MEN OF WAR

Courage Under Fire in the Nineteenth-Century Navy

DAVID CRANE

Dedication

For my Mother and Father

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: Hastings’s Sword

Hastings: The Happy Warrior

Peel: A Verray Parfit Gentil Knyght

Goodenough: The Sword of the Lord

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction
Hastings’s Sword

My sword, I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill, to him that can get it.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Awaits alike th’inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Thomas Gray,

‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’

I FIRST CAME ACROSS the idea for this book fifteen years ago in the British School in Athens while working on a biography of Edward Trelawny. I was going through the archive of the great philhellene and historian of Greece, George Finlay, and in among his papers was the draft will of an ex-English naval officer and hero of the Greek War of Independence called Frank Abney Hastings.

It seemed that almost nothing was known of Hastings before he arrived in Greece – aristocratic connections, Trafalgar at the age of eleven, a row with his superiors that brought his career with the Royal Navy to a premature end – but it was the will rather than the man that grabbed my attention. Like almost every document that Hastings ever left it is heavily scored and corrected, but in among a few minor bequests to a servant and friends was a single clause – the gift of an inscribed sword with instructions that it was to be passed down the generations from officer to officer in perpetuity – that seemed to conjure not just a man but a whole world and tradition into vivid and immediate life.

Memory has a way of improving, or at least ‘tidying’ things, and when I went back to the archive some years later the clause was both less elegant and more robust than I had recalled. In it Hastings nominates a man called Edward Scott, 1st Lieutenant of the Cambrian, ‘the finest officer’ he had ever served with, as his beneficiary, with the rider that

he will cause to be inscribed on the blades of my swords and on the Barrels of my Fire arms the following words. Viz ‘This /Gun/ Pistol or sword (as the case may be) was bequeathed by Frank Abney Hastings to his former Messmate Captain Edward Scott RN and I further request of the said Edward Scott that these arms and my Nautical Instruments and my watch, may never be sold but that he should bequeath them to that Naval Officer whose Skill and Valour he most admires.

There is something gloriously immodest and extravagant about this that is typical of Hastings – as if Achilles had bequeathed his shield and sword, and then, what the hell, thrown in his helmet and greaves for good measure – but for all that the idea is still a profoundly generous one. There was nothing unusual in one officer presenting a commemorative sword to another in this way, but what Hastings’s bequest enshrines is not so much a memorial to himself as an idea of naval service that links generation to generation in an organic tradition of ‘Skill’ and ‘Valour’ in which he himself formed one small but brilliant link.

And in spite of the fact that Hastings is now virtually unknown in the country of his birth – and scarcely remembered in the country of his adoption – no nineteenth-century naval officer so boldly carried the torch. It used to be said by a rueful Spanish ambassador that every English captain an enemy faced was a Nelson, and if that is about as accurate as most generalisations about the Royal Navy, it is probably truer of Hastings than it was of any young officer of his generation who learned his trade during the last decade of the Napoleonic Wars.

‘Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he, That every man in arms should wish to be?’ asked Wordsworth, and almost a century before Herbert Read found his own savage answer in the trenches of Flanders, Hastings triumphantly filled the bill. It is possible that he had other interests than fighting and the art of war, but born as he was in the first year of the conflict with Revolutionary France he never knew or seemed to want anything else, fighting against Napoleon and the United States for as long as there were battles to be fought, before transferring his allegiances and genius to the nascent Greece in her struggle for independence from Ottoman oppression.

Hastings has only himself to blame that he is not better known, but as the architect and captain of the first successful steam warship and the great prophet of gunnery and total war, he was the unacknowledged godfather to everything that was bloodiest in the century ahead. ‘Great Britain is especially called upon to acknowledge her obligations to Captain Hastings,’ George Finlay wrote with premature optimism in 1845, at a time when the Royal Navy was tardily implementing the revolutionary lessons Hastings had given the world’s navies almost twenty years before.

By rendering naval warfare not only more destructive, but at the same time making it more dependent on a combination of good gunnery and mechanical knowledge with profound naval skill, he has increased the naval power of Great Britain, where all those qualities are cultivated in the highest degree. At the same time, the civilized world is indebted to him for rendering battles so terrible as to henceforth be less frequent, and for putting an end to naval warfare as a means of amusing kings, and gratifying the ambition of princely admirals, or vainglorious states.

It would have been fun to hear Hastings’s response to these pieties – he could have started a sea battle in a dry-dock – but for all the brutal realism with which he approached the business of war, his friendship with Edward Scott suggests that he was not immune to the navy’s more dashing and chivalrous traditions. ‘SCOTT. (CAPTAIN, 1838)’ Scott’s entry in O’Byrne’s 1848 Dictionary of Naval Officers begins, and nothing could speak more eloquently of the depths of the tradition he represented than that a career of such variety and distinction should now be so utterly and irrecoverably lost:

EDWARD HINTON SCOTT was born about 1789. This officer entered the navy in May, 1798, as Fst. Cl. Vol. on board the ANSON … With five of the [enemy] frigates … she came, 12 Oct., singly into collision, and sustained a loss, with injury to her masts and yards, of 2 men killed and 13 wounded. On 18 of the same month we find her, in company with the KANGAROO 18, enduring a similar loss in a gallant action of an hour and a quarter which terminated in the capture of La Loire of 46 guns and 664 men … While attached to the ANSON Mr Scott contributed, also, to the capture of several fine privateers … In the course of the same year he commanded a rocket-vessel in Sir Sidney Smith’s attack on the Boulogne flotilla. On leaving the BLAZER he became Acting lieutenant of the SKYLARK 16; and while in that brig … he had charge of her boats in a running fight with a French cutter privateer of 8 guns and 48 men, whom, after having cut away her sweeps and chased her for three hours, he drove under the guns of the SKYLARK. On one occasion he landed at Flushing, spiked the 8 guns of a battery, and brought the guard off prisoners … He was frequently, in the SATURN, and her boats engaged with the enemy’s forts and armed vessels (several of which he captured). During his servitude in the ORLANDO he took part in many boat-affairs in the Adriatic and Chesapeake. He commanded her boats too in several skirmishes with the Malay proas in the Straits of Sunda and Malacca, and once succeeded in repelling an attack made by them at night on a wrecked Indiaman, of which he had been placed in charge. In the boats of the CAMBRIAN we find him cutting out, in the Gulf of Athens, with much spirit and judgement, a piratical schooner, carrying two long guns and 50 men, together with three of her prizes … He also assisted at the reduction of Napoli di Romania and, at the head of a hundred seamen, landed there at the request of the Provisional Government, had the good fortune, when the troops entered the town, to save the lives of 2000 Turks, men, women, and children … For these services … was presented with a sword by the Greek Provisional Government … For his conduct in jumping overboard from the ORLANDO and saving the lives of four persons, Capt Scott (who is senior of 1838) received the thanks of the Royal Humane Society.

In an ideal world it would be possible to trace Scott’s inheritance down the generations – in any decent fiction ‘Evans of the Broke’ would be wielding Hastings’s sword in the hand-to-hand fighting with a rammed German destroyer in the Channel in 1917. (In any fiction, on the other hand, it would now be rusting in shame on the bed of the Persian Gulf.) But history is seldom so obliging. It seems doubtful that the sword even got as far as Edward Scott, but the idea of the bequest is too good to let go of; so what follows here, in the lives of Hastings and of two other figures who dazzled their generations – the brilliant William Peel, third son of the Prime Minister, and James Goodenough, the outstanding officer of his time – is a kind of ideal progress of the sword through the late Georgian and Victorian navy that answers to the spirit of Hastings’s will with a faithfulness that no literal or historical descent could possibly hope to do.

There are various reasons for choosing these men in preference to more obvious candidates – Goodenough instead of his more famous contemporary Tryon, for instance – but the first and foremost is that they were, in that special sense of the word reserved to the armed forces, ‘lucky’. In the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War the Royal Navy fought only one fleet-to-fleet action, but in an age in which many a gifted officer was doomed to fret on half-pay, Peel and Goodenough were fortunate enough to see action against the Russians and the Chinese, in ships of the line and in gunboats, at sea and in trenches, off the walls of Acre and on the walls of Canton, in the Baltic and the Crimea, in open boats against pirate junks and on open ground in front of Lucknow against sepoy mutineers.

These were the careers that every nineteenth-century naval or army officer wanted and needed, the opportunities for glory, distinction and advancement that were the life blood of both services. ‘I stay in hopes that war may again break out in some part of our Indian territory,’ one typical young ex-Harrovian, contemplating the horrors of peace, wrote from India to William Peel’s future housemaster in 1829, ‘or that the Russians, succeeding better than they deserve, will at last reach India, when a man who distinguishes himself may have a chance of being rewarded by an extra step in rank, or medal, or something of that kind, instead of, as it is now with us, receiving bare thanks from our worshipful masters the shop-keepers of Leadenhall Street.’

Whether or not it was entirely a matter of ‘luck’ that Peel and Hastings were in the right place at the right time when Russia and British India finally obliged is a nice question – there is at least half a case for arguing that the natural ‘warrior’ gets the wars he ‘deserves’ – but either way, they were born ‘fighters’ in the sense that Hastings understood the word. If this had simply been a matter of courage one could open any nineteenth-century navy list and stick in a pin to find his successors, but Peel and Goodenough were not just men who could and did fight – in Wilfred Owen’s startling boast – like ‘angels’, but officers who in a period of institutional stagnation brought to the business of war all the intelligence, thought, empirical skills, leadership, ambition, aggression, imagination and ‘thirst for glory’ that had once characterised the Nelsonian service that shaped Hastings’s ideals.

And if the absolute dominance of the Royal Navy during the nineteenth century – the French could never be relied on for a fight, and the Russians would rather sink their ships in the Black Sea than face battle – meant that they had to do their fighting in some odd places, they remained always loyal to that tradition. In many ways Peel’s and Goodenough’s careers might have been those of any Victorian army officer, but even when they fought as part of naval brigades hundreds of miles from their natural habitat, in the heat and dust of India or up the rivers of the Mosquito Coast, they remained as unmistakably the products of Hastings’s navy as did the bluejackets under their command.

But while these three careers, spanning a period of seventy years that opens with Trafalgar and closes on the beach of a remote Pacific island, are a celebration of continuity and tradition, they equally reflect an age of rapid and radical change. When Hastings first saw action from the deck of a man-of war he would have approached the enemy at a slow walking pace; but by the time Goodenough took his place on the Admiralty Committee on Designs for Ships of War in the early 187os, sail had given way to steam, wood to armour, and the ad hoc improvisations and confused hell of Trafalgar to dreams of choreographed fleet actions, centralised command, signalling hegemony and speeds of fourteen knots.

In a sense these technical developments left the subjects of this book relatively untouched: Peel did most of his fighting on land, and Goodenough died a very eighteenth-century death. But the navy has always been a microcosm of national life, and no one was immune to the wider social and intellectual changes shaping nineteenth-century Britain. Both Peel and Goodenough first went to sea in the last leisurely days of sail, but if they were Georgians by upbringing and age they were Victorians by instinct and high moral seriousness, and in crucial matters of temperament and faith as remote from Hastings as they were close to him in their gift for war.

And while there are certain men, as John Masters put it in his wonderful evocation of pre-Second World War soldiering with the Indian Army, Bugles and a Tiger, who only come fully alive in battle, there are fewer who are prepared to admit it even to themselves. Over the middle years of the century both Goodenough and Peel would throw themselves into conflicts every bit as savage as anything Hastings knew, but even so they could no more have publicly signed up to his reductive vision of ‘the art of war … in other words, the method of killing men most expeditiously’ than could the Christian country and governments that sent them into action.

Hastings had come of age in a war of national survival that left little room for moral reflection, and had fought for Greece in a savage war of liberation that left still less room for sentiment, but these were dispensations that the generations who fought for Turkey in the Crimea or in the Opium Wars against China never enjoyed. In every war there will always be men who fight for the sheer joy of stabbing and stabbing again the ‘well-killed Boche’, but for anyone else, anyone brought up within the framework of a Christian nation – and it is impossible to overstate the influence of religion on the national life of nineteenth-century Britain – the sheer thrill of battle and the Homeric lust for Glory and Fame that were the unashamed motives of Hastings’s life had to be dissembled into more morally acceptable notions of ‘Duty’, Service’, ‘Patriotism’ and ‘Sacrifice’.

The fighting instincts were no less rampant – ‘After all,’ Thomas Hughes cheerfully asked in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, ‘what would life be without fighting, I should like to know?’ – but no one who had had their first scrap at the back of Thomas Arnold’s chapel at Rugby was ever left in any doubt of the need for a just moral cause. ‘From the cradle to the grave,’ Hughes went on, neatly subsuming the soul, the school playground and the killing grounds of the Alma and Inkerman into one moral universe, ‘fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.’

The pages of Tom Brown’s Schooldays are as good a place as any to feel the moral change that had overtaken nineteenth-century Britain, and one of the fascinations of the three lives here is the ways in which natural warriors of successive generations justified to themselves Hastings’s ‘art of killing’. As a boy of seventeen William Peel would experience all the thoughtless excitement of action at the bombardment of Acre; but if that takes little understanding, what was it that enabled a man of his intelligence, piety, innate gentleness and background to fight with such brilliance in the Crimea in defence of an Ottoman Empire that was repugnant to every tenet he held?

Perhaps the first and most prosaic answer is that there was a burgeoning belief in the nineteenth century – and one to which Peel ardently subscribed – that God’s Higher Purpose was to be worked out through British civilisation, British arms and British trade. Seldom can the long, disreputable history of the ‘Just War’ have been deflected to such improbable purposes. ‘There cannot be a doubt that it is a just war we are engaged in,’ wrote Captain Hedley Vicars, a natural warrior and Popery-hating zealot who in 1854 looked forward to Britain’s triumph over the Russians in the Crimea as a portent of the imminent ‘coming of the Son of Man’.

There are some people, I know, who cannot imagine how any Christian could ever join the deadly strife of battle; but I can only say with such I do not agree, so I shall not flinch from doing my duty to my Queen and Country, the Lord being my helper … I consider war to be … as much a visitation from the Almighty as cholera or any other scourge; and as on the appearance of that dreadful malady, we do not sit quietly down and let it take its course, but very rightly (trusting in the blessing of God) use every precaution, and employ every means to drive it from amongst us, so in the case of this war with the Russian despot. He has made an aggression against a country (one of our oldest allies), which has given him no just cause of provocation, and has thus disturbed the peace of Europe and let loose upon us the horrors of war, and shall we Britons let him have his way, and tamely look on? God forbid! Rather will we, the Lord being our ‘shield and buckler’ crush the evil, and restore peace and quietness to the land.

There were other, and contradictory, strands at work too, and alongside this growing belief in Britain’s Divine Mission was a lurking anxiety that the sinews of national life had been fatally softened by long years of peace. The triumphant success of the Great Exhibition in 1851 had demonstrated to the world the pre-eminence of British manufacturing, but what if there was a price to pay for prosperity and luxury in a decline of the ‘Race’ that only war could halt? ‘Art?’ exclaims Stangrave in Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857), a novel set against the background of a Devon village ravaged by cholera and the mightier national struggle with the Russians taking place on the shores of the Black Sea:

What if the most necessary human art, next to the art of agriculture, be, after all, the art of war? It has been so in all ages. What if I have been befooled – what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been befooled by forty years of peace? We have forgotten that the history of the world has been as yet written in blood; that the history of the human race is the story of its heroes and its martyrs – the slayers and the slain. Is it not becoming such once more in Europe now? And what divine exemption can we claim from the law? … What if the wise man’s attitude, and the wise nation’s attitude is that of the Jews rebuilding their ruined walls – the tool in one hand, and the sword in the other; for the wild Arabs are close outside and the time is short, and the storm is only lulled a while in mercy, that wise men may prepare for the next thunderburst … Armed industry, which tills the corn among the cannons’ mouths … knows that so long as cruelty and wrong exist on earth, man’s destiny is to dare and suffer, and if it must be so, to die.

