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

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.