire de putain’ than in Greece. ‘Before I close this letter,’ he wrote to Cochrane at the beginning of February – just about as close as he allowed himself to a warning shot across the Admiral’s bows – ‘I must remark that Mr Hesketh has conducted himself in a meddling interfering manner very ill-suited to his station, & as I feel satisfied that such comportment is contrary to your sanction I take the liberty of requesting you will instruct him to limit himself in future to delivering your orders & reserve his own opinions for those who value his opinions more highly than I do.’

It is probably not just hindsight that detects a note of irony in a reference to the ‘great man’ in his letters, but neither of them could afford to fall out. Among the leading figures of the Greek Committee were several of Cochrane’s old political allies, but when it came to naval matters, he needed the ‘indefatigable Hastings’ just as badly as Hastings needed Cochrane to stop a vacillating Greek government from whoring after some crack-brained solution or Bavarian fantasist to solve their military problems.

Hastings was also the one foreigner who had been able to give Byron, Cochrane or the Committee a clear-eyed sense of the kind of men they were dealing with in Greece. The two naval leaders of whom he spoke most warmly were Canaris and Miaulis – ‘a very distinguished worthy old man’ – but for every Greek of ability or courage, there were half a dozen drunkards, pirates, cowards and rogues: ‘a merchant of distinction but nothing more … does not so much want talent as ferocity … wants courage … entirely ignorant … consumes three bottles of Rum a day … said to be a very great coward … no consequence … exceedingly intriguing … undistinguished except by a colossal stature & a ferocious countenance … a great rogue … detested but I know not why …’ ‘The fact is that the Greek does not in general possess either courage, or generosity & scarcely patriotism,’ he concluded, finding what comfort he could in so dire a catalogue of venality, greed and vice:

his every action is subjected to the narrow views of self-interest alone. Fortunately providence has so ordained it, that moral evils arrived at a certain extent carry with them their own remedy & despotism debases the master even more than the slave; was it not so, despotism once established would be eternal; instead therefore of attributing the success of the Greeks to their Heroism, let us give it its real character, that of the degradation of the Turks.

And in spite of the Greeks, the delays and disappointments at the engine trials – only two of the ships under construction would ever make it out to Greek waters – the last week of May finally saw the completion of Hastings’s Perseverance. Cochrane had originally planned on a grand entrance at the head of a united fleet, but with news of the war worsening with every post and the Perseverance’s sixty-eight- and thirty-two-pound guns already on their way to Greece, one ship – any ship, almost – was better than the finest fleet the Greek Loan could buy if it was going to languish at Deptford awaiting Mr Galloway’s attentions.

And even if the Perseverance’s power – ‘forty two horses’ – was ‘feeble’, the engine still defective, and the charismatic Cochrane nowhere to be seen, it was not just any ship that made its ‘unmolested’ way at ‘about six miles an hour’ downriver from her mooring. There might have been nothing new about the sight of such a vessel in the Thames by 1826, but one only has to translate her in the imagination – four hundred tons, 125 feet in length, twenty-five in breadth, paddles churning, tall, thin funnel, set well to the aft, belching smoke – from Deptford to the Gulf of Corinth and the waters beneath Delphi to see Hastings’s vision, in all its barque-rigged, primitive and shocking ugliness, spring into vivid and brutal life.

The mounting of the guns, the alignment of the trunnions, the internal arrangement of the ship, the methods for safely handling and firing hot shot and shell in pitching seas, everything about her, as Finlay put it, was the brainchild not just of Hastings’s strategic vision but of ‘his extraordinary perseverance and energy’. ‘The Karteria,’ Finlay wrote,

which was the name of the Perseverance in the Greek navy, was armed on the principle which Hastings had laid down as necessary to place the Greeks with small vessels on some degree of equality with the line-of-battle ships and large frigates of the Turks: namely, that of using projectiles more destructive than that of the enemy. These projectiles were hot shot and shells, instead of the cold round-shot of the Turks … The Karteria was armed with sixty-eight pounders. Of these she mounted eight; four were carronades of the government pattern, and four were guns of a new form, cast after a model prepared by Hastings himself. These guns were seven feet four inches long in the bore, and weighed fifty-eight hundred-weight.