It was no coincidence that the two great, sacrificial periods of British polar exploration – the search for Sir John Franklin in the early 1850s and the first stirrings of interest in Antarctica at the end of the century – coincided with two prolonged periods of peace, and war offered opportunities for purging the nation’s soul that not even the self-induced miseries of ‘man hauling’ and starvation rations could match. For Kingsley the conflict with Russia was nothing short of a wakening ‘to a new life – at least to the dream of a new life!’, it was ‘a discipline from heaven’, an expiation for old ‘sins’, a purifying fire that redeemed men and women alike from fripperies and ease. ‘My health is quite restored enough to enable me to walk up to a cannon’s mouth,’ Major Campbell tells the beautiful Valentia St. Just before sailing for the Crimea and a hero’s death on ‘Cathcarts’s Hill’, only yards from where William Peel would win his Victoria Cross. ‘There are noble elements underneath the crust, which will come out all the purer from the fire; and we shall have heroes and heroines rising up among us as of old, sincere and earnest, ready to face their work, and to do it, and to call all things by their right names.’

Along with this sense of national crisis went a growing obsession with masculinity and courage that seems from this distance a reflex of the same insecurity. ‘To understand courage,’ wrote Field Marshal Lord Wolseley – a companion-in-arms and admirer of Peel’s – in a noxious article entitled ‘Courage’ that might have provided chapter and verse for everything that is most paranoid in the whole A.E.W. Mason canon,

one must have thoroughly studied cowardice in all its phases and they are infinite. It is the most subtle of mental diseases, the existence of which may never be known to any but the man whose heart it gnaws at. When the day arrives on which all hearts shall be open, we shall, I am sure be astonished to find that many of those who have passed muster in our ranks as brave men will plead in extenuation of sins committed the astounding fact that they were cowards by nature.

There are, of course, many degrees of courage, endless varieties in its manifestations, but my own experience leads me to believe that this virtue in men follows the same natural laws as obtain in the cases of horses and dogs. The better bred all three are the greater will be the innate pluck …

In our army – as indeed in nearly all good armies – there is a great gap between the social position of the officer and the private. Their education from early infancy has been as opposite as the poles … For the officer to be suspected of any lack of nerve would be fatal to him. He would be shunned and boycotted as a leper, and he had better end his days at once by his own hand.

This, then, was the culture – a culture of national assertion and self-doubt – that shaped the mid-century experience of war, and twisting insidiously around Kingsley’s visions of redemption and Wolseley’s darker obsessions was that bizarre and very Victorian cult of Chivalry that found one of its most famous and handsome incarnations in Sir William Peel. The history of chivalry had already taken some very odd turns by the time of the Crimean War, but under Kingsley’s and Thomas Hughes’s influence ‘the old chivalrous and Christian belief [in] the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes’ was refined into a search for self-purification and ‘self-conquest’ that reached its highest pitch on the barren uplands above the city of Sevastopol.

‘The annals of chivalry’ had nothing to match the exploits of Peel and his young ‘pages’ in the Crimea, Lord Lyons, the Commander-in-Chief in the Black Sea, would tell an enraptured Guildhall audience at a banquet to celebrate the end of the Crimean War, and the greater the moral and physical degradation around him, the more brilliantly Peel’s armour shone. Nobody who saw him under fire in the trenches of the Crimea would ever forget his air of quiet and inviolable self-mastery, and it would be the same again in India, where he could ride through a landscape of decomposing corpses and tree boughs heavy with hanged rebels as if it was some mythological world of chimeras and goblins conjured up by a Malory to try his knightly resolve.

If the face of heroism had changed between the Homeric code that Hastings embraced and the medieval code of a Peel, the life and death of the third of these naval officers provides perhaps the most vivid proof of how it would mutate again before the Victorian age was very much older. In the eyes of a man like Thomas Hughes there might have seemed no conflict between ‘chivalry’ and Christianity, but to a sterner moralist of Thomas Arnold’s stamp the whole cult of chivalry – with its essential egotism, its elitism, its self-reliance, its glamorised brutality, its culture of ‘honour’ rather than ‘duty’ – was not some knightly expression of the gospels but the enemy and antithesis of those true Christian virtues that a Protestant England would eventually find in James Graham Goodenough.

The cultural divide between Peel and James Goodenough was not the same in either degree or kind as that between either man and Hastings, but it was in its way just as profound. It is always tempting to think of change in terms of generations or decades, but history rarely evolves so neatly, and although only six years separated the two men in age, the Britain that mourned Peel’s death in India in 1858 was not the same country that would thrill to Goodenough’s less than twenty years later.

When Peel died the country commemorated the life of a peerless knight; when Goodenough was killed it celebrated the death of a national martyr. In those two responses lies a world of difference. It was not that ‘Holy Joe’ Goodenough had been any less of a natural fighter than either Hastings or Peel, or had been engaged in ‘better’ wars, but that his ‘heroic’ death at the hands of a group of island ‘savages’ whom he refused to harm chimed not just with Britain’s growing sense of its Sacred Mission but with the tastes, prejudices and religious instincts of an ascendant middle class ready to claim Goodenough as its own.

It was in some ways a curious claim to make on a man married to a goddaughter of the Queen, but in more important respects they had it right. By birth and education Goodenough might have sprung from an ethos of refined privilege, but in his faith, social conscience and his impregnable, teetotalling respectability he belonged squarely to that middle-class world – to a world that stretched from the products of Arnold’s Rugby at one end to the chapel, mission and Low Church pamphleteer at the other – that was learning to look to its own kind for the embodiments of national greatness. ‘The middle class of this country may well be proud of such men as these,’ wrote The Times of Havelock, Nicholson and Neill, the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, ‘born and bred in their ranks – proud of such representatives, such reflections of their own best and most sterling characteristics, – proud of men who were noble without birth, without the pride of connexions, without a breath of fashion, and without a single drop of Norman blood in their veins.’

But if in Goodenough the middle classes had, at last, the real thing, a Christian warrior who lived and died by what he preached, the concept of a ‘naval martyr’ was not without its difficulties. The sole reason that the public at large had been happy to indulge the chiliastic nonsense of a man like Vicars was that he could also fight like a lion, and if Sir Henry Havelock, the hero of Lucknow, was allowed to treat the world to the spectacle of an exemplary Christian death it was because he had made damned sure to precede it with a campaign of unedifying Old Testament ferocity.

Goodenough, though, was different, and if he chased Glory as assiduously as Hastings and Peel had done, it was the Glory of the next world and not of this. Throughout his long and distinguished career he did all he could to reconcile the conflicting claims of his faith and his profession, but when, finally, in the pursuit of Britain’s Sacred Mission among the natives of the Pacific islands he had to choose between ‘love’ and ‘duty’, and paid for it with his life, a new and disturbing kind of naval hero was born.

There were those in the service who were dismayed by his choice, but if the sword that had been left to Edward Scott had come a long way in forty years to stay so firmly sheathed on a beach on Santa Cruz, Hastings would at least have recognised the forces that had brought Goodenough to such an end. In the years since his own death the whole concept of heroism might have changed, but if – to use George Finlay’s phrase – those ‘elements of true greatness’ that had combined in him to produce a martyr to Greek freedom coalesced in Goodenough to create a profoundly different kind of hero, then the elements themselves remained just the same.

Courage, sacrifice, selflessness, ardour, energy, vanity, pride – the self-referential vanity of the hero, the spiritual pride of the martyr – they are all there, but if there is one key to the lives that follow it probably lies in the ‘thirst for glory’ that Hastings confessed was the driving force of his life. There are any number of reasons why men fight, and then there are the reasons that they give, but whether it was an earthly or a heavenly reward, the ‘lustre of a name’ that Peel spoke of or the lustre of a martyr’s crown, the battles of the sea that were the only sort Hastings knew or Bunyan’s battles of the soul, the pursuit of ‘Glory’ – whatever the price – was, in all three men, what Alexander Pope would have called the ‘Ruling Passion’.

And no nineteenth-century naval officer needed to be reminded of where the paths of glory almost inevitably lead. ‘There is no death so glorious, so much to be desired, as on the battlefield,’ wrote Captain Oliver Jones, who had helped support the wounded Peel at Lucknow, and if an ironic fate robbed each of Hastings, Peel and Goodenough of that particular happiness, they were, like Tennyson’s Sir Perceval, at least allowed to glimpse the Grail. In their last moments as fighting men each saw the glory that they had lived for, and none of them would have had it any different. For the Homeric warrior, the ‘parfait gentil knyght’ and the soldier of Christ alike, death – ‘the experience of all experiences’, as Charles Kingsley put it – was not the negation of hopes and ambitions, but what Goodenough, writing to a wife who would rejoice in his Christian triumph, called ‘the happy crown of life’.

Hastings
The Happy Warrior

I

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of 18 June 1819, a Royal Navy brig of war seven weeks out of England came into a busy Port Royal harbour on the island of Jamaica under a flamboyant press of sail. It was a manoeuvre her young commander had seen and admired in other captains, and as the Kangaroo came alongside the moored flagship, Iphigenia, he gave the order to shorten all sail and simultaneously let go her anchor.

It would have been a flashy manoeuvre in a vessel that handled better than the Kangaroo, and as she began to drift towards the Iphigenia, her commander found himself powerless to stop her. The First Lieutenant in the flagship had been engaged on the blind side of the quarterdeck as the Kangaroo came in, and the first he knew of the danger was when the shouting brought him across to the starboard rail to see the Kangaroo ‘broadside on’ and ‘apparently drifting’ under her own momentum athwart the Iphigenia’s cable. ‘I instantly ordered the Boatswain to send out the Forecastle men to run in the flying Jib boom,’ he recalled. ‘Captain Parker gave orders for veering the cable which I went to see executed as the Kangaroo would certainly have been on board of us had it not been done.’

The incident and the danger were over in a moment, but the Iphigenia was neither the ship, nor Iphigenia’s captain the man to have affronted in this way. ‘You have overlayed our anchor,’ shouted the future Admiral Sir Hyde Parker – son of Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, grandson of Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker Bt. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you damned Lubber, who are you?’

It would be another thirty-six hours before Hyde Parker got a reply to his question, but the answer when it came was ‘Lieutenant and Commander’ Frank Abney Hastings, a fair-haired, jaw-jutting twenty-five-year-old veteran of the Napoleonic and American wars with the nose of a Wellington and rather more of his character than was good for a junior officer. He had taken over HM Survey Vessel Kangaroo in a murky Deptford Basin just five months earlier, and had brought to his first modest command all the enthusiasm and energy of a man who had lived for that responsibility since he had first gone to sea as an eleven-year-old on the eve of Trafalgar. ‘I was a young officer,’ he later pleaded in extenuation of his recklessness,

and anxious to excel … God forbid that I should for one instant attempt to justify in myself a conduct that I should not approve in another. I had quite recently observed with admiration the smart way in which some men of war in which I have been brought up have shortened all sail at the moment of anchoring and I was ambitious to imitate them. I feel now how injudicious it was to attempt such an evolution in a vessel like the Kangaroo.

Contrition did not come naturally to Frank Hastings, but more unfortunately it had not come early either, and long before this confession reached the Admiralty he had done all within his powers to ruin his career. On the evening of the Kangaroo’s arrival in Port Royal he had delivered the despatches he was carrying to the Commander-in-Chief as if nothing untoward had happened, and then like Achilles to his tent, had returned to the pregnant solitude of his captain’s cabin to brood over the public nature of Parker’s insult. ‘When duty permitted me for a moment to reflect on the language used by Captain Parker,’ he later wrote to the Lords Commissioners,

my first impression was to apply for a Court martial … there were officers of the army on board who could not be ignorant from its Publicity of the insult offered me & … would have construed forbearance into cowardice … in fact the short time I had to deliberate left me no choice but that of disgracing the Rank to which your Lordships had been pleased to appoint me or of adopting the proceeding which has unfortunately led to this explanation.

The following morning – a Sunday – he went on half-pay and, dressed in a plain blue greatcoat, had himself rowed across the harbour to Admiral Home Popham’s flagship. There, on the Iphigenia’s quarterdeck, ‘between three and four bells’, he approached the officer of the watch, a Lieutenant Wood. ‘Captain Hastings asked me if Captain Parker was on board,’ Wood later testified: ‘he at the same time gave me a note for Captain Parker saying it was from Captain Hastings. I went to the opposite side of the deck where Captain Parker was and delivered it to him, informing him it was from Captain Hastings. Captain Parker then opened the note and appeared to read it.’

‘Port Royal Monday 20th June,’ the hurriedly scribbled note read. ‘You appear about to sail – time is precious tomorrow morning I must have that satisfaction your conduct on the 18th has rendered so indispensable. I am not provided with a friend so that I am myself the bearer of this. Frank Hastings late commander of the Kangaroo.’

It was the first in a chain of letters that would eventually stretch from Port Royal to the Admiralty and the Prince Regent. ‘Sir,’ Parker wrote the same day to Popham, enclosing Hastings’s challenge, careful to embrace his admiral, his admiral’s flagship and His Majesty’s whole navy in the insult to his personal dignity:

The day before yesterday in the evening a Brig of War, the Kangaroo, commanded by Lieutenant Frank Hastings came into Port Royal, in so unofficerlike manner as far as related to the respect which is due to all Flag Ships, and in so lubberly as far as relates to his professional duties as a seaman … that I could not refrain from reprimanding the Officer, whoever he might be, in severe terms …

To my great astonishment however, this morning a person calling himself Capt Frank Hastings came aboard His Majesty’s Ship Iphigenia and delivered the enclosed challenge …

I now most respectfully Sir, leave it to you to judge whether the discipline of the Service has not been insulted by such a proceeding … I am satisfied that my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty will upon this occasion approve of my conduct in bringing this Officer before a Court instead of accepting a challenge publicly delivered before the officers; contrary to the respect which is due to the Military discipline of His Majesty’s Service.

As Popham’s own chequered record would suggest, he was in fact a seaman of a very different cast – had Hastings issued his challenge in the first rush of blood, he later told him, he ‘could almost have forgiven it the provocation was such’ – but in a service that forbade duelling he had little room for manoeuvre. On the same day he instructed Commodore Sir George Collier to convene the senior captains in port aboard HMS Sybille, and when in another fit of hauteur and legalistic quibbling Hastings refused to attend a court that could have no jurisdiction over an officer on half-pay, the slow, deliberate processes of Admiralty justice ground into motion without him.

‘Was the Commander in Chief’s Flag flying on board the Iphigenia at the time the Kangaroo anchored?’ Parker was asked on board the Sybille.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you consider the manner in which the Kangaroo came to an anchor Seaman-like or not?’ they asked Mr Rent, the Iphigenia’s master.

‘No – I could not avoid exclaiming – That’s a lubberly trick and that I thought the Flag Captain would give it him.’

One by one – Flag Captain, Master of the Tartar , Master Mate of the Kangaroo, Master, First Lieutenant and Boatswain of the Iphigenia – they were all questioned, and when Lieutenant Hood reported that he had seen ‘Captain Hastings shake his head in, as it struck me, a very disrespectful manner’ at the retreating figure of Parker, the court’s findings became a formality. ‘10th Aug,’ John Wilson Croker – placeman supreme, model for the vile Rigby in Disraeli’s Coningsby, and Tory Secretary to the Admiralty – scrawled crossways over the Port Royal court findings:

This is an aggravated case of insubordination. The Board are indispensably called upon to remove Captain Frank Hastings from the list of commissioned officers in the Navy. Acqt. Sir H. Popham accordingly, & inform him also that their Lds. entirely approve the conduct of Capt Parker in refraining from noticing the challenge conveyed to him by Mr Hastings in any other manner than by transmitting it to the Rear Admiral for his information, and they desire it to be understood that even if it should be repeated at any future period, the acceptance of it on the part of Captain Parker would in their Lds’ estimation be highly improper and would incur their severe displeasure.

It was the end of Frank Hastings’s Royal Naval career.

II

If ever a man was doomed by birth it was Frank Abney Hastings. In the weeks and months after the Kangaroo incident, there was scarcely a day when one word of apology could not have saved his career, when a single gesture of moderation or even cautious self-interest could not have redeemed his reputation; but he was quite simply incapable of making it. ‘Your Lordship may find officers that will submit to such language,’ he wrote instead to Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty,

but I don’t envy them their dear purchased rank & God forbid the British Navy should have no better supporters of its character than such contemptible creatures. A great stress has been layed upon the circumstance of the challenge being delivered to Capt Parker on the Quarter deck, but … why the contents of a sealed challenge should be known to bystanders any more than the contents of a dinner invitation I confess myself at a loss to divine.

