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

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,