It was not for nothing, either, that her English name was ‘Perseverance’, and long before they reached Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Hastings would need all the reserves of it he could muster. The last time he took a ship downriver from Deptford had been the Kangaroo in 1819, and in spite of fine weather and fair winds the omens for his second command were not promising. The ship sailed well, and he had no complaints with his crew, but ‘There never was a vessel sent to sea with an Engine in so discreditable a condition,’ he complained after it had failed them a fourth time.

From my experience of it I am satisfied we shall have to stop every two or three days to repair it & on our arrival at our destination I fear it will require a month to put into a fit state to go to sea with. The most lamentable incapacity has been shown by Mr Galloway in the conception of a variety of combinations … [some remediable but others not] so colossal that I fear we shall not be able to make the alterations we desire particularly in the paddle wheels, which threaten to come to pieces every other day.

Another fortnight only made things worse – ‘Galloway deserves to be hung, & I would hang him if I had him here’ – and Galloway’s men added further to Hastings’s problems. ‘Our voyage (thanks to Mr Galloway & his) bets fair to be as tedious as that of Ulysses,’ he reported to Hobhouse on 10 July.

The Engine, always defective, stopped altogether about a fortnight ago … The total failure of the Engine has been the work of one of the Engineers [it was common practice for the engine builder to supply two engineers to maintain the machinery] who altered some of the screws of the Larboard side on purpose to ruin the Engine – I never liked taking Galloway’s men after I found them dissatisfied & had almost engaged a man from Taylor & Martin’s which Galloway contrived to prevent. I shall discharge this man here & use my best endeavours.

The death of one of his officers, a Mr Critchley – masquerading under the name of Thompson to protect his naval half-pay – added to the gloom, and it was more than another two months before the Karteria (as she had now become) finally limped into Nauplia. ‘All is confusion here,’ an aggrieved Hastings wrote again to Hobhouse on 5 October, ‘with Athens … blockaded … The Egyptian fleet … expected … with reinforcements … The Greek Government (as I foresaw) [determined] to make a pleasure boat of me for their amusement,’ and Cochrane nowhere to be seen. ‘The absence of Ld C astonishes and mortifies everybody,’ Hastings continued, warming to what would become his favourite theme over the next two years:

for my part I do not know how he can exculpate himself, considering the sum he has locked up & the period he agreed. I expect to get out of this without a sixpence of publick money. The Government has none, & if it had would not give any to me – I have bound myself responsible for three months wages for the Crew, to induce them to embark – (they saw that the Greeks would never pay them). As long as I have any money I will keep the crew together but my own funds will not go far in this, now is it fair that I should ruin myself while Ld Cochrane hanging back as he does is to receive such a sum. I should hope that you would see the propriety & necessity of finding funds for this vessel for at least three months more – then I must take by force part of the revenue of the islands if not given freely, – & what with that, & occasional prizes I hope to keep things afloat for a year or two if the war lasts … Whatever turns up rely upon it I will do my utmost to advance the interests of Greece & should fortune not favour us I will be the last to quit the wreck.

Hastings and the Greeks were not being entirely fair to their absentee admiral – it was not his fault that Galloway went on promising more than he could deliver – but for all their own corruption and greed the Greek government had every right to feel aggrieved. At the end of 1825 they had a theoretical eight warships under construction, but a year later, and £155,000 spent in America alone, they had just one American frigate to show for their money, one unreliable steamer – the next two had proved completely useless, and two more never left the Thames – and a £57,000 admiral who had got no nearer an enemy ship than watching Mohammed Ali’s new Egyptian men-of-war rising on the stocks of the Marseilles dockyards.