If this was hardly the language of conciliation or compromise, the truth was that there was nothing in Hastings’s temperament or background that would have counselled a place for either. For six hundred years the Hastings family had amassed titles and lands with a daring promiscuity, alternately the favourites and the victims of successive English monarchs to whom they were too closely related for comfort, safety or humility. ‘Though the noble Earl was sprung from ancestors the most noble that this Kingdom could boast,’ the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote in 1789 on the death of Frank’s grandfather, the 10th Earl of Huntingdon,

Plantagenet, Hastings, Beauchamp, Neville, Stafford, Devereux, Pole, Stanley, it might be said also that they were most unfortunate. The Duke of Gloucester was strangled at Calais. The Duke of Clarence was put to death privately [fine word, ‘private’] in the Tower. The Countess of Salisbury, his daughter, was publicly beheaded, as was also her son … Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was beheaded by Richard III. Robert Devereux, the famous Earl of Essex, died on a scaffold in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The untimely deaths of the gallant Nevilles are sufficiently known. The founder of the Huntingdon family, William Lord Hastings, lost his head in the Tower …

No family that includes Warwick the Kingmaker and Essex can put such a record entirely down to ill-luck, and it sometimes seems as if the Hastings went out of their way to import vices that were not already indigenous to the tribe. From the sixteenth century onwards there had been a distinct streak of religious extremism in the family, and in the seventeenth fanaticism was wedded to real madness with the marriage of the 5th Earl to Lucy Davies, a niece of the Lord Castlehaven beheaded for sodomy and abetting the rape of his wife, and the devoted daughter of that notorious prophetess, Bedlamite and ‘abominable stinking great Symnell face excrement’ of Stuart England, Lady Eleanor Davies.

To marry into one unstable family might be a misfortune, but to marry into two smacks of something more culpable, and to the toxic infusion of Castlehaven’s Touchet blood in the seventeenth century was added that of the Shirleys in the eighteenth. This latter alliance came at a time when some of the old Hastings energy seemed at last to be dissipating, but in the tyrannical and litigious Selina Shirley, Countess of Huntingdon – cousin of the Earl Ferrers hanged for murder, founder of the religious cult bearing her name and, by turns, Wesleyan, mystic, ritualist and damnation-breathing Calvinist – the Hastings could again boast a figure to hold her bigoted own with any in the family’s long and bloody history.

It is astonishing, in fact, how successfully the Hastings clan came through an Augustan age of Lord Chesterfield, ‘manners’ and rhyming couplets and emerged on the other side with all their traditions of violence and excess so wonderfully intact. In a letter to Warren Hastings – no relative but a close friend – Frank’s father once cheerfully confessed to their ‘naturally hot and spicy’ blood, and whether they were Calvinist or atheists, shooting themselves or shooting their steward, hanging rebels in America or being hanged at Tyburn, the young Frank’s immediate family bequeathed to him a tradition of volatility that found its inevitable echo in his challenge to Captain Hyde Parker.

Throughout his life Frank would be abnormally sensitive to the claims of a family that, in its more modest moments, traced its ancestry back ‘eleven hundred years before Christ’, and for him there was a twist that might well have added a morbid prickliness to the natural Hastings hauteur. From the first creation of the earldom in the sixteenth century the Huntingdon title had descended in more or less regulation mode to the middle of the eighteenth, but when the 9th Earl died of a fit of apoplexy in 1746, he was succeeded by a seventeen-year-old son whose well-publicised contempt for women of a marriageable class had soon eased him into the arms of the Parisian ballerina and ‘first dancer of the universe’, Louise – ‘La Lanilla’ – Madeleine Lany.

The result of that ‘Philosophical and merely sentimental commerce’, as his friend and moral guide Lord Chesterfield silkily put it, was a baby boy born on 11 March 1752. By the time this ‘young Ascanius’ arrived in the world ‘La Lanilla’ had already been abandoned, and while Huntingdon continued his philosophical and sentimental education on a diet of Spanish paintings and Italian women, the infant Charles was removed from France and sent over to Ireland to be brought up ‘as brothers’ with his cousin Francis Rawdon, the future 2nd Lord Moira in the Irish Peerage, Baron Rawdon in the English, 1st Marquis of Hastings and Governor General of India.

Of all the generations of Hastings who shaped Frank’s future, Charles Hastings – his father – is infinitely the most engaging. There seems little now that can be known of his early childhood, but in 1770 he was bought a commission in the 12th of Foot, and over the next twenty years enjoyed as successful a career as was possible at that nadir of British army fortunes, distinguishing himself in America and at the siege of Gibraltar before finally rising by purchase and patronage to the rank of lieutenant general and the colonelcy of his old regiment.

With the powerful Hastings connections behind him, the friendship of the Prince of Wales, and a pedigree and personality that might have been designed for the louche world of Carlton House, the only things missing from Charles’s life were the title that went into abeyance on the Earl’s death in 1789 and the fortune and family seat that passed to his Moira cousin. He would have to wait another sixteen years for the minor compensation of a baronetcy, but in the year after his father’s death he augmented his modest inheritance by marriage to a Parnell Abney, the sole daughter and heiress of Thomas Abney of Willesley Hall, a handsome but dilapidated estate with a landscaped park and ornamental lake just two miles south of the historical Hastings power base at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Charles was thirty-eight on his marriage, and still only forty-one in 1793 when war broke out with France, but to his deep frustration a Tory government could find no active use for him in the years ahead. The seven years between 1796 and 1803 were spent instead in command of the garrison on Jersey, and by the time his friends came into power, age, ill-health and a growing melancholy had reduced him to a kind of English version of Tolstoy’s old Prince Bolkonski, brooding in his library over his maps and despatches as Bonaparte’s armies redrew the boundaries of Europe.

It is hard to imagine what solace a world-weary free-thinker can have found in Parnell Hastings – ‘a great bore’ is the only surviving judgement on her – but the one thing they shared was a deep love of their two surviving children. It would seem that their eldest, Charles, was always closer to his mother than to his father, but if there were times when the old general thought a good dose of peppers in the boy’s porridge would cure him of his ‘milk-sop’ tendencies, there were no such fears over his younger and favourite lad, Frank, born in 1794 and destined from an early age for a career in the navy.

With his father’s royal and military connections – Lord Rawdon was Commander-in Chief for Scotland and Sir John Moore a close friend – it seems odd that Frank did not follow him into the army, and odder still when one remembers the grim reality of naval life in 1805. In May 1803 the brief and bogus Peace of Amiens had come to its predictable end, and for the two years since Britain’s weary and overstretched navy had struggled from the Mediterranean narrows to the North Sea to contain the threat of the French and Spanish fleets while the country steeled itself for invasion.

It is only in retrospect that 1805 seems the year to go to sea, because with Napoleon abandoning his invasion plans, and the allied fleets holing up in Cádiz after their West Indies flirtation, the only certain prospect facing Frank as his father took him down to Plymouth was the ‘long, tiresome and harassing blockade’ work that had become the navy’s stock in trade. ‘I think it incumbent upon me to announce to you the disposal of my boy,’ a grateful Charles Hastings wrote to Warren Hastings on 11 June 1805, a month after entering Frank as a Volunteer First Class under the command of one of Nelson’s most bilious, courageous and uxorious captains, the solidly Whig Thomas Fremantle, ‘whom you were so kind as to patronize by writing to Lord St Vincent. He is at present with the Channel fleet on board the Neptune of 98 guns commanded by my friend Captain Fremantle. We have heard from him since, and he is so delighted with his profession that he declares nothing shall ever tempt him to quit it – I took him down to Plymouth myself.’

It would be hard to exaggerate how alien and hermetic a world it was that closed around the young Hastings when his father deposited him at Plymouth. As a small child growing up on Jersey he would have been familiar enough with garrison life, but nothing could have prepared him for the overpowering strangeness of a great sea-port during wartime, its utter self-sufficiency and concentration of purpose, its remoteness from the normal rhythms of national life, its distinctive mix of chaos and order, its forest of masts and myriad ships’ boats, or the sheer, outlandish oddity of its inhabitants. ‘The English keep the secrets of their navy close guarded,’ the young Robert Southey, masquerading in print as the travelling Spanish nobleman Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, wrote two years later of his attempt to penetrate the sealed-off worlds of Britain’s historic ports. ‘The streets in Plymouth are swarming with sailors. This extraordinary race of men hold the soldier in utter contempt, which with their characteristic force, they express by this scale of comparison, – Mess-mate before ship-mate, ship-mate before a stranger, a stranger before a dog, and a dog before a soldier.’

At the outbreak of the Napoleonic War the Royal Navy was quite simply the largest and most complex industrialised organisation in the world, and it was in the great south coast ports of Plymouth or Portsmouth that this took on its most overwhelming physical expression. ‘A self-contained walled-town,’ wrote Caroline Alexander in her magical evocation of the dockyards that serviced the world’s greatest fleet – eighty-eight ships of the line in commission the year Frank joined, thirteen ‘Fifties’, 125 frigates, ninety-two sloops, eighteen bombs, forty gunbrigs, six gunboats, eighty-two cutters and schooners and forty-one armed ships,

the great yard encompassed every activity required to send ships to sea … There were offices and storehouses, and neat brick houses … as well as the massive infrastructure required to produce a ship. In the Rope-house all cordage was spun, from light line to massive anchor cable, in lengths of more than a thousand feet, some so thick that eighty men were required to handle them … Timber balks and spires of wood lay submerged in the Main Pond, seasoning until called to use. In the blacksmith’s shop were wrought ninety hundred-weight anchors in furnaces that put visitors in mind of ‘the forge of Vulcan.’ And on the slips, or docked along the waterfront, were the 180-foot hulls of men-of-war, the great battle-wounded ships brought for recovery, or the skeletons of new craft, their hulking, cavernous frames suggesting monstrous sea animals from a vanished, fearsome age.

Along with all this industrial might came the people, the contractors and tradesmen, the wives and prostitutes, the shopkeepers and clerks, and the thousands of workers who kept the fleets at sea. ‘I could not think what world I was in,’ another boy recalled his introduction to this alien culture, ‘whether among spirits or devils. All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.’

If it was an alien world, though, with its own language and languages – England, Ireland, Canada, America, the Baltic, Spain, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Sardinia, Venice, they were all represented in Neptune – its own customs, and traditions, its own time-keeping, arcane ways of business and overlapping hierarchies, it was a world the young Hastings took to as if he had known no other. ‘Whilst on board with him (although only eleven years old last month),’ Sir Charles proudly told Warren Hastings, ‘he offered to go up the masthead without going through the Lubbers’ hole which however Capt Fremantle would not permit as I could not have borne seeing him make the attempt – I have no doubt that he will do very well if his education is not neglected but as there is a Schoolmaster on board I entertain great hopes of him making a proficiency.’

There were thirty-four boys in all entered in Neptune’s muster book – the youngest nine years old (there was a four-year-old girl in Victory, born in HMS Ardent in the middle of the Battle of Copenhagen) – though only a handful rated ‘Volunteer First Class’ who were destined to be officers. There was still such a wide divergence of practice from ship to ship that it is impossible to generalise about these boys’ duties, but in a world of interest and patronage, the naturally symbiotic relationship of captain and volunteer was a well-connected boy like Hastings’s best guarantee of the training his father had wanted for him. ‘My Dear General,’ – that ‘most mischievous political quack … Mr Pitt’ was still alive and the general as yet without his baronetcy – Captain Fremantle was soon writing to Frank’s father, conscientiously carrying out his side of the bargain: ‘… of your boy I can say nothing but what ought to make you and Mrs Hastings very happy, he is very mild and tractable, attentive to his books & dashing when with the youngsters of his own age. I declare I have had no occasion to hint even anything to him, as he is so perfectly well behaved.’

With all the ‘dash’ and patronage in the world, a man-of-war like Neptune, with her 116 marines and ship’s company of 570 brawling, drunken, thieving seamen recruited or pressed from across the globe, was a tough school for any boy. ‘Who can paint in words what I felt?’ Edward Trelawny, whose path would later cross with Hastings’s in Greece, histrionically recalled his first days as a thirteen-year-old midshipman in that summer of 1805. ‘Imagine me torn from my native country, destined to cross the wide ocean, to a wild region, cut off from every tie, or possibility of communication, transported like a felon, as it were, for life … I was torn away, not seeing my mother, or brothers, or sisters, or one familiar face; no voice to speak a word of comfort, or to inspire me with the smallest hope that anything human took an interest in me.’

Trelawny had his own sub-Byronic line in self-pity and self-dramatisation to peddle, but even in Neptune and under a captain like Fremantle, there were no soft edges to the gunroom. ‘I thought my heart would break with grief,’ William Badcock, a fellow ‘mid’ in Neptune when Hastings joined, recalled. ‘The first night on board was not the most pleasant; the noises unusual to a novice – sleeping in a hammock for the first time – its tarry smell – the wet cables for a bed carpet … Time however reconciles us to everything, and the gaiety and thoughtlessness of youth, added to the cocked hat, desk, spy-glass, etc of a nautical fit out, assisted wonderfully to dry my tears.’

And for all the brutal horseplay – ‘sawing your bed-posts’, ‘reefing your bed-clothes’, ‘blowing the grampus’ (sluicing a new boy with water) – and the ever-present threat of the ‘sky parlour’ or masthead for punishment, there was none of the institutional or private tyranny in Neptune so vividly recorded in Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son. A midshipman coming off watch might spend his first half-hour unravelling his tightly knotted blanket in the dark, but with cribbage and draughts to play, book work to be done and stories of Captain Cook to be wheedled out of the old quartermaster, Badcock did his ‘fellows in Neptune the justice to say that a more kind-hearted set was not to be met with’.

Hastings did not have long in Plymouth to acclimatise himself to this new world. On 17 May, after a hasty refit, the Neptune was ready again for sea. ‘I begin my journal with saying that I have passed as miserable a day and night as I could well expect,’ Fremantle complained to his wife Betsey the same night, as his sluggish-handling new ship pitched and rolled in heavy seas and Plymouth, home and family slipped below the horizon:

tho’ I have no particular reason why that should be the case … I dined with young Hastings only on a fowl and some salt pork, as triste as a gentleman needs to be … my mind hangs constantly towards you and your children, and I am at times so low I cannot hold up my head … my only hope is in a peace, which I trust in God may be brought about through the mediation of Russia. These French rascals will never come out and fight but will continue to annoy and wear out both our spirits and constitutions.

This two-month cruise with the Channel Squadron gave Hastings his first experience of blockade work, and after another brief refit at Plymouth he was soon again at sea. Fremantle had no more real belief in bringing the French out to battle than he had ever had, but by 3 August they were once more off Ushant and before the end of the month had joined Collingwood’s growing squadron blockading the enemy fleets inside Cádiz. ‘I am in hope Lord Nelson will come here as nobody is to my mind so equal to the command as he is,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife on 31 August:

it will require some management to supply so large a force with water and provisions, and as the combined fleets are safely lodged in Cadiz, here I conclude we shall remain until Domesday or until we are blown off the Coast, when the French men will again escape us. I can say little about my Ship, we go much as usual and if any opportunity offers of bringing the Enemy’s Fleet to battle, I think she will show herself, but still I am not half satisfied at being in a large Ship that don’t sail and must be continually late in action.

They might well have stayed there till doomsday, but while Fremantle fretted and flogged, a messenger was already on the road to Cádiz with orders for the French Admiral Villeneuve to take the fleet into the Mediterranean in support of the Emperor’s new European ambitions. From the collapse of the Peace of Amiens Napoleon’s naval strategy had been marked by an utter disregard for realities, but this time he had excelled himself, timing his orders to arrive on the very day before Fremantle and the whole blockading fleet at last got their wish for Nelson. ‘On the 28th of September was joined by H.M. Ship Victory Admirl Lord Nelson,’ wrote James Martin, an able seaman in Neptune, ‘and the Ajax and the Thunderer it is Imposeble to Discribe the Heartfelt Satifaction of the whole fleet upon this Occasion and the Confidance of Success with which we ware Inspired.’

‘I think if you were to see the Neptune you would find her very much altered since you were on bd,’ Fremantle told Frank’s father, sloth, dyspepsia and ill-temper all dispersed by a single dinner with Nelson and the promise of the second place in the line in any coming action. ‘We are all now scraping the ship’s sides to paint like the Victory [black, with buff-coloured stripes running between the portholes], the fellows make such a noise I can hardly hear myself. Pray make my respects to Mrs Hastings & beg her [to have] no wit of apprehension about her son who has made many friends here, & who is able to take his own part.’

Opinions were still divided as to whether or not the French would come out, but with five ‘spy’ frigates posted close in to the city, and Nelson’s battle plan circulated among the captains, the fleet knew what was expected of them. In the brute simplicity of the tactics Hastings was to learn an invaluable lesson, but the great danger of breaking the line in the way Nelson intended was that it ceded the opening advantage to the enemy, exposing a sluggish handler like Neptune in the light October breezes to the full enemy broadsides for anything up to twenty minutes before she could get beneath a foe’s vulnerable stern.

Nobody in Neptune was under any illusion as to what that would mean, but nothing could contain the excitement when the signal from the inshore squadron finally came. ‘All hearts towards evening beat with joyful anxiety for the next day,’ Badcock wrote on 20 October, as Neptune answered the signal for a general chase, ‘which we hoped would crown an anxious blockade with a successful battle. When night closed in, the rockets and blue lights, with signal guns, informed us the inshore squadron still kept sight of our foes, and like good and watchful dogs, our ships continue to send forth occasionally a growly cannon to keep us on the alert, and to cheer us with the hope of a glorious day on the morrow.’

As partitions, furnishings and bulkheads were removed, decks cleared, livestock slaughtered – Fremantle had a goat on board that had provided him with milk – Neptune turned south-west to give her the weather gage in the coming action. From the signals of their ‘watchdogs’ they knew that the enemy were still moving in a southerly direction, and as dawn broke on 21 October, first one sail and then a whole ‘forest of strange masts’ appeared some eleven miles to leeward to show that the Combined Fleet was at last where Nelson wanted it.

The sun, William Badcock – midshipman of the forecastle and first in Neptune to see the enemy – remembered, ‘looked hazy and watery, as if it smiled in tears on many brave hearts which fate had decreed should never see it set … I ran aft and informed the officer of the watch. The captain was on deck in a moment, and ere it was well light, the signals were flying through the fleet to bear up and form the order of sailing in two columns.’

As the ship slipped into those atavistic rhythms that no one who witnessed them ever forgot, and hammocks were stowed, cutlasses and muskets distributed, powder horns and spare flintlocks issued, magazines and powder rooms unlocked, operating area prepared, and final letters written, full sail was set and Neptune strove to take her place in the line. In Nelson’s original battle plan Fremantle had been ordered to follow Temeraire, Superb and Victory in the weather division, but with only the short October day ahead of them, and speed crucial if the enemy were not to escape, precedence went out of the window in favour of an ad hoc order that left the two columns to sort themselves out, as sailing capacities dictated, behind Victory and the Royal Sovereign.

It was now that the ‘old Neptune, which never was a good sailer’, as William Badcock put it, ‘took it into her head to sail better that morning than I ever remembered’, and at about 10 a.m. she came up alongside Nelson’s Victory. Fremantle intended to ‘pass her and break the enemy’s line’, Badcock recalled, ‘but poor Lord Nelson hailed us from the stern-walk of the Victory, and said, “Neptune, take in your studding-sails and drop astern; I shall break the line myself.”’

It was probably the eleven-year-old Hastings’s sole glimpse of Nelson, but if he ever wondered what it was that gave him his unique hold over men, he did not have long to wait for an answer. As Neptune dropped astern of Victory, and the Temeraire slipped between them to take her place in the van, Nelson’s last signal before the order to ‘engage’ was relayed through the fleet. ‘At 11,’ the Neptune’s log laconically noted, ‘Answered the general signal, “England expects every man will do his duty”; Captain Fremantle inspected the different decks, and made known the above signal, which was received with cheers.’

He ‘addressed us at our Different Quarters in words few’, James Martin remembered, ‘but Intimated that … all that was Dear to us Hung upon a Ballance and their Happyness depended upon us and their safty allso Happy the Man who Boldly Venture his Life in such a Cause if he shold Survive the Battle how Sweet will be the Recolection be [sic] and if he fall he fall Covred with Glory and Honnor and Morned By a Greatfull Country the Brave Live Gloryous and Lemented Die.’

In the heavy swell and light winds – and to the sounds of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Britons Strike Home’ drifting across the water from ships’ bands – Neptune closed on the enemy with agonising slowness. ‘It was a beautiful sight,’ Badcock wrote,

when their line was completed; their broadsides turned towards us, showing their iron teeth, and now and then trying the range of a shot to ascertain the distance, that they might, the moment we came within point blank (about six hundred yards), open the fire upon our van ships … Some of them were painted like ourselves – with double yellow sides, some with a broad single red or yellow streak; others all black, and the noble Santissima Trinidada (158), with four distinct lines of red, with a white ribbon between … her head splendidly ornamented with a colossal group of figures, painted white, representing the Holy Trinity … This magnificent ship was destined to be our opponent.

It was not just a ‘beautiful sight’, but an exhilarating and terrifying one, and at the stately walking pace at which the fleets closed there was all the time in the world to take it in. At 11.30 Neptune’s log at last recorded the signal ‘to locate the enemy’s line, and engage to leeward’, and as first Victory and then Temeraire broke through ahead, and Neptune prepared to receive her opening broadsides, Fremantle ordered everyone, except the officers, to lie down to reduce casualties.

Until this moment Hastings had been on the quarterdeck with Fremantle, an unusually small, frightened and superfluous spectator, neatly dressed in the new suit Betsey Fremantle had had made for him, but to his future chagrin the First Lieutenant now ordered him to a safer circle of hell below. ‘A man should witness a battle in a three-decker from the middle deck,’ a young marine lieutenant in Victory later wrote, struggling to evoke the blind, smoke-filled, deafening chaos of the battle that awaited Hastings as he made his way down to the lower decks of Neptune,

for it beggars all description: it bewilders the senses of sight and hearing. There was the fire from above, the fire from below, besides the fire from the deck I was upon, the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, where every man appeared a devil. Lips might move, but orders and hearing were out of the question, everything was done by signs.

Even to those still on the quarterdeck, the smoke of battle and the tangle of fallen masts and rigging had already obscured Victory, but as Neptune closed on her target, the gap that Nelson had punched between Villeneuve’s Bucentaure and Redoubtable widened to welcome her. For the final ten minutes of her approach Neptune was forced to take the combined fire of three enemy ships, until at 12.35 she at last broke through astern of Bucentaure and, in the perfect tactical position, delivered a broadside from thirty yards’ range. ‘At 12.35, we broke their line,’ the log reads – a typical mix of understatement, spurious accuracy, guesswork and partial knowledge.

At 12.47, we engaged a two-deck ship, with a flag at the mizzen. At 1.30, entirely dismasted her, she struck her colours; and bore down and attacked the Santa Trinidada, a Spanish four-decker of 140 guns … raked her as we passed under her stern; and at 1.50 opened our fire on her starboard quarter. At 2.40, shot away her main and mizzen masts; at 2.50, her foremast; at 3, she cried for quarter, and hailed us to say they had surrendered; she then stuck English colours to the stump of her main mast; gave her three cheers.

Neptune herself was in little better shape – ‘standing and running rigging much cut; foretop-gallant and royal yard shot away … wounded in other places; fore yard nearly shot in two, and ship pulled in several places’ – but as the smoke cleared they caught their first overview of the shambles around them. ‘We had now Been Enverloped with Smoak Nearly three Howers,’ wrote James Martin. ‘Upon this Ships [Santa Trinidada] striking the Smoak Clearing a way then we had a vew of the Hostle fleet thay were scattred a Round us in all Directions Sum Dismasted and Sum were Compleat wrecks Sum had Left of Fireng and sum ware Engagen with Redoubled furey it was all most imposeble to Distinguish to what Nation thay Belonged.’

It was a momentary respite – ‘but a few minets to take a Peep a Round us’ – but in the midst of this chaos they could see Victory and Temeraire still ‘warmly engaged’ and, more critically, ‘the six van ships of the enemy bearing down to attack’ them. In his original memorandum Nelson had anticipated this second phase of the battle, and as separate ship-actions continued to the rear of them, Neptune, Leviathan, Conqueror and Agamemnon manoeuvred to form a rough line of defence. ‘At 3.30, opened fire on them,’ Neptune’s log continued, ‘assisted by the Leviathan and Conqueror; observed one of them to have all her masts shot away by our united fire.’

With nearly all her own sails shot away, however, and not ‘a brace or bowline left’, Neptune was in no state to give chase when the remaining enemy abandoned their attack and escaped to southward. For another hour or so the fight continued around them in a mix of close actions and long-range duels, but for Neptune – and, at 4.30, just a quarter of an hour after she had ceased firing, Nelson himself – the battle was over. ‘Three different powers to rule the main,’ ran a popular song reflecting on the fate of the three ‘Neptunes’ that had fought at Trafalgar,

Assumed old Neptune’s name:

One from Gallia, one from Spain,

And one from England came.

The British Neptune as of yore,

Proved master of the day;

The Spanish Neptune is no more,

The French one ran away.

In the immediate aftermath of the battle, though, as carpenters and surgeons went to work with their knives and saws, corpses were flung overboard, and the news of Nelson’s death spread through the fleet, there was little temptation to triumphalism. During his last moments Nelson had repeatedly enjoined Hardy to drop anchor at the end of the day, and yet for some inexplicable reason Collingwood decided against it, condemning his scattered and dismasted fleet itself to every sailor’s nightmare of a heavy swell, a freshening wind and a perilous lee shore.

It would have been harder to say which stuck most vividly in men’s memories of Trafalgar, the battle itself or its terrible aftermath, as the stricken members of the fleet fought for their lives and prizes against a gale that was of a piece with everything that had gone before. In spite of her damage the Neptune was actually in a better state than most to ride it out, and after taking the Royal Sovereign in tow the following day, she was deployed again on the twenty-third to counter a bold enemy attempt to recapture what it could of its lost ships.

With the weather worsening again after a brief respite – the barometer reading that night at the Royal Observatory just south of Cádiz was the lowest ever recorded – and the shattered Combined Fleet in no state to renew a general action, anxieties in Neptune rapidly turned to their hard-won prize. From the moment they had gone into action the towering Santissima Trinidada – the largest battleship in the world – had been marked as theirs, and their first sight of her after the battle, when a prize crew under William Badcock went aboard to take possession, provided a bloody testament to the appalling destruction Neptune’s ‘beautiful firing’ had inflicted. ‘She had between 3 and 400 killed and wounded,’ Badcock told his father, ‘her Beams where coverd with Blood, Brains, and peices of Flesh, and the after part of her Decks with wounded, some without Legs and some without an Arm, what calamities War brings on.’

As conditions grew more desperate than ever, and self-interest gave way to self-preservation, Collingwood gave the order to ‘sink, burn and destroy’ all prizes, and Badcock’s thwarted crew went to work in the dark and mountainous seas. ‘We had to tie the poor mangled wretches around their waists, or where we could,’ another of Neptune’s officers recalled, as lower gun ports were opened, holes cut in the hull, and the last of the wounded winched off, ‘and lower them into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.’

There were 407 taken off in the Neptune’s boats alone – a last boat went back for the ship’s cat, spotted perched on the muzzle of a gun as the Trinidada rolled helplessly in her death throes – and shortly after midnight the pride of the Spanish fleet and Neptune’s prize-money went to the bottom. ‘I am afraid this brilliant Action will not put much money in my pocket,’ wrote Fremantle – unusually benign for him, given that he had nothing more tangible to show for Trafalgar than the Trinidada’s pug dog (the cat had gone to Ajax),

but I think much may arise out of it ultimately. This last Week has been a scene of Anxiety and fatigue beyond any I ever experienced … I am at present towing the Victory and the Admiral has just made the signal for me to go with her to Gibraltar … We have ten men killed and 37 Wounded, which is very trifling when compared to some of the other Ships, however we alone have certainly the whole credit of taking the Santissima Trinidada, who struck to us alone. Adml. Villeneuve was with me over two days, I found him a very pleasant and Gentlemanlike man, the poor man was very low! … This fatigue and employment has entirely driven away the bile and if poor Nelson had not been among the slain I should be most completely satisfied.

His letter is dated ‘off Cadiz the 28th Oct. 1805’. He was right to be satisfied. By any other measure than a butcher’s bill the Neptune had acquitted herself heroically. ‘7 November,’ reads the ship’s log ten days later, as they made passage for Gibraltar: ‘Captain Fremantle read a letter of thanks from Vice Admiral Collingwood to all officers & men belonging to the Fleet for their conduct on the 21st Octo. Performed Divine Service & returned thanks to the Almighty God for the victory gained on the day.’ Frank Hastings would have done well to have forgotten his father’s atheism and joined in. At the age of just eleven he had survived the storm of the century and the greatest battle ever fought under sail. The next time – twenty-two years later at Navarino – there would be an action of similar proportions, his brilliance and daring would have gone a long way towards provoking it.

III

One of the great disappointments of Hastings’s story is that there is neither a portrait of the unusually small, fair-haired lad who had fought at Trafalgar, nor any surviving account from him of his part in the battle. It is clear from the Fremantle correspondence that Frank wrote an indignant protest at being sent below, but it would seem likely that his disappointed father destroyed that along with all his other letters in the aftermath of the Kangaroo incident, reducing his boy at one embittered stroke to a silent and anonymous role in all the great dramas of his early life.

There is an unusually rich and varied archive to fill the gaps – captains’ letters, testimonials, Admiralty minutes, ships’ logs, tailors’ bills – but nothing quite makes up for the absence of Frank’s own voice. It is easy enough to follow the external outline of his career over the next six years, but the formative steps that operated on his genetic inheritance to transform him from the small frightened boy on the quarterdeck of Neptune into the commander of the Kangaroo remain frustratingly, elusively, out of reach.

By the time one hears his own voice, the movement and rhythms of a man-of-war, the mouldering damp and discomfort, the proximity of death and violence, the chronic sleeplessness and brutal intimacy that were the universal experience of any young officer were so much a part of his nature that they pass unnoticed. In the youthful letters of a Peel or Goodenough there is a vivid sense of what it was like to be a boy at sea, but when Hastings finally emerges from his midshipman’s chrysalis it is as the finished product, as inured to the hardships and dangers of naval life as he is to the sense of wonder and curiosity that clearly once touched him.

There are times, in fact – so complete is the absence of ‘colour’, so absolute the sense of purpose and concentration in his adult letters – when it feels as though one is following a man through a sensory desert. Over the last ten years of the Napoleonic Wars he served and fought from the China Seas to the Gulf of Mexico, yet one would no more know from Hastings what it felt like to be shipwrecked in the icy black waters off Halifax than how shattering it was to drag a massive naval gun through the swamps and bayous of New Orleans.

The magical island fortresses of the Ligurian Sea, the baroque grandeur of Valetta, the feckless elegance of Nauplia’s Palamidi fortress, the harsh and brilliant clarity of the Cyclades, the romance of the Dardanelles, the numinous charge that attaches itself to the landscape of Greece – these were the background to his fighting life, but one would need one’s longitudes and latitudes to know it. It was not that Hastings was blind to either people or place – he was a naval officer trained to see and record – but where other men looked at modern Nafpaktos and saw historic Lepanto, Hastings looked at Lepanto and saw Nafpaktos; where other men saw the harbour from which the Argo sailed or the little ribbon of island on which Spartan soldiers first surrendered, Hastings saw only currents, breezes, lines of fire and anchorages.

It cannot have been always so – he was too intelligent, too widely cultured, too well-liked, too much a man of the Age of Byron for that – and no such child can have excited the intense affection and dread with which family and friends awaited the news from Trafalgar. The first despatches from Collingwood had reached Falmouth after a voyage of only eight days, but for the families in the great houses, cottages, vicarages and deaneries that serviced the navy the arrival of the schooner Pickle signalled just the start of the waiting. ‘Thursday 7th Nov. I was much alarmed by Nelly’s ghastly appearance immediately after breakfast,’ Betsey Fremantle wrote in her journal, the day after Collingwood’s despatches reached London,

who came in to say Dudley had brought from Winslow the account that a most dreadful action had been fought off Cadiz, Nelson & several Captains killed, & twenty ships were taken. I really felt undescribable misery until the arrival of the Post, but was relieved from such a wretched state of anxious suspense by a letter from Lord Garlies, who congratulated me on Fremantle’s safety & the conspicuous share he had in the Victory gained on the 21st off Cadiz … I fear the number of killed and wounded will be very great when the returns are sent. How thankful I am Fremantle has once more escaped unhurt. The accounts greatly shook my nerves.

For the Hastings family, immured in the middle of the English countryside with their maps and their fears, the wait was still longer. ‘I should certainly not have delayed so long writing to you had I not so much leisure on my hands,’ Frank’s father at last wrote to Warren Hastings more than six weeks after the battle.