There was one small glimmer of hope, when the Marseilles and Paris Philhellene Societies suspended rivalries with London for long enough to buy Cochrane a French brig, the Sauveur, but for the next five months Hastings was on his own. ‘To the Commander of the First American or English vessel that arrives in Greece to join the Greeks,’ he addressed a letter at the end of October, too late in the year to do anything more than prepare the Karteria for the coming campaigning season:

An apprenticeship in Greece tolerably long has taught me the risks to which anybody newly arrived & possessed of some place & power is exposed. They know me, & they also know that I know them, yet they have not ceased & never will cease intriguing to get this vessel out of my hands, & into their own, which would be tantamount to ruining her. Knowing this, I take the liberty of leaving this letter to be delivered to the first officer in the command of a vessel; to caution him not to receive on board his vessel any Greek captain – they will endeavour under various pretences to introduce themselves on board & when once they have got a footing, they will gradually encroach until they feel themselves strong enough to turn out the original commander … If you want seamen – take none from Idra – Spetsia, Kranidid, Poros – the Ispariotes may be trusted in very small numbers – take a few men from one, a few from another island & thus you will be best enabled to establish some kind of discipline. Take a good number of marines – choose them from the Peasantry, & foreign Greeks, and you may make something of them … You must see Sir that in this my advice … I can have no interest any further than inasmuch as I wish well to the Greek cause & therefore do not wish to see a force that can render great service to the Greek cause rendered ineffective by falling into the hands of people totally incapable & unwilling to adopt a single right measure. In Greece there cannot be any artillery operations except such as are carried out by foreigners in their service.

It was not, perhaps, the triumphal return Hastings must have dreamed of, nor a document to inspire a sense of warm collaboration. But then charm or conciliation were never part of his prescription for success. Nor, in the fighting to come, would there be room for either if Greece was to be saved.

X

It would be impossible to exaggerate the dangers Greece faced over the winter of 1826–27. After a long and heroic resistance Missolonghi had at last fallen in April 1826, and with Athens under siege and Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptians well on their way to making good his promise to carry off ‘the ashes of the Peloponnese’, the rapidly shrinking enclave that was ‘Greece’ seemed to be facing extinction. ‘The Morea has been devastated by the troops of Ibrahim in almost every direction,’ one impassioned American philhellene wrote of the country:

All Messenia, part of Arcadia, Ellis and Achaia, presented a scene of utter devastation; it would seem as if the siroc had blown over it for years, destroying every vestige of vegetable, and had been followed by pestilence in its train, which swept away every living thing that had once inhabited it. Those delightful plains, which poets in all ages have sung … were now barren wastes, where the roofless and blackened walls of the houses, the scathed and leafless trunks of the olive trees, and here and there the whitening bones of human beings, remained to tell that fire had passed over and blasted them.

This was the situation of at least one-half of the Peloponnesus; of its inhabitants many had been slaughtered, others carried off into slavery in Egypt, and the rest, where are they? Oh God! It is an awful question to answer, but it is a question which must one day be answered to Thee by this generation, who left thousands and tens of thousands of their fellow beings to be hunted like wild beasts; to dwell in the caverns of the rocks; to wander about, year after year, seeking for the roots of the earth, giving to their ragged and emaciated children sorrel and snails for food, unable to get enough of even this, and pining and dying – ay! Absolutely perishing from want, while the rest of the earth was full of fatness.

Here was a vision – with all its biblical and classical echoes – to stir the conscience even of governments, but whether it would do so in time was another question. From the very beginning of the war Greece’s only real hope had rested with the Great Powers, but it was not until the summer of 1825 that a first cautious approach to London from the Tsar led in the following spring to negotiations at St Petersburg and a jointly signed protocol calling for mediation and an autonomous Greece under Turkish suzerainty.

Even the prospect of the ‘barbarization’ of the Peloponnese – Egypt’s own Islamic take on seventeenth-century England’s Irish solution – was never going to win over absolutist Austria or Prussia, but by the end of the summer France had joined the negotiations. Over the next twelve months the three powers would edge their way towards the document that would finally become the Treaty of London, but until that was signed and the original protocol had grown some real ‘teeth’, the problem facing them was always going to be in enforcing an agreement that was inimical to the ambitions of both warring parties.

The Greeks were in no position to argue with a protocol that offered more than they could ever win for themselves, but as Roumeli, the Morea and finally the town of Athens fell into Ottoman hands there seemed less and less reason for the Porte to tolerate any interference in its own internal affairs. A revolt of the Janissaries had given them problems of their own, but with only the beleaguered Acropolis in Athens standing between them, the isthmus and the last pocket of Greek resistance in the western Peloponnese, it was a fair gamble that they could finish off the war before the three signatories could muster the resolve or the unity to intervene.

As the Greeks and the Turks both knew, though, intervention was only a matter of time, and so by the end of 1826 the key to the whole war and the geographical scope of any future Greece had become the fortress at Athens. From the late summer of 1826 the insurgents had poured all their resources into her relief, though two abortive attempts in August and October, and a third in December under the command of that heroic relict of Napoleonic glories, Colonel Fabvier, had only succeeded in burdening a starving garrison with Fabvier himself and another five hundred Greek and French volunteers.

The failure of one philhellene never seemed to discourage the next for very long, however, and in the following February one of the most distinguished of all British volunteers agreed against his better judgement to try where the French had failed. Thomas Gordon had been among the first foreigners to join the Greek cause in the early months of the war, but, sickened by the horrors of Tripolis, had almost immediately quitted the country, driven out by that familiar combination of plague and moral disgust that had seen off so many romantic philhellenes in the opening days of the conflict.

But at that point the generalisations fail, because with his Eton and Oxford background, his experience with the British and Russian armies, his intelligence, linguistic abilities, independence and – above all – immense wealth, Gordon was made of very different stuff. In the years since he left Greece he had continued to play an influential role in European philhellenism, and even in absentia he remained one of the very few disinterested foreigners with the skills and the knowledge of both sides to make a genuine contribution to the war.

A sense of duty? The lure of Athens? A touch of philhellene vanity? It is unlikely that even Gordon knew what finally brought him back to Greece, but it certainly was not experience or judgement. During the five years since the fall of Tripolis he had successfully resisted every Greek blandishment, but for once his resolve failed him, and pressed again to give his services, he allowed the pleas of a desperate government to overcome every military and political instinct he had.

Gordon knew a direct assault on the enemy position made no strategic sense – he favoured attacks on the Turks’ long and vulnerable supply lines – but he agreed all the same to a twin-pronged February landing at Piraeus and Eleusis, to the south and west of Athens. The experience of Fabvier in the open before Athens should have demonstrated once and for all the folly of any such strategy, but this was a war in which judgement was always at the mercy of fantasy, strategy in hock to politics, vanity, ambition, and the endless rivalries that set Greek against Greek, Greek against philhellene and philhellenes against each other.

If nothing else, the attack offered Hastings the chance at last to satisfy the enormous expectations that had surrounded the Karteria since her arrival in Greece three months before. ‘All the world, men, women, children, old young, black and white, are coming on board to see the steamboat,’ Samuel Gridley Howe, the Karteria’s new American doctor and one of the nineteenth century’s greatest reforming philanthropists, had recorded in his November journal.

We have two Englishmen [officers], one German, one Frenchman, and one Greek; the Greek is the eldest son of Tombazi. Captain Hastings is a man who deserves the deepest gratitude and respect from the Greek nation. It is only through his exertion, his activity, and generosity, that this ship was ever got out. She was built under his own eye in London, and carries as much weight of metal as a thirty-six gun frigate; her engine, however, is not of the best. Captain Hastings, having on board about forty English and forty Greek sailors, is all ready to join the Greek fleet and engage the enemy. He sees the eyes of the whole people turned upon him – they are tired of waiting for Lord Cochrane and the rest of the vessels. Captain Hastings finds himself obliged to attempt something alone, and I doubt not, from his character, he will succeed or perish with the vessel. ‘Tell Captain Hastings,’ said Commodore Hamilton to me, ‘that I honour and envy him for what others pity him: his situation is perilous, nay almost desperate, yet so glorious is the attempt that were I without wife or children, I would give £1,000 to be in it.’ … How my spirit springs with joy at being on our way to meet the haughty Turk. And though our fate is uncertain, it cannot be an inglorious one. To be engaged in something active and important, in so glorious a cause, in such consecrated regions, makes my heart beat with a wild enthusiasm, which to my sober senses seems boyish and romantic.