Great inclination to oblige, frequent opportunities of doing it and a thorough conviction of its propriety, all this made the matter so easy that I never failed every morning at breakfast to declare my intention, always however determining to put it off to the last moment of the post, in order to send you news, which not coming, I thought it hardly worthwhile to trouble you, and so it went on until the glorious victory of Trafalgar was announced when my anxiety for your little protégé my son Frank only eleven years old who was on board the Neptune so damped my spirits, & absorbed every other consideration, as to render me unfit for any other thing, and it was not till about ten days ago that our minds were set at ease by the returns of the Neptune at last arriving, and also seeing a letter from my little Hero which completely dissipated every anxiety.

The wait had put a strain on even his oldest and closest friendship – Lord Moira, thinking that Frank was with Cornwallis in the Channel had written flippantly to Charles Hastings – but when the news came everything was forgotten in the flood of relief and goodwill. ‘Most truly do I congratulate you,’ Moira wrote almost immediately again, ‘… on the safety of your Frank … When he comes to be prosing in his cane chair at Fourscore it will be a fine thing to have to boast of sharing the glory in the Battle of Trafalgar.’

‘My Dear General,’ wrote the Duke of Northumberland – another old soldier in the American Wars with a son in the navy,

I have longed for some time to congratulate you on the English Victory gained over the combined fleets of France & Spain, but could not do so till I saw an authenticated List of the killed and wounded. Last night relieved me from my difficulties, & brought me the Gazette Extraordinary, & I now therefore take the earliest opportunity of writing to say how happy I am that my friend your youngster has had his share in so glorious a Victory unhurt. I hope he likes the Sea as well as ever, and flatter myself, He will in time prove another Lord Collingwood. I should have said Nelson but that I would prefer his being a Great Living Naval Character, to a dead one.

There was more than a touch of Jane Austen’s Mrs Musgrove about Parnell Hastings, and as the letters flowed in at Willesley anxiety gave way to a pride every bit as extravagant. ‘Mrs Hastings is a great bore,’ Fremantle wrote back to his wife, after she had complained of the Hastings dragging ‘poor’ Captain Arklom – previously in Neptune – to dinner to ply him with ‘silly questions about their Boy’.

I am afraid Hastings will shoot me, for the first Lieutenant thinking such a small child could not be of use on Deck desired him to go below, which he did without remorse, but is now ashamed of it and have wrote to his father something on the Subject, you must call upon the Woman, and say what is really true that he is a very clever and well disposed boy, and very attentive to his Navigation, if you are half as fidgety about your Doddy who seems to occupy you so much, I will break every bone in your skin.

There is a foreshadowing here of the older Hastings – morbidly sensitive, proud, honourable, intense – and probably a glimpse, too, of the endless teasing and ragging that was part and parcel of a gun-room world that hovered between the chivalries of war and the brute realities of a floating prep school. ‘Young Hastings get [sic] Volumes by every opportunity,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife, as the Neptune resumed blockading duties off Cádiz. ‘His mother put his letters to my address without an envelope, but the part opposite the seal concluded with your Affe. Mother it made no difference, as I did not read a Sylable [sic], indeed if I had I conclude it contained much what Mothers write to their Children at that age.’

Child or not, though – and Hastings was now just twelve – there was a career to be planned for him if he was to be a second Collingwood, and on 2 June 1806 he was transferred by boat from the Neptune to the forty-two-gun Sea Horse under the command of Captain John Stewart. In his later years Hastings never forgot the seamanship and sheer endurance demanded by a winter blockade in Neptune, but the frigate and not the lumbering three-decker was the glamour ship of the navy, the vessel in which captains made their names and fortunes and young officers and midshipmen had their chance to punch above their rank and weight.

The move was the making of Hastings – the Sea Horse the perfect training in the kind of coastal warfare he would make his own – but before that there was convoy duty and a return to England for the first time in eighteen months. ‘My boy of Trafalgar is just arrived,’ Sir Charles wrote proudly to Warren Hastings from Willesley on 2 November, only five days after the Sea Horse anchored at Portsmouth: ‘he appears an unlicked cub – but is considerably advanced in nautical knowledge for his age and time of service – he is only thirteen [twelve in fact] last Febry has been but a year and a half at sea, and is as capable of keeping a day’s reckoning, putting the ship about, in short navigating a ship on board, and that is according to the Capt’s testimony.’

This was not all blind partiality – the only fault Captain Stewart could find with his charge was that he would not grow – and Warren Hastings was more than happy to respond in kind. ‘I think you have much happiness yet in store,’ he wrote back. ‘You will live to see one of your sons a finished gentleman; and the other standing on the summit of glory as a British seaman. Charles Imhoff [Warren Hastings’s stepson] tells me he never saw a youth so much improved, in knowledge, manners or manliness, as the latter in the short time in which he has not seen him.’

Frank had just two months at Willesley – his first holiday at the old Abney seat to which his parents had recently returned – and it was probably as well that he could call on his blockading experience to prepare him for the rigours of home life. He had been only two years old when his father moved to Jersey, and the family’s long absence had left the house in a state of almost comic dilapidation, its roof leaking, draughts howling, the beds a misery, and the dining table so small – Sir Charles complained to Warren Hastings – that the family could not dress for dinner until after dinner because they spent their meals kicking each other under the table and filthying each other’s clothes.

Almost nothing is left now of Willesley – the ornamental lake, the contours of an eighteenth-century landscaped park – but a Vanbrugh-esque stable gateway of Cyclopean proportions gives some idea of what Sir Charles Hastings took on when the family returned to their ‘ruined mansion’. A surviving estate book underlines how seriously he took his duties, but if he did all he could to indulge his wife’s and his son Charles’s passion for the place, he remained at heart the man of affairs he had always been, stoically resigned to finding himself dependent on the London mail or a sight of his boy, Frank, for proof that there was a world beyond his Willesley exile.

He was determined, too, that Frank’s future should not be forgotten while he was at home, taking on the best mathematics tutor that he could find for him; but by the beginning of January 1807 the Sea Horse was being fitted for sea and the end of the holiday was in sight. ‘I have been much more interested about the brilliant exploits of Sir J. Duckworth in the Archipelago, or rather against the Porte,’ Sir Charles wrote rather prematurely to Warren Hastings on 17 April, after the Sea Horse had been diverted from the Far East to the Mediterranean to face a growing Turkish threat in the Aegean, ‘and if it is true that he has forced the Dardanelles and destroyed the whole Turkish navy – Lady Hastings may sleep in peace for she has been much alarmed at the boy going up the Mediterranean and being taken by one of their corsairs and perhaps undergoing a certain operation that would fit him more for the Seraglio than the Navy.’

Frank was well out of the dismal failure of Duckworth’s expedition, and if he had had to forgo Warren Hastings’s Eastern patronage, the Hastings name worked just as well closer to home. ‘I have much pleasure in acquainting you your Dear Frank is in the highest health and spirits,’ General Sir John Smith, an old colleague of Frank’s father on Sir Henry Clinton’s staff during the American War of Independence, wrote from Gibraltar on 21 July: ‘he dined with me about ten days since and Sailed again two days after to join Lord Collingwood … I beg my Dr Sir Charles will rest assured that his old academical fellow poet – Jack Smith – will make a point of paying all possible attention to his son Frank Hastings and that he shall have a mother in Mrs Smith when necessary – anything you may wish to send him – direct to my care and he shall receive it safe.’

With the inevitable lag in news there would always be something for Lady Hastings to worry about, and Mrs Smith was already too late with her motherly attentions. ‘We are just returned from a rather successful cruise,’ John Stewart, another bold, intelligent and talented frigate captain, who had circumnavigated the globe with Vancouver, had written to Sir Charles a fortnight earlier,

and going to sail again in search of Lord Collingwood, who we conclude is gone up to attempt what I expect he will not succeed in, as the French influence will keep the Turks in a warlike temper … We have been unlucky enough to lose a Lieutnt last cruise he was killed in a boat by a round shot which also took the arm of little Lord John Hay [aged fourteen] both of which things vexed me … the former however could not have been prevented, but the little boys were expressly forbid going, I found young Hay had been a favourite of the poor Lieutnt [Young], & had been smuggled into the boat.*

The incident was not enough to stop Hastings stowing away in the ship’s boat just five days later – ‘I gave him a scold but could not be very angry,’ Stewart told Sir Charles – but a Mediterranean frigate was no place to hide a boy. The injury to Hay had occurred in the Hyères Roads while the Sea Horse was engaged with an enemy bombard and merchantman, and over the next two years she was in constant action, exchanging fire with shore batteries at Barcelona, cutting out French vessels, capturing the castle of Pianosa off Elba or destroying magazines and guns in a brilliant raid on Isola di Giannutri in the Ligurian Sea. ‘All our frigate captains are great generals,’ an exhausted but grateful Collingwood, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, wrote: ‘… they have taken seven forts, garrisons, or castles, within the last two months, and scaling towers at midnight, and storming redoubts at mid-day, are becoming familiar occurrences. It is really astonishing, those youths think that nothing is beyond their enterprise, and they seldom fail of success.’

There could have been no better theatre for Hastings to learn the importance of this brand of warfare, and with the exception, perhaps, of Cochrane, few abler teachers than Stewart. In the scale of European events these victories might have seemed little more than pinpricks, but quite apart from the effects on national morale, the mayhem caused along the French and Spanish coasts by ships like the Sea Horse or Imperieuse demonstrated that under the right command naval power could exert a strategic influence on land warfare out of all proportion to numbers or firepower.

Hastings would never be averse to the kind of verve and élan that characterised these operations – the Kangaroo demonstrates that – but there were other lessons, too, of a dourer and more professional kind, that he was taking in. At the age of fourteen he had served under two captains of very different temperaments, and if there was one thing he had learned from both, it was that if there had to be war – ‘the art of killing in the most speedy way possible’, as Hastings bluntly put it – then it had to be fought with all the ruthlessness and efficiency that could be mustered.

Implicit in this credo was the conviction that the end justified the means – fireships, mortar ships, ‘stink vessels’, hot shot, anything – because wherever the Battle of Waterloo was to be won, Trafalgar had most certainly not been won on the playing fields of Eton. ‘The objection of unfair is so ridiculous, and so childish,’ Hastings would again write, haughtily showing just how well he had absorbed the lessons of the Mediterranean, ‘that I should consider I was insulting the understanding of the public by mentioning it, had I not heard it reiterated so often, and by people whose opinions go for something in the world … I have heard pretenders to humanity talk of the cruelty of hot shot, shells, etc; it really appears to me the superlative of cant to talk of the art of war (or, in other words, the method of killing men most expeditiously) and humanity in the same breath.’

This might have been Cochrane talking, and with the political situation deteriorating – Portugal under threat, Turkey and Russia (a nigh impossible ‘double’) both hostile, Denmark implacable, Sicily in danger, America muttering, France threatening the Ionian Isles and Britain without an ally to her name except the bizarre Gustavus of Sweden – Hastings would have found few dissenters in the Mediterranean Squadron. ‘We have been out from Syracuse ten days looking after the Toulon fleet which is expected to be making for Corfu,’ Captain Stewart – as ever spoiling for a fight – wrote to Sir Charles Hastings. ‘Thornbrough is following them up & Ld Collingwood (with whom we are) sitting in their route, our force is five of the line, myself & a brig; theirs five of the line, four frigates & several corvettes besides transports in all 20 sail, we are full of hopes and ardour & night or day they are to be attacked the moment we can meet them.’

Stewart was disappointed of his ‘Toulon Gentlemen’, but by the time he wrote – 11 January 1808, dated ’07 in error – the Sea Horse was in the eastern Mediterranean and facing a very different kind of challenge. Towards the end of the previous year Collingwood had negotiated an arrangement with the Porte to exclude Turkish warships from the Aegean, but as the Greek islanders took advantage of their masters’ absence and Anglo-Ottoman relations hovered somewhere between war and peace, the Sea Horse found herself the solitary British presence in an exclusion zone that the Turks had no intention of honouring. ‘You will expect me to say something about the Turks,’ Stewart told Sir Charles, warming to a subject dear to every frigate captain’s heart – prize-money –

with whom we have been Philandering for so long, in fact from the hour that Sebastiani [Napoleon’s envoy to the Porte] knew of the Treaty of Tilsit, Sir A. Paget [Britain’s Ambassador] might have departed, as it was (between friends) it ended in them at last sending him away & saying they would not receive any more flags of Truce from the ship he was in. We in my opinion did wrong in forbearing from making war on them during the negotiations … had we done as we have since done, take burn & destroy, I seriously believe they might have made peace with us … Now I understand they want to begin a negotiation, we are not now at war they say & it is no prize money to us Captains, but I would like to know what name can be given to our footing with that nation, we must coin a word. I alone destroyed or took twelve of their vessels, only four of which are in Malta, who is to account for the rest?

‘Take burn & destroy’ – it might have been the motto of the Mediterranean fleet – and whatever his fears over the legal status of his prizes, they were never going to stop Stewart when the chance came. Through the early months of 1808 the Sea Horse had been constantly engaged in capturing or destroying cargo bound for Constantinople, and when on 1 July, while riding at anchor off the island of Sira, wind came of bigger game with the news that, in defiance of Collingwood’s agreement, a substantial Turkish flotilla had come through the Dardanelles to punish their rebellious Greek subject, Stewart did not hesitate.

The same day he began working the Sea Horse up from Sira against a north-north-easterly, and at noon on the fifth he received confirmation of the Turkish movements from a Greek ship bound for Malta. Taking advantage of a light south-easterly the Sea Horse immediately made all sail, and at 5.45 p.m. saw between the islands of Skopelos and Dromo two enemy men-of-war, the twenty-six-gun Alis-Fezan and the larger and more powerful fifty-two-gun, 1,300-ton Badere-Zaffer, Captain Scandril Kitchuc-Ali.

Stewart had, in fact, been expecting far longer odds for the forty-two-gun Sea Horse, and faced with only two opposing vessels, closed on the Turkish ships until at 9.30 he was near enough to hail the Turkish commodore and demand his surrender. ‘This Captain Scandril flatly refused,’ William James, prize court judge, historian and shamelessly partisan hammer of the American navy, wrote, ‘and into the hull of the Badere-Zaffer went a whole double-shotted broadside of the Sea Horse. Nor was the Turkish frigate slow in returning the fire. In this way, with the wind a light breeze about two points abaft the starboard beam, the two frigates went off engaging; the Badere-Zaffer gradually edging away to close her consort, who was about a gun-shot distant.’

For the next half-hour the two ships manoeuvred for position, with the heavier and better-manned Badere-Zaffer attempting to board, and Stewart employing all his seamanship to fight the battle on his terms. At 10 o’clock he had again got his ship on the larboard quarter of his enemy when the Alis-Fezan interposed herself, taking from Sea Horse at a range of no more than a cable’s length a devastating starboard broadside that within ten minutes had driven her out of the action.

As the Alis-Fezan limped burning into the Aegean night, her crew decimated by the Sea Horse’s gunnery, her hull racked by explosions, Stewart turned his attention back to the Badere-Zaffer. The Turkish captain was as determined as before to exploit his overwhelming advantage in manpower, but as the two ships ran before the wind exchanging broadsides and Captain Scandril again closed to board, Stewart swung the Sea Horse across the Badere-Zaffer’s bow – losing her gaff vangs and mizzen and starboard mizzen back-stays to the enemy bowsprit as he did so – and raked her crowded forecastle with grape from his stern-chase guns as she passed.

Outsailed and outgunned as they were, the Badere-Zaffer’s crew gave place to no one when it came to courage, and the two ships continued to exchange broadsides until the Turkish cannon at last fell silent. As the Badere-Zaffer settled helpless in the water, shortly after I o’clock in the morning, her mizzen, fore and main topmasts all gone, her hull so badly shot up she could barely float, Stewart brought the Sea Horse under her stern and hailed her to surrender. A desultory fire from her after-guns was the only answer, and with one last starboard broadside, Stewart, ‘finding that his shattered opponent would neither answer nor fire, very prudently, and very humanely too, hauled off; and, after standing on a little further, brought to on the starboard tack to wait for daylight’.

It took one more broadside, and a mutiny of the Badere-Zaffer’s surviving officers – who hauled down her colours from the shattered stump of her mizzenmast while they held the half-mad Scandril in his chair – to end the engagement, but shortly after dawn it was over. ‘Sent the 1st Lieut to take possession of her,’ the Sea Horse’s log recorded, with a characteristically laconic indifference to the human drama: ‘she proved to be the Badere Zaffer a large Turkish frigate, a complement of 540 men commanded by Scandali Kichuc Ali, Captain. Her consort’s name was the Alex Fesan carrying 24 brass guns and two mortars. The enemy lost 170 killed and 200 wounded, ours 5 seamen killed [two next to Hastings when a gun blew up] & ten wounded and two dangerously.’

For all the good the Badere-Zaffer ever did the Sea Horse’s crew – the prize court refused to buy her for the navy – Scandril might as well have succeeded in a last-ditch attempt to scuttle her, but Stewart was determined to add her to the growing haul of bombards, brigs, schooners, wine, ‘senna and austrich feathers’ that he had already sent back to Malta. Over the next days her battered hull was made seaworthy enough to be towed, a skeleton crew was detained to man their prize on the voyage back to Valetta, and a Greek vessel bound for Constantinople ‘co-opted’ to repatriate their prisoners.

It was not long before the Sea Horse was following them, because with a demi-thaw in diplomatic relations between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, she was back again at Malta in September to receive on board another old friend of Sir Charles’s, Britain’s new ambassador to the Porte, Mr Robert Adair. Through the previous months the Turks had done all they could to stall negotiations, and even in a more conciliatory atmosphere it was the end of January 1809 before the ship’s company was again manning the yards to salute ‘His Excellency Mr Adair the Ambassador on his disembarking’ at Constantinople. ‘The walls of the Seraglio are like the walls of Newstead,’ another young English aristocrat, Lord Byron, on his travels with his old Cambridge friend and future philhellene John Cam Hobhouse, recorded of his first impressions of the ‘polis’,

but the ride by the walls of the city on the land side is beautiful, imagine four miles of immense triple battlements covered with Ivy, surmounted with 218 towers, and on the other side of the road Turkish burying grounds (the loveliest spots on earth) full of enormous cypresses, I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, and Delphi, I have traversed great parts of Turkey and many other parts of Europe and some of Asia, but I never beheld a work of Nature or Art, which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side, from the Seven Towers to the End of the Golden Horn.

To a young naval midshipman like Hastings, though, it was the seaward defences of Constantinople that would have been of most interest. The captains who formed part of Sir John Duckworth’s abortive expedition were adamant that the city had been there for the taking if they had only been allowed, and over the next two months of diplomatic inactivity and interminable salutes, Hastings had all the opportunity he could want to assess those defensive frailties that were still exercising his mind twenty years later.

These were all the more obvious, too, because the Sea Horse had arrived at Constantinople at a juncture in the city’s history that was bloody even by its own violent and unstable standards. The contorted negotiations with Britain had from the first been conducted against a background of riots and rebellion, and a frenzy of beheadings, strangulations, mutilations and traditional Ottoman family planning – two hundred women of Mustafa IV’s harem were drowned in the Bosphorus – that had only paused for the murder of the Sultan and the ascent to the throne of a man to whom terror was the supreme instrument of policy.

With his jet-black beard, his great breadth of shoulder, an eye that ‘awed’ strangers and an ‘air of indescribable majesty’, as Hobhouse put it, Mahmud II had the appearance to match his character. ‘Those who know him,’ Adair’s successor as ambassador to the Porte, Sir Robert Liston, wrote of the man against whom Hastings would expend his fortune and, ultimately, his life, ‘say he had considerable abilities, a vigorous and active mind, with such an idea of the elevation, perhaps of the sanctity of his station, and so strong a feeling of personal superiority that he deems all opposition criminal, all resistance vain and ultimate disappointment on his part impossible.’

It would be intriguing to know what the young Hastings said of him, and there is no doubt that he saw him at least once. ‘Mann’d the yards and saluted the Sultan with 21 guns upon his passing the ship in his caique,’ reads the Sea Horse log for 6 March, ‘mann’d the yards and saluted the Sultan on his return.’ In its way, that glimpse was as crucial as the single, fleeting vision of Nelson from the quarterdeck of Neptune. With great swathes of the city still smouldering from the fires of the Sultan’s mutinous Janissaries, and France and Russia both threatening Ottoman integrity, Hastings could be forgiven for underestimating the man, but he would have had no trouble in recognising a natural enemy. Corrupt, despotic, violent, vulnerable, Mahmud II was everything a young Whig aristocrat could ask for. And so, too, for a born incendiary like Hastings, was Constantinople. As the Sea Horse weighed for Malta, Robert Adair’s mission accomplished, the memory of its burning suburbs, enfeebled defences and – still only a glint in the eye of even the most far-seeing naval moderniser in 1809 – its vulnerability to any ship capable of forcing the Dardanelles, left an impression that made those months among the most important of Hastings’s life.

IV

For Frank and the Sea Horse the return to Malta in the spring of 1809 meant the welcome resumption of business as usual. After her long inactivity the ship finally quitted the Dardanelles at sunset on 29 March, and by 12 April was again in Valetta where Stewart mustered the ship’s company to make ‘known to them the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty’s approbation of their conduct in capturing the Turkish frigate’.

There was prize-money to be distributed – if not as much as they reckoned their deserts – but after three years in the Sea Horse, and growing at long last, as Stewart wrote to tell his father, it was time for the fifteen-year-old Hastings to move on. In July 1808 he had completed the requisite sea-time to be rated midshipman, and back in England Sir Charles was already mobilising old Jersey connections to secure his son’s next ship. ‘I shall be anxious to know when you have settled with Sir J. Saumarez about Frank,’ Stewart wrote to Sir Charles from Sicily in December 1809, at the end of another successful summer and autumn cruise that included two brilliant assaults on the fortresses on Isola di Giannutri and Pianosa,

as unless something particular occurs I do not propose coming home next year unless it may be late in it & I would send Frank to you in April with a discharge into Sir J’s ship which would secure his time: I have this last time at Malta given Frank a sum of money and made him buy his own clothes which by the by are now very expensive … I have now wound up all his accounts to this day & find him still £16 in my debt but he shall not draw till he finally goes as he will necessarily want some more. I have been as moderate in his expenses as I could consistent with the high price of things and his going & living like a Gentleman. He behaves exceedingly well & I like him much.

If Admiralty records are to be believed, Frank was not discharged from the Sea Horse into Victory until 6 May 1810, but between the two ships there was Willesley, a ‘delighted’ mother and a determined father to see. He ‘understood from Lady Hardy’, Sir Charles was soon writing to Warren Hastings’s son-in-law,

that you and Lady Imhoff are both intimate with the Captain of Victory, on board of whom my son Frank is to go, will you have the goodness (previous to your quitting town) to leave him a letter of recommendation to your friend. He will find it very useful when on board as thro’ the Captain’s means he may be placed under the care of some Lieut. which is what I would wish as I cannot expect Sir James Saumarez will do any more than admit him on board.

After the excitements of the Sea Horse, and the light and the colour of Sicily, the Aegean and the Dardanelles, it was a return for Frank to the dull realities of home ports and blockade duties with the Baltic Fleet. In spite of the official entry date he did not join Victory until October 1810, and he was back at Willesley again by 15 December – ‘the date of the Regency’, as Sir Charles triumphantly dated Frank’s arrival – putting his father to work to find him something more interesting than a winter’s guard duty at Spithead. ‘I have been in town for a few days in consequence of my youngest son,’ Sir Charles wrote to Warren Hastings a month later, ‘who required my exertions to place him on board a sloop of war to cruise the channel … It was his own choice to employ the few months he has to finish his time in studying that most important though very dangerous navigation.’

This was a period of feverish political expectations for the extended Hastings clan, as Lord Moira came within a whisker of forming a government, but for Frank the next two years were probably the quietest of his whole career. It is difficult to trace his exact movements during this time through the usual Admiralty records, but by the autumn of 1812, after another summer at Willesley studying with a clergyman tutor, he was again exploiting family interest to smooth over the next step in his career. ‘I am obliged to be in town the 1st week in Sept,’ Sir Charles explained to Warren Hastings, ‘on acct of my younger son, whose time of serving as a midshipman will be near expired and I must not be out of the way.’

The first great hurdle for any midshipman, ideally taken at the age of twenty after the requisite six years’ sea-time, was the demanding examination to make lieutenant. In exceptional cases – or where powerful interest could be brought to bear – the age criterion might be fudged or falsified, but even a boy as well connected as Frank would seem to have had to do it the hard way, and to wait until just after his twentieth birthday in April 1814 for his promotion.*

Hastings was on the North America station at the time – the United States had declared war on Britain two years earlier – but it was only a matter of luck that he was alive to make lieutenant at all. Sometime late in 1813 he had taken a passage out to join the sloop Atalante under the command of Frederick Hickey, and early in November, as a nineteen-year-old acting lieutenant, found himself in heavy fog off Halifax when the distant sounds of a frigate’s cannon were mistaken for the signal guns at the lighthouse on Sambro Island.

There was often clearer weather close in to shore at Halifax, and with lookouts posted on the bowsprit-end and jib boom, a leadsman in the chains taking constant soundings, and her signal guns firing every quarter-hour, the Atalante nudged under easy sail into the thickening fog. For forty-five minutes Hickey coaxed her towards the safety of harbour, and with the guns of Sambro Island – as he still fondly imagined them – silent, and the leadsman reporting nothing at twenty fathoms, had just begun to think his ship clear of danger when there was a sudden warning cry of ‘Starboard the helm!’ and the Atalante was in breakers. In a matter of minutes ‘the rudder, the stern-post and part of the keel’ had been ripped away by the rocks of the Eastern Shelf off Sambro Island, Hickey reported at his court martial, ‘and perceiving immediately that there was no hope of saving the ship, my whole attention was turned to saving the lives of my valuable crew; to effect which, I directed, in the first place, the quarter boats to be lowered, and the jolly boat to be launched from the poop. I had also given directions for the guns to be thrown overboard; but the ship filled before any of them could be cut loose.’

There was just time to fire off a distress signal from the guns still above the water, and to order his men to the exposed larboard side of the ship, when with a crash of masts, the Atalante broke into three. ‘In twelve minutes she was literally torn to pieces,’ Jeremiah O’Sullivan, a passenger on board recalled, as the crew fought against the crashing breakers to get to the ship’s pinnace, tangled up helplessly in the wreck of the Atalante’s booms, ‘… and to see so many poor souls struggling for life, some naked, others on spars, casks, or anything tenable was a scene painful beyond description.’

One of their boats had already gone down – not to mention Hastings’s sea chest with all his possessions and papers – and with some sixty of the crew struggling to get into the pinnace, it seemed only a matter of moments before most of them went the same way. It was rapidly obvious to Hickey that not all of them could possibly escape in her, and ordering twenty or thirty of them out onto the booms, he succeeded in freeing her from the wreckage and – ‘in a most miraculous manner’ – launching her to safety.

With the pinnace freed there was one last, desperate attempt to lash the booms into a makeshift raft, but almost immediately they began to drift into still heavier breakers. ‘I signalled to the small boats to come near us,’ Hickey continued his evidence,

and each to take in a few more men, distributing them with each other and the pinnace till I succeeded in getting every man and boy off the raft, when, with three cheers, the wreck was abandoned. After pulling near two hours without seeing the land, guided only by a small dial compass, which one of the quartermasters had in his pocket, we picked up a fisherman, who piloted the boat safe into Portuguese cove … It now becomes a pleasing task to me to state in the fullest manner that the conduct of my officers and ship’s company, under the most trying circumstances in which human beings could be placed, was orderly, obedient and respectful, to the last extremity.

The loss of the Atalante probably had as much to do with her seaworthiness as anything else, and if Hastings was lucky to get away with his life and reputation – Hickey and his officers were honourably acquitted of all blame at the court martial – it was an omen of things to come. For the first seven years of his naval career he had known nothing but success, but over these next two he was to see the other side of his profession and learn the lessons of defeat in a war that exposed inadequacies in the Royal Navy that twenty years of almost seamless triumph had successfully masked.

There were any number of issues that lay behind the War of 1812 – the right to search and impressment, republican sympathies, Yankee designs on British Canada, mutual dislike – but at the heart of the struggle lay the system of economic warfare between Napoleonic France and Britain that threatened American merchant interests. In 1806 Napoleon had promulgated the first of his decrees designed to cripple British trade, and when Britain retaliated with her own Orders in Council that effectively closed Continental ports to neutral shipping there were inevitably a thousand potential flashpoints for war. ‘With respect to America,’ Stewart had written prophetically to Sir Charles Hastings in 1808,

we may possibly by concessions put off the evil day but the arrogance, highhandedness & I may say ungentlemanlike conduct of that nation will sooner or later force us to quarrel with them; we have always put up with things from them we would not have suffered from any other nation in the world, many instances of which I saw in the last war, & our forbearance only increases the insolence of the mob, which seems to me the only real government in that country.

None of this can disguise what a ‘bad’ war the War of 1812 was, but to an ambitious young naval officer there is no such thing, and within weeks of the Atalante going down Hastings was lucky enough to join the newly commissioned Anaconda under the command of the twenty-eight-year-old George Westphal. There had been nothing wrong with Hickey – except that he seems to have been a permanently unlucky officer – but of all Frank’s captains George Westphal, a protégé of the Duke of Kent and scion of an aristocratic German family of Hastingsesque antiquity, was by some margin the most remarkable.

As a young midshipman at Trafalgar he had lain next to the dying Nelson in the cockpit of Victory, and that was just the first and most romantic of his battle honours. In 1807 he had again been severely wounded and was captured after a long and bloody action, but making his escape in an open boat from a Guadeloupe prison ship, had worked his way back to England – courtesy of an American merchantman and an English privateer – in time to join in the reduction of Martinique and to take a prominent and heroic part in the attack on Flushing.

Fleet actions, espionage, ship-to-ship, siege work, land skirmishes, Westphal had fought in over a hundred engagements in all, and had continued in the same vein on American soil. ‘On first landing,’ a contemporary biography recorded one typical incident,

Mr Westphal, having dismounted an American officer, set off on the captured horse in pursuit of the fugitives; forgetting, in the ardour of the moment, that it was not possible for his men to keep pace with him – a circumstance indeed that did not present itself to him until he found himself, unsupported, in the midst of a body of armed men. Firing his pistols right and left, however, and slashing his sword in all directions, he dashed through them and succeeded, although wounded by a shot through the hand, in effecting his escape, bearing away with him at the same time as his prisoner a Captain in the militia.

Hastings’s new posting was doubly fortunate for him, because it was not as if the navy’s performance against the Americans had been of a kind that would guarantee him a ship like the Anaconda, or a captain like George Westphal. For the previous decade the service had exercised a virtual mastery over its European enemies, but when in the first year of war English ships had taken on more heavily armed enemies with crews – as often as not British and Irish – of more or less equal skill, the result had been a series of defeats that became an equally fertile source of American myth-making and British soul-searching.

At the heart of the British performance – when all the socio-moral nonsense about Republican Virtue and New World Vigour is forgotten – were failures in long-range gunnery, and it was this that turned Hastings into the impassioned evangelist of gunnery reform he became. After twenty wearing years of warfare there were clearly other factors at work, but in a service in which ‘any knowledge … of gunnery [was] obtained gratuitously’, as Hastings – precursor to all those prophets of gunnery change who would cry in the naval wilderness over the next hundred years – contemptuously put it, ‘all the Seaman’s help in the world will avail little, if your artillery practice is inferior to the enemy’.

The war at sea had been largely turned around by the time Hastings joined the Anaconda, but though he got his fair share of prizes there was still one more brutal lesson before he could quit America. In the first twelve months after he had joined Westphal and the Anaconda he was principally engaged in the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, and as the conflict ground to its inevitable and pointless conclusion – the status quo ante, with no gains and no concessions on either side – he found himself at anchor with the main British fleet off the Louisiana coast in support of Britain’s last punitive effort of the war.

If anything can epitomise the uselessness of the conflict, it is the Battle of New Orleans, fought at the beginning of January 1815, two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed at Ghent. For some months before this the opposition to war had been growing in Britain, but the abdication of Napoleon had given the government a belated opportunity to send out an army of Peninsular veterans under the command of Wellington’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham, to strengthen its position at the negotiating table.

In the middle of December 1814 the navy began to ferry the army to its advance base on the Île de Poix in Lake Borgne, but from the start the operation was bedevilled by delays – Pakenham had not even arrived – logistical shortages, command failures and overconfidence. After the pusillanimous American performance before Washington that last was at least understandable, yet as so often it was only the courage and endurance of the army’s rank and file that redeemed a battle plan which condemned them to a sixty-mile slog across lake, bayou, bank, shoal, swamp and the mud of a half-cut canal in some of the filthiest weather Louisiana could throw at them.

It had never occurred to Andrew Jackson, in command of New Orleans’s defence, that an attack could come from this quarter, but by December the British army and commander were at last united on a narrow strip of firm ground between the Mississippi on their left flank and a cypress swamp on their right, just seven miles downriver from New Orleans. ‘In the endeavours to place the small vessels of war as near as possible to the point of landing,’ Sir Alexander Cochrane, the Commander-in-Chief, wrote of the Anaconda’s role in the operation,

Captain Westphal was particularly conspicuous in his zeal and success towards the effecting of this important object; he having, by the utmost perseverance, skill, and exertion, hove the ANACONDA over a bank nearly five miles in extent (upon which there were only eight feet of water), into Lac Borgne, and there occupied a station that enabled that sloop to render the most essential aid and protection to the open boats conveying troops and supplies from the fleet; which were frequently rescued by her assistance from the imminent danger to which they were reduced by the severity of the weather.

With Jackson’s defenders now entrenched behind a strong defensive wall stretching from river to swamp, however, and his right flank supported by the naval guns of the Carolina and Louisiana, Pakenham delayed his final assault until more artillery could be brought up from the fleet. Under the command of Sir Thomas Troubridge, a naval brigade that included Hastings dragged and canoed their cannon up from Lake Borgne, and on 27 December – using the hot shot that would become so dear to Hastings’s heart – set fire to the Carolina and blew her out of the water in a matter of only minutes. ‘His conduct as a Gallant, able, attentive, Obedient, and Zealous young officer, claims my highest approbation,’ Westphal wrote of Hastings’s part in the action. ‘On several occasions his zeel [sic] & activity attracted the notice of Sir Thomas Troubridge, who commanded the Brigade of Seamen and of Lt Col Dixon commanding the artillery, both of whom caused me to express to Lieutenant Hastings (on several occasions) their thanks for his persevering activity, and promptitude in the execution of the several tasks with which he was entrusted.’

The spectacular destruction of the Carolina was the last real British success of the campaign. A humiliating defeat in an artillery duel on 1 January gave a grim pointer to what was to come, but it was a warning wasted on Pakenham. Reinforced by the arrival of two more of Wellington’s best regiments he ordered a frontal assault against the entrenched American line for dawn on the eighth. It was an assault that Hastings and the navy were well out of. The failure of a diversionary attack across the river to go off on time, or an appalling blunder that left the forlorn hope without fascines or scaling ladders, might have deterred another commander, but Pakenham was made of sterner stuff. With the morning light already streaking the Louisiana sky he gave the command for the attack to begin.

The previous day Jackson had watched British preparations for the battle, and as the rocket signal went up, and the fog cleared from the British troops advancing in close order, the turkey shoot began. At five hundred yards the first twelve-pounder exploded into life, followed by the whole of the artillery and – at two hundred yards – by Jackson’s Tennessee riflemen. There was no missing and no escape. The attackers were soldiers who had fought their way up Spain under Wellington, but under the sustained fire of the whole American line the right began to edge left and the British assault to falter. General Gibbs got to within twenty yards of the defences before he fell with four bullets in him. A few even made it as far as the ditch in front of the earthworks before they died. As the troops fell back, they found themselves caught between their own guns behind them and the American in front in a chaotic shambles of their commanders’ making. And for once British troops were not going to bale their generals out. ‘For shame!’ cried Pakenham, trying to rally them again, ‘Remember you are British soldiers!’ but it was no use. As he spurred them on a bullet shattered his knee and brought down his horse. Mounting another, he was immediately hit again in the groin and spine and collapsed to the ground, his last, unavailing orders expiring on his lips with him.

This was the end of the assault, and at just 8 o’clock, and in spite of the eventual success of the diversionary attack, the effective end of the battle. At the cost of eight – or perhaps thirteen – casualties, the Americans had killed two thousand British troops in the most lopsided defeat ever inflicted on British arms. And with the coming of peace there would be no time for redemption. ‘Hoisted the English and American ensign in conjunction,’ reads the Anaconda’s log for 16 March 1815, ‘& fired a grand salute in commemoration of Peace with America.’

It was a bitter end to a criminally pointless war. And for Hastings it was not just the end of the war but, except for the odd skirmish with Malay pirates in the Far East, the last time he would see action as a Royal Navy officer. Family interest and family money would keep him from the fate of those thousands of lieutenants thrown on the scrapheap by Waterloo, but from now on he would have to go looking for his excitement. ‘I feel that in addressing your Lordship I am taking upon myself an unwarrantable liberty,’ he wrote to Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, after sixteen months in the Orlando on the Eastern station and the best part of an uneventful year aboard the Pelican in the West Indies had brought him again to London with his begging bowl out:

perhaps no excuse can easily justify it; I throw myself on your Lordship’s well known clemency and trust that you will not attribute it to impertinence, but an anxiety to attain that eminence in any profession which is the object of every enterprizing officer … this has emboldened me to solicit employment in the expedition which your Lordship may, perhaps, decline, to prosecute their discoveries to the Northward at a favourable season. If I am so happy as to enjoy a place in your lordship’s good opinion, sufficiently favourable to induce you to grant my request, no exertion on my part shall be wanting to qualify myself for this arduous undertaking. Till the period of sailing my labours shall be directed to the acquisition of such knowledge as is likely to prove serviceable – you may perhaps find those more capable but none more devotedly willing to acquit themselves with credit.

It is a fascinating thought that Hastings might have ended up in the North-West Passage – the cradle and the grave of so many nineteenth-century naval reputations – but while there was no vacancy on that expedition Melville had not forgotten him. On the return of the Pelican in 1818 Hastings had gone up to Willesley, and while he borrowed his brother’s gun and played the country gentleman – ‘Frank is trying to be a sportsman,’ his mother reported in a spidery hand made worse by gathering blindness, ‘he has killed a hare & brace of Partridges’ – Lord Melville’s goodwill filtered down through the channels of Admiralty preferment: ‘Lieut F. Hastings to be appointed to the Frigate destined to relieve the Forth,’ a minute for 9 January 1819 reads, ‘it being Ld Melville’s intention to recommend the Lieut to the Bd on that station.’

A fortnight later, on 23 January, the appointment was ratified: ‘Lieut Frank Hastings to be appointed to the command of the Kangaroo Surveying Vessel at Deptford.’ Within another two weeks Hastings was in London, and on 8 February he began entering men into his new ship. At just twenty-four, he had his first command. Four months later it would come to its disastrous end in the harbour of Port Royal. How different the history of the nineteenth-century navy, possibly of Arctic exploration, might have been had John Barrow found room for him on his expedition to the North-West Passage is a matter of poignant speculation: how different Greek history would be is a matter of fact.

V

On 6 March 1821, a Russian general of Greek extraction crossed the River Pruth from Bessarabia into Moldavia, raised his standard emblazoned with a phoenix, and called on the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire to throw off their Turkish oppressors.

At first glance, the banks of the Pruth might seem a perverse place to start a Greek revolution, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century the abject condition of Greece itself meant that any revival would have to come from without. In the early fifteenth century there had been one last, great flowering of Byzantine culture at Mystra in the southern Peloponnese, but over the four hundred years since Mystra’s fall the geographical area of what is now modern Greece had sunk into a state of oppressed and degraded misery, its traditions of freedom withered to the bandit culture of the mountain regions and all memory of its political and artistic birthright buried under centuries of foreign tyranny.

It was inevitably from western Europe, where there had been a rebirth of scholarly interest in Greek art, that this memory was given back to Greece and to the scattered communities of the Greek diaspora. Throughout the eighteenth century these colonies had flourished at ports and cities throughout the mercantile world, and as this renewed sense of identity became a fixed part of the émigré consciousness, the fashionable Hellenism of the dilettante was transformed into a heady cocktail of political theory, revolutionary fervour and Byzantine nostalgia.

For the nineteenth-century Greek, it was supremely Constantinople – the ‘polis’ – and not Athens that was the historical centre of the Greek world, and it was no coincidence that the movement for Greek freedom found its focus and leadership there. For the best part of four centuries the great Christian families of the Phanar* had arrogated to themselves all the tasks that Muslim indolence or fastidiousness would allow them, and it was the wretchedly inept son of one of these princely families, the one-armed Alexander Ypsilanti, who in the spring of 1821 crossed the Pruth to spark off a Greek revolt that only the Turks themselves cannot have seen coming.

Ypsilanti’s campaign was a fiasco – by June it was over and he had shamefully fled to Austria – but as news of the uprising spread and the Greek flag was raised on Peloponnesian soil, fantasy had suddenly become fact. For centuries Greeks and Turks had been living within the empire side by side, and within weeks the Ottoman-Greek world was in flames, as community turned on community in a religious and racial war of a hatred and savagery that would have beggared the imagination of a Goya.

And as massacre followed massacre – Athens, Constantinople, Tripolis, Smyrna, Nicosia, Kos, Rhodes – it was inevitably the plight of the Greeks that excited the sympathy and indignation of the Christian West. In its earliest days European philhellenism was largely an academic pastime, but under the influence of Byron’s verse it became a popular cause that within months had inspired the first volunteers – Swedes, Danes, Bavarians, Saxons, Prussians, Italians, Russians, French, British and Americans – to raise, beg and borrow the money to make their way east to save the cradle of Western culture and political freedoms. ‘Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!’ wrote Byron,

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,

And long accustom’d bondage uncreate?

Not such thy sons who whilome did await,

The hopeless warriors of a willing doom,

In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait –

Oh! Who that gallant spirit shall resume,

Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?

‘We are all Greeks now,’ Shelley proudly proclaimed from the cosy safety of Italy, but if this sounded good, what was actually meant by it would have been hard to define. Among the first volunteers who sailed out to fight were refugees from monarchical despotism who would have thrilled to the language of Shelley’s ‘Hellas’, yet side by side with them were academic dreamers and romantic fantasists, Byronic poseurs and aristocratic democrats, deluded Benthamites and disenchanted Bonapartists, charlatans and orthodox co-religionists, fortune-hunters, mercenaries and unemployed and unemployable military professionals, the flotsam and jetsam of a whole European generation who had known nothing but war. ‘What a queer set,’ the American doctor, Samuel Gridley Howe, one of the greatest of all philhellenes, wrote of these men – heirs at once in their mix of naïveté and depravity to the Children’s Crusade and the condottieri of fourteenth-century Europe. ‘What an assemblage of romantic, adventurous, restless, crack-brained young men from the four corners of the world. How much courage and talent is to be found among them, but how much more of pompous vanity, of weak intellect, of mean selfishness, of utter depravity … Little have Philhellenes done towards raising the reputation of Europeans here.’

The disappointment was not all one-way, because if these were seldom the kind of volunteers to inspire the Greeks with a keen sense of gratitude, the feeling of disillusionment on their arrival was invariably mutual. The one belief that sustained most philhellenes was the conviction that they were defending the heirs to ancient Greece, and when instead of Pericles and Epaminondas they found a nation of mountain bandit warriors as ready to behead, baptise or sodomise their Ottoman victims as the Turks were to enslave, circumcise and impale theirs, the revulsion was as intense and irrational as the enthusiasm it replaced.

In the whole history of the Greek War of Independence no more than a handful of foreigners ever bridged the cultural gap between the Greece of the imagination and the Greece of reality, and incomparably the greatest of these after Byron was Frank Abney Hastings. In many ways Hastings belonged to the mainstream of philhellene life, but even as a citizen with a grudge and a fighting man without a war there were crucial differences about him – differences of wealth, talent and temperament – that equipped him to survive a Homeric world of factionalism, greed, treachery and violence with a resilience that few other foreigners could match.

Glory, revenge and the joy of battle – the brazen tripod that holds up the Homeric world – these were the urges that drove Hastings, and the Greek War was as much made for him as he was for the Greeks. Like any good Whig aristocrat he was a firm believer in Greece’s ancient liberties, yet if he fed off her classical past it was not off the Greece of Demosthenes or Aristogeiton – ‘Harry Stodgiton’ as one enthusiastic Scottish MP called him – but off an older and more elemental code. ‘That Glory is in a great measure the object I propose to myself I cannot deny,’ he would tell Lord Byron, ‘& I must acknowledge that independent of the satisfaction I should receive from establishing a European reputation … ’twould be delicious revenge to prove to those who have deprived me of my rank in the British service that the object of their persecution is not altogether devoid of Naval merit.’

There seems no way of recovering the exact steps that led Hastings to Greece – he was in France, learning the language and ‘qualifying’ himself for the kind of foreign service Cochrane had made so glamorous in South America when war broke out – but the one certainty is that without the humiliation of the Kangaroo he would never have gone. ‘My lord,’ he had written pathetically to Lord Melville, ‘only those who like me have thirsted for glory, who like me have lived in the anticipation of fame can tell how intolerable it is to find the tender bud nipped when about to bloom.’

It is arguable that Hastings never recovered from the humiliation of the Port Royal inquiry, and he certainly emerged from it a different man, less anxious to please, less open to people and in some ways less likeable than the small lad who made friends so easily in Neptune. It is possible of course that this was no more than the natural consequence of age, but between the ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘exemplary’ young officer all his captains spoke of so warmly in their testimonials and the often harsh, judgemental, self-sufficient loner who we at last get to know in Greece it is hard not to detect the shadow of the Kangaroo.

For all his sense of rejection, however, Hastings’s dismissal from the service only confirmed and strengthened in him that blinkered obsession with his profession that had never left room in his life for much else. It is clear from the early diaries of Thomas Fremantle that the brothels of Naples were a staple part of a Mediterranean officer’s world, and yet apart from a single woman’s name scrawled in a pocket notebook – and she turns out to have been a boat moored in the Thames – there is not even a momentary hint among Hastings’s surviving papers that he was any more interested in Mediterranean women than he was in his father’s housemaids or those ‘pretty daughters’ of Halifax who ‘made such sad havoc with the hearts of both the army and navy’.

Hastings was capable of strong and loyal male friendship – Edward Scott in the Orlando, to whom he would leave his sword, George Finlay later in Greece – but there seems no reason to read any more into this than into anything else. It is always possible that letters will turn up to reveal a lover or a brace of children somewhere in France or the Morea, but until they do nothing is going to crack the adamantine image of a man who sublimated all his energies and ambitions – sexual, social, emotional, professional – into the all-consuming business of warfare.

It was not that there was ever anything cold about Hastings – the Greek marble bust of ‘ ’ gives very little away – on the contrary, he was a generous and highly-strung creature of endless moods, passions, angers, noble impulses and nervous energies. To the end of his life he would always crave recognition and fame, but as he sat in his metaphorical tent brooding or raging over real or imagined wrongs, his notion of achievement – like his idea of justice – went along with a profound sense of self that needed no grubby endorsement from the common run.

In this fierce and proud individualism, this refusal to sit at any bar but that of his own conscience, Hastings was supremely a child of his time – this is, after all, the age of Byron – and onto the natural hauteur of the eighteenth-century aristocrat was grafted the isolation of the romantic. ‘It was not out of consideration for others, but respect for himself, that he always bluntly told the truth,’ the philosopher-novelist William Godwin wrote of his fictional hero Borromeo – a portrait of another Byronic philhellene, Edward Trelawny, that in important respects is a far truer likeness of Hastings – ‘… Yet this man was eminently a moral being. He had certain rules of right to which he rigorously adhered, not for the sake of good to result to others, but, as certain theologians inculcate in their systems, from the simple love of justice, and without care for the consequences.’

It was, then, this Hastings – age twenty-seven, height five feet seven inches, eyes blue, hair and whiskers fair, forehead bold, nose ‘grand et aquilain’, as his French passport describes him – who in March 1822 boarded a Swedish merchant vessel at Marseilles bound for the eastern Mediterranean and Constantinople. From the earliest days of the revolt Marseilles had been a popular staging post for philhellenes, and travelling with him in the Trontheim was another volunteer, a coarse-grained but insinuating anglophobe American zealot blessed with just the right blend of physical toughness and moral laxity to equip him for the intrigues, warfare and vermin ahead, called George Jarvis.

From his father’s will it is clear that Hastings had volunteered without his blessing, but with the security of his mother’s marriage settlement – worth £5,000 – behind him and £300 in gold concealed round his person, he was in a strong position to travel on his own terms. In a typical piece of generosity he had paid for Jarvis’s passage to Greece, and on the evening of 3 April, after a journey of just over three weeks, the two men were landed with all their baggage on the barren northern tip of Hydra off the north-east coast of the Peloponnese.

The Greece and the revolution into which Hastings and Jarvis sailed in the spring of 1822 was in as precarious a state as it had been at any time since Ypsilanti had raised his standard. In the first months of the war the Ottoman government had been too busy with other problems to give the rebels its full attention, but with Athens and the historical fortresses of Nauplia, Patras, Rion, Modon and Coron – the ‘eyes of Venice’ – still in Muslim hands, and two Ottoman armies massing in the north-west and north-east to revenge the massacres of 1821, no newly arrived volunteer could be quite sure how or where he would find the Greece he had come to save.

And if the Turks were at last taking their war seriously, the Greeks were no nearer presenting a unified and coherent front than they had been in the first confused days of revolution. At the beginning of 1822 an Assembly at Epidaurus had drawn up a modern constitution for the country, but while the laws might have been framed in the image of Greece’s first president – the educated, frock-coated, bespectacled, Phanariot exile Alexander Mavrocordato – real power still lay with the island merchants, local primates, captains and klephtic chiefs whose loyalty to a central government or a united Greece was as notional as the constitution itself.

Hastings was not certain, until a group of islanders materialised out of the rocky landscape, whether Hydra was a part of the revolution, and even the offer of a boat and a guide to the town was not sufficient to still his suspicions. He had served long enough in these waters as a midshipman to be almost as wary of Greeks as of Turks, and when it transpired that there was room in the boat only for Jarvis and their baggage, he prepared himself for the worst. ‘I was amongst three,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘each had a knife – it is true I was armed “jusqu’au dent” but before I could have cocked a pistol, the man next me might have stabbed me & there appeared every probability I should pass the night in this bay – I therefore resolved to abandon my effects to their fate & go over land to the Town.’

This was easier said than done, but weighed down by his guns, sabre and gold, he hauled himself up the two hundred feet of almost sheer cliff and, ‘fatigued to death’, finally stumbled across a shepherd’s cot ‘and made signs for water’. For the first time since his landing he came across the other side of the Greek character, and strengthened by bread and cheese and the ‘real disinterested hospitality’ of the shepherd, made the last hour’s ‘painful march’ across country with life and money still mercifully intact.

When the sun rose the next morning, Hastings found himself in one of the handsomest and most prosperous towns in the whole of the Levant. The merchant families of the island had done well out of the economic blockades of the Napoleonic War, and the neat white houses and great Genoese and Venetian residences of Hydra’s ‘primates’ – great names of the revolution like Tombazis and Conduriottis – rose up from its secretive harbour in a natural amphitheatre that provided a gleaming contrast with the scenes of desolation only miles away on the coast of the Morea.

From the first months of the revolution the island had been one of the three centres of Greek naval power, but if Hastings imagined that his professional credentials or his knowledge would secure him a welcome, he was in for a rapid disillusionment. In the months he had spent in France he had been studying the latest developments in gunnery and ship design, and he arrived full of ideas and innovations, desperate to try out his new sights and paddle boats on an island community equally determined to resist the advice and habits of an English Messiah whose sole experience of command had ended in his dismissal for gross insubordination.

Perhaps only a young English aristocrat could have arrived with the confidence and assumptions that Hastings brought, but at the root of his dilemma was that same cultural gap that every philhellene faced. From the age of eleven he had known nothing but the disciplines and practices of the Royal Navy, and on Hydra he found a world in which war was a matter of profit and not honour, in which captains went to sea when and if they pleased, crews hired or withheld their services at their whim, and any notion of a ‘fleet’ – or cooperation between the islands – was more a voluntary and self-interested association of equals than a patriotic duty.

But even if this ‘bigoted’ Hydriot community was a world unto itself – impervious to anything Hastings had to offer, complacently sure of its own superiority, and independent of any central authority – it was still all there was, and at first light on 20 April Hastings and Jarvis sailed over to the desolate Corinth isthmus to present their credentials to Greece’s new president. On their first arrival they were received with a distinctly cautious civility by Mavrocordato, but it was only after further audiences with the Ministers of Marine and War had produced nothing that Hastings learned why. ‘Monsieur le Prince,’ he immediately wrote in protest – and one can hear a certain irony in the use of that title from a descendant of Edward III addressing the heir to a long line of Turkish ‘hired helps’ in the Danubian provinces –

I have determined to take the liberty of addressing your Highness in writing, as I found you occupied when I had the honour of presenting myself at your residence yesterday. I shall speak with freedom, convinced that your Highness will reply in the same manner.

I will not amuse you with recounting the sacrifices I have made to come to serve Greece. I came without being invited, and have no right to complain if my services are not accepted. In that case, I shall only regret that I cannot add my name to those of the liberators of Greece; I shall not cease to wish for the triumph of liberty and civilization over tyranny and barbarism. But I believe that I may say to your Highness without failing in respect, that I have a right to have my services either accepted or refused, for (as you may easily suppose) I can spend my money quite as agreeably elsewhere.

It seems that I am a suspected person because I am an Englishman. Among people without education I expected to meet with some prejudice against Englishmen, in consequence of the conduct of the British government, but I confess that I was not prepared to find such prejudice among men of rank and education. I was far from supposing that the Greek government would believe that every individual in the country adopted the same political opinions. I am the younger son of Sir Charles Hastings, Baronet, general in the army, and in possession of a landed estate of nearly £10,000 a year. The Marquis of Hastings, Governor-General of India, was brought up by my grandfather along with my father, and they have been as brothers. If I were in search of a place I might surely find one more lucrative under the British government in India, and less dangerous as well as more respectable than that of a spy among the Greeks. I venture to say, your Highness, that if the English government wishes to employ a spy here, it would not address a person of my condition, while there are so many strangers in the country who would sell the whole of Greece for a bottle of brandy …

What I demand of your Highness is only to serve, without having the power to injure, your country. What injury can I inflict on Greece, being alone in a ship of war? I must share the fate of the ship, and if it sink I shall be drowned with the rest on board.

Hastings was never to know that Jarvis was behind his cool reception – he had warned Mavrocordato against the help of Perfidious Albion – but the letter had its effect, and on 30 April he at last got permission to sail with the fleet in Tombazis’ corvette, the Themistocles. He recorded his belated introduction to the laissez-faire time-keeping of the Greek navy with characteristic irritation: ‘In the morning we commenced getting under way & hauling out of the harbour. In fifteen years of service I never beheld such a scene. Those of the crew who chose to come on board did so – the rest remained on shore & came off as it suited their convenience.’

If Hastings’s exasperation was understandable, it was hopelessly academic, because by the time the Hydriot fleet finally sailed, they were not just hours but weeks too late to prevent the single greatest tragedy of the whole revolution. The initial object of the fleet was the Greek maritime power base of Psara, but beyond that, just four miles from the Asian mainland, lay another island with a profoundly different tradition and population, whose name over the next months was to become a byword across Europe and America for barbarism and horror.

In the first stages of the uprising, Chios – the peaceable, mastic-growing Shangri La of the Aegean where Occidental fantasy and Eastern reality came as close to being one as they ever have – had done all it could to keep out of a war it could not possibly hope to survive. In the years before the revolt the Turks had left the government of the island more or less completely to its inhabitants, but Ottoman indulgence always came with a bow-string attached, and when in March 1822 the island was reluctantly sucked into the conflict, the Porte responded as only it could. ‘Mercy was out of the question,’ wrote Thomas Gordon, the friend of Hastings and great philhellene historian of the war, ‘the victors butchering indiscriminately all who came in their way; shrieks rent the air, and the streets were strewed with the dead bodies of old men, women and children; even the inmates of the hospital, the madhouse, and the deaf and dumb institution, were inhumanely slaughtered.’

The Turks had landed on 11 April, and less than a month after a slaughter that had left 25,000 dead and slave markets from Constantinople to the Barbary coast glutted with Greek women and boys, all that was left of the old idyll was a wilderness of smouldering villages and unburied corpses. ‘We landed contrary to my opinion,’ Hastings wrote from the Themistocles on 8 May, his impotent anger, as it so often would, recoiling onto the Greek fleet and his fellow volunteers,

for we had no intelligence & … had reason to suppose the Turks were here in numbers … We landed & I wished to establish some order – place a sentinel on the eminence … keep the people together etc but I had to learn what Greeks were. Each man directed his course to the right or left as best pleased him. After rambling about without any object for two hours we reassembled near our boat & when about to embark, four refugees – men – appeared on the eminence above us creeping cautiously towards a wall & some muskets were seen. This was justly calculated to create suspicion. Our men called to us to get into the boat – we did so – all except Jarvis who always pretended to know better than his superiors & those who had seen service … No doubt when Jarvis [the two men had already almost come to a duel] has seen some service he will learn that the duty for an officer is to provide for the protection of his own men as well as the destruction of the enemy. However the confusion I saw reign during this alarm disgusted me with Greek boating – every one commanded – everyone halloed & prepared his musquet & no one took the oars – nobody attempted to get the boat afloat, so the boat was ground fore & aft.

The men on the clifftop turned out to be Greek, but with Hastings and his party finding only three other survivors – two women and a child hiding among the decomposing corpses – revenge was only a matter of time. ‘While I was on board the Admiral,’ he wrote four days later, at sea again in the narrow channel between Chios and mainland Asia,

I beheld a sight which never will be effaced from my memory – A Turkish prisoner was brought on board to be interrogated & after he had answered the questions to him, the crew came and surrounded him, insulting language was first used, the boys were made to pull him by the beard & beat him, he was then dragged several times round the deck by the beard & at length thrown living into the sea. During this horrid ceremony the crew appeared to take the greatest delight in the spectacle, laughing & rejoicing & when he was in the water the man in the boat astern struck him with the boat hook. This sight shocked me so much that I could not help letting them see I disapproved of it: but I was told it was impossible to prevent it & that letting the sailors see my disapproval would be apt to expose me to their revenge.

Mr Anemet a gentleman serving on board the Minerva was on board the Admiral & gave me shocking details of the massacre of the men of a boat they took that morning; after sinking the boat with grape shot they picked up some of the wounded who floated, with two Greek women who were prisoners in the boat & escaped unwounded. The wounded were senseless, but the Greeks did not consider that to kill them at that moment was cruel enough; they therefore revived them & afterwards one of the women with her own hands cut the throats of two of them; the others after torturing greatly, they hung & even heaped their revenge on the bodies. The Turks I was told defended themselves with great courage. The one I saw massacred, uttered no complaint, made no supplication nor acted meanly in any way, true he trembled greatly, but it must be remembered he was surrounded, had already been half drowned & hauled round the deck by the beard; as it was it is not surprising that his nerves should have a little failed him.

‘What marvellous patriotism is to be found in Greece!!!’ Hastings was soon scrawling – the words heavily underlined – on the twenty-fifth, after a rumour reached the ship that the Ottoman fleet were planning an assault on the most remote and exposed of the three Greek naval centres at Psara.

The report … greatly alarmed the men on board our ship, who appeared resolved gallantly to run away & leave their countrymen to have their throats cut in case the attack should take place – quells animaux! … I was sorry to find also that the Franks [i.e. the Western philhellenes] on board the other ships were conducting themselves in a manner not at all likely to gain the esteem of the Greeks, eating, drinking & smoking seemed to be their principal occupations.

All that Hastings asked was the chance to fight, but as the summer dragged on with only a single Greek success to show for it, that seemed as remote as ever. A half-hearted night attack on the Turkish ships under a bright May moon came to nothing, and after a stretch of blockading work off the Turkish-held Nauplia – where Hastings met ‘the famed Baboulina’, revolutionary Greece’s bloodthirsty cross between a Parisian tricôteuse and a vision-free Jeanne d’Arc – he made a final, Cochrane-esque bid to bully Miaulis, the Greek commander, into action. ‘I saw the Admiral this evening,’ he wrote on 6 July, back at Hydra again, where he found himself stranded among the scheming philhellene ‘scum of the earth’ that had made it their home while he had been away with the fleet,

and presented him with a plan for endeavouring to take a frigate – the idea was to direct a fireship & three other vessels upon a frigate during the night & when near the enemy to set fire to certain combustibles which should throw out a great flame; the enemy would naturally conclude they were all fire-ships … However, the admiral returned it to me … without even looking at it or permitting me to explain it to him and I observed a kind of insolent contempt in his manner, which no doubt arose from their late success [an action with a fireship against a Turkish vessel] – for the national character is insolence in success & cowardice in distress. This interview with the admiral disgusted me more than ever with the service – They place you in a position in which it is impossible to render any service, and then they boast (amongst themselves) of their own superiority and the uselessness of the Franks (as they call us).

There was in fact to be one last chance for Hastings, and it came almost before the vitriol in his journal had had time to dry. A couple of days after his rejection by Miaulis the Themistocles again put to sea, and on 15 July was giving chase to a small flotilla of enemy sakolevas south of Tenedos, when a rogue wind took her close in under a cliff heavily manned by Turks. ‘These troops opened a sharp but ill-directed fire of musketry on the deck of the Themistocles,’ George Finlay later wrote – there is, typically, no mention in Hastings’s journal of his own role in the action –

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 ¹/₃ 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* was abandoned by his soldiers & fell into the hands of the Turks who put him to death in the most cruel manner the Greeks remarked that it was no loss as he was worth nothing as a soldier [as] he could not run fast – I must however acknowledge that I [had] a very different feeling at Cadeno [on Crete]. As there was no cannon I took the musquet of my servant & advanced into the valley to a short pistol shot from the pyrgos – the Greeks then used all their endeavours to persuade me to retire saying it was not my business to get killed & that I did not understand their manner of making war & it would hurt them very much to lose me citing with much regret the fate of Balleste – this I must acknowledge gave me a favourable opinion of the Cretans – fortunately for me Tombazi recalled me from this position & thus I was (perhaps) saved from Balleste’s fate.

Hastings could have had no idea of it at the time but it was the last occasion on which he would fight alongside Greek soldiers on land. In the early days of the campaign fever had been rampant in the army, and by 10 August he had joined a mounting sick list, ‘suffering very much’ and the next day was still worse. ‘During the night I was stung by something in my handkerchief,’ he wrote, ‘and on the light being brought I found a scorpion in my handkerchief. The pain tho’ very great lasts only 5 or 6 hours.’

It would be another five weeks before Hastings was strong enough to move, and by that time he would have been grateful for any excuse to quit Crete with life and honour intact. In the early part of September a letter from Edward Scott had warned him of an Egyptian army heading for the Morea, but even before that – before the expedition had even sailed, in fact – a chance meeting with the indefatigable Irish philhellene and serial activist Edward Blaquiere, travelling in Greece on behalf of the newly formed London Greek Committee, had raised possibilities that made the prospect of a foot soldier’s death in a useless war a criminal abrogation of all Hastings’s headiest ambitions.

One of the most puzzling and ill-explained aspects of European philhellenism in the first days of the revolution had been the comparative indifference of Britain to affairs in Greece. In the historiography of the war there have been any number of reasons advanced for this coolness, but whether the answer was domestic politics, Castlereagh or simply some post-Napoleonic species of ‘compassion fatigue’, the truth remains that for all the pamphlets, speeches and moral indignation, no more than a dozen British philhellenes had actually gone out to fight for Greece by the end of 1822.

There had never been any shortage of sympathisers, though, and at the beginning of March 1823 an inaugural meeting of the new London Greek Committee was held at the Crown and Anchor in London’s Strand. The moving spirits behind its formation were the usual suspects associated with the liberal causes of the day, and their manifesto lacked nothing of the woolly sentiment that characterised the earliest ‘friends of humanity, civilization, and religion’. It was time to redress Britain’s record, it announced, and ‘time … to make a public appeal … in the name of Greece. It is in behalf of a country associated with every sacred and sublime recollection: – it is for a people formerly free and enlightened, but long retained by foreign despots in the chains of ignorance and barbarism!’

If this could just as easily have come from Boston or Berne as London, there were forces at work within the Committee that potentially distinguished it from its European or American equivalents. At the core of the small active membership was a group of skilled and practised politicians, and as Britain’s foreign policy under Castlereagh’s successor, George Canning, began to thaw towards Greek aspirations, the Committee found itself and its cause in an unlikely – if undisclosed – harmony with British national interests.

Without the tacit connivance of the authorities the London Committee could have done little, but in the short term of even greater importance to Greece was the potential access to the London money markets at a time when a drop in interest on government bonds was making foreign loans an attractive proposition. In its early days the Committee’s attempts to raise funds from voluntary donations had been modest at best, but by 1823 a heady mix of idle money, speculative greed and philhellenic high-mindedness had conjured up dreams of a Greek gold bonanza on a scale to dwarf anything that had gone before.

With the future colonial governor John Bowring, the radical MP Joseph Hume and the politician-money