Over the next two months an endless stream of mechanical problems with engine, paddles, boilers, leaks, coal, guns and shells – the shells would not explode and all but one of the cannon were damaged by the shock of the charge needed to throw a sixty-eight-pound ball – dampened Howe’s enthusiasm, but on 22 January 1827 the crew at last learned that the Karteria was to see action. ‘Even at this moment the Greeks are struggling to repel the attacks of the Turkish hordes which surround the sacred city,’ an excited Howe wrote as six days later the Karteria slipped unnoticed through the narrow western straits between Salamis and Megara – the first man-of-war since ancient times to effect the passage,

but doubtless the sight of our vessel comforted them, and let them know that assistance was at hand. About 11 A.M. our engine got completely out of order, and there being not a breath of wind to break the glassy smoothness of the sea, we lay motionless; but in what a spot, and with what objects around us! I could not regret the delay which afforded me such a scene. Behind lay Aegina, with its slope to the sea, richly cultivated and interspersed with olives, while farther back rose its hills, crowned by the temple of Jupiter Pluvious, whose still standing columns were plainly to be seen. To the right lay Attica, stretching south and terminating by Sunium; high up was Athens, its Acropolis and Parthenon rising above the mist which floated over the town; Salamis was before us; to the left the Isthmus of Corinth, above which rose the ragged, almost perpendicular Acro Corinth, crowned by its fortress.

The potential fly in the philhellene ointment was as ever the modern Greek soldier, and Gordon’s battle plan was peculiarly designed to bring out all his defects. He had already shown more than once what a different proposition he was among the mountains of the Morea, but as if no one had learned anything in the course of five years of war, the attack on Athens again required him to face the enemy infantry and cavalry out in the open.

At the beginning of February a force under the fat and bejewelled Cephalonian Bonapartist Colonel Bourbaki was landed at Eleusis, and two days later, on the afternoon of the fifth, Gordon’s troops began to embark in the small flotilla of boats that were to ship them across to the mainland. Colours were blessed, saints invoked, and on board the Karteria, Gordon, his second-in-command, the Bavarian Colonel Heideck and the Greek leaders met Hastings to finalise arrangements. ‘The moon shone bright and clear,’ Howe noted, and after all ‘the infernal delays of the Greeks’, everything at last

promised to favour our enterprise … About ten the vessels were all despatched in advance, and at eleven we got under way with steam, and moving on rapidly soon overtook the little fleet, which had but a light breeze. Off the Piraeus, having passed all the vessels, we took a turn backward, sailed around then, and again took the lead. The scene was exceedingly fine, – the night still and clear, a slight breeze filling the sails of our little fleet, which lay about us in every direction; the camp fires of the Greeks under Vashos and Bourbakis upon the sides of the mountains; while from time to time the launching of bombs from the enemy’s batteries into the Acropolis marked the horizon with a long streak of fire, and showed that the siege was still hotly pressed.

By three in the morning the moon had gone, and in a night black enough to mask her approach, the Karteria anchored at Phaleron and the first of Gordon’s 2,300 men were rowed silently ashore. The object of this first wave was the heights immediately above the landing place, but a sudden outbreak of musket fire and ‘wild shouting’ from the ridge – almost certainly a Greek feu de joie to celebrate that they still had their heads on their shoulders – was enough to panic a dubious Gordon into thinking they had been thwarted. ‘“The Turks are there! Our men will be cut to pieces! Back to the boats and take them off,”’ an indignant Howe wrote. ‘These were the words of Colonel Gordon, leader of the expedition, who seemed to be agitated and surprised. Others [were] more cool, particularly Captain Hastings and Colonel Heideck, who besought him calmly to consider whether he should not, instead of re-embarking, proceed to send more men to their assistance.’

The bolder counsel prevailed, and by the end of the night the heights of Munychia had been consolidated, with a traditional line of earth and stone tambouris stretching out over a distance of eleven or twelve hundred yards. In the early hours of the next morning the first of Gordon’s artillery pieces were dragged up from the beach, and to a ‘tremendous feu-de-joie of artillery and musketry’ from the Acropolis and an answering salvo from Gordon’s guns on the heights, the Karteria steamed around the headland and through the narrow harbour entrance of the Piraeus to engage the Turkish centre in the monastery of St Spiridon.

In half an hour the Karteria had dropped anchor, and from a distance of about four hundred yards, firing for the first time with the massive weight of her sixty-eight-pound guns, had soon reduced whole sections of the monastery to little more than rubble. ‘Two thousand men [had] stood regarding us with idle applause,’ Howe wrote, beside himself at the memory of the fancifully styled ‘300’ assault force staying firmly behind their tambouris when their time came,

but came down not. Such complete cowards are they that they will never attack an enemy who is sheltered in such a way as to make an attack in the least dangerous … No, not they! They expected our ship to march upon the land, enter the monastery, and drive out the enemy. Cowards I always knew them to be, and have often seen them show themselves, but never in a more shameful manner than to-day. In fact, my prediction will be accomplished: the country is too open for Greeks to fight in. At ten, we hoisted anchor and came just outside of the Piraeus, in order to prevent being caught by the enemy’s bringing down cannon and placing it upon the entrance of the port, which is not more than fifty yards across.

Howe was no more tolerant of Gordon’s generalship than he was of the Greeks, and the next day only reinforced his doubts. As soon as it was light the Karteria again steamed into the cauldron of the harbour, and boldly anchoring within musket range of the shore, resumed her solitary and futile small-arms and artillery duel with the heavily reinforced Turkish defenders. ‘The Turks would only poke out their heads, fire their musquets, and retire,’ Howe complained, vividly capturing the intense physical intimacy of Greek warfare, ‘but one of them held out his head long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a rifle-ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall.’

After another two hours of shelling a signal came from Gordon to retire, and as Hastings ordered ‘up anchor’ the battle developed into a desperate race for the harbour mouth, with cannonballs ‘whizzing about and striking the ship in all directions’ and a force of cavalry dashing along the western shore of the port to cut off their retreat. ‘Soon we were moving,’ Howe recorded;

the enemy saw it, and galloping rapidly down to the narrow part of the port, awaited us. Among them were many Delhis, with their tremendous long caps, I should think at least two feet and a half high. I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily was not called to for one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the high sides of the vessel … Our retreat was necessary, because we could not possibly do any good by remaining, but I could not help feeling shame as we moved off from a pursuing enemy hooting at us, and this in plain sight of the Greeks in the Acropolis and upon the hills.

A small dent in philhellene pride was neither here nor there – jeers and insults were as ritual a part of Turko-Greek warfare as breaches of faith or severed heads – but elsewhere in the battle it was a different story. ‘The Turks from the monastery cried out to our men that the troops under Vashos and Bourbakis had been completely routed,’ Howe continued.

This I fear may be true. Vashos is an experienced Greek soldier and knows the paliikaris completely, and probably did not suffer much … But Bourbakis is fresh from France, full of French notions, and though born a Greek, knows them not. He talked confidently of what he would do; nothing less than taking Kiutahi alive would satisfy him – and such nonsense. He is brave, and probably ventured upon the plain; the cavalry came upon him, his men ran away, and he was killed or taken prisoner; this we fear, but know nothing certain.

The reports were true – Vashos’s ‘poltroons’ had fled, Bourbakis was captured and beheaded for his pains, more than four hundred of his regulars slaughtered – and with one army defeated the Turks were now free to unleash the full weight of their cavalry and infantry against the Greek-held heights of Phaleron. After the mauling the Karteria had received in the first exchanges Hastings might have done well to stay out of it, but these were precisely the kind of operations for which his vessel was designed, and as his men watched successive waves of Turkish attacks climb and break against the Greek defences, he again ordered her to drop anchor within ‘short musquet-shot’ of the Ottoman rear and open up with grape.

With the Karteria’s arrival the whole focus of the battle suddenly shifted from the heights to the shore. From her deck Howe watched a dozen men dragging a gun down to the water’s edge, and within moments a shell had ‘burst amid twenty of us. I expected at least four or five would have been killed, but my attention was drawn by the shrieks and cries of a drummer boy. I saw him fall, terror and despair in his countenance; seizing him in my arms, I carried him below …’

The whole of the Turkish artillery was now turned on the Karteria, and as ‘the balls … began to whiz about the ship, to strike her sides, cut her cordage etc’, their position became increasingly desperate. The ship’s guns had rapidly dealt with three of the enemy’s cannon, but two howitzers cleverly sited behind the walls of the monastery soon had their range. ‘I am told it was a rich scene to behold the mixture of dismay and gloom alternately reddening and whitening the cheeks of some of the Greek sailors,’ wrote the English philhellene Thomas Whitcombe, impotently ‘curling and twisting [his] mustaches’ and ‘biting [his] lips with vexation’ up on the heights,

as the worrying batteries’ pitiless storm pelted in every direction round their vessel; – the jolly reefers wishing themselves all the while in the territories of Prester John, or any other outlandish quarter of the globe, rather than where they had found themselves. The hair-breadth escapes on board the Karteria were … almost past belief, – flogging the doctrine of chances with unsparing thong … Our maledictions, loud and deep, were denounced on the heads of those Europeans [servicing the Turkish guns] – Christians they presumed to call themselves! – who could thus unshrinkingly stain their name and birth-place with the indelible disgrace of pocketing the Seraskier’s blood-steeped wages, in requital of tendering their arms and knowledge in aiding the suppression of the hallowed warfare of liberty and the blessed cross.

Up on the heights the battle was more or less won, and with the crew wilting and his boats shot to bits, Hastings’s only thought was to extricate the Karteria while he still had the chance. ‘To our dismay,’ though, wrote Howe, back on deck after tending to the drummer boy – only very slightly wounded, as it turned out,

on the word being given to start the engine it was found not to move. There was repetition of the order; it was shouted, but in vain; the engine would not start. Many a cheek blanched and many a lip quivered, for we were in a narrow port, exposed on every side to musquetry, and could see the enemy bringing down more cannon; to make it more dreadful, the anchor had been cut away, and it was whispered to me by the lieutenant that the ship’s head was aground, – and she only a pistol-shot from the shore. The enemy apparently perceived this, and shouting and waving their sabres, they began to rush down, expecting to have us in a few minutes. I must say that a feeling of bitterness and almost agony came over me for a moment at the sight of these barbarians, who I expected would soon be mercilessly hacking us to pieces.

The one man on board who seemed unmoved by the danger was Hastings, and with ‘much coolness and skill’ he brought his frightened crew to order. For a few endless moments the Karteria’s fate hung in the balance, and then – very slowly – the engine began to move, the wheels turned back, the ship’s head swung free and – ‘Thanks to Mr Aeolus,’ as the watching Whitcombe put it – the sails filled, and Karteria fought her way out through the narrow mouth of the port and into open water.

It had been touch and go, but the escape of the Karteria added the final touch to a day that had seen the Greeks put up their finest display in fixed battle of the whole war. It is arguable that only an Ottoman general could have ordered the attack on so formidable a position in the first place, but the casualty figures for the action – some three hundred Turkish dead to only fifteen Greek – had as much to do with the courage and defensive skill with which the Greeks fought behind their tambouris as it did with Ottoman obduracy and contempt.

In a sense, however, that was the problem – the Greeks had their bridgehead and the Turks had Athens – and faced with an inevitable stalemate and endless political dissensions, Gordon did what he should have done before the landings and resigned. He had at least kept his army intact, but that was all. The Acropolis, with Colonel Fabvier imprisoned inside it, was no nearer being saved; the Greek captains, euphoric at their ‘victory’, were no nearer to trusting Western tactics; and the Karteria no nearer to proving the decisive element in the war that Hastings had promised. It had not been a good campaign for philhellenism.

XI

If the winter of 1826–27 probably saw philhellene stock plummet to its lowest mark, there was one man whose absence through it all had only added to his reputation. Over the last months there had admittedly been a growing bitterness over Greece’s missing admiral, but when on 17 March, ‘after wandering about the Mediterranean in a fine English yacht, purchased for him out of the proceeds of the loan’, as Finlay acidly and unfairly put it, Thomas Cochrane and the Sauveur at last arrived at Poros, all was forgiven in a surge of hope that the long-awaited Messiah had come.

With stalemate at Phaleron, Athens on the brink of collapse, civil war in Nauplia, open conflict brewing between the islands and rival ‘governments’ multiplying by the week, there could never have been a time when Greece was more sorely in need of a Messiah. ‘This unhappy country is now divided by absurd and criminal dissensions,’ Sir Richard Church, another aspiring saviour who had been waiting in the wings of Greek history for even longer than Cochrane, wrote to him. ‘I hope, however, that your lordship’s arrival will have a happy effect, and that they will do everything in their power to be worthy of such a leader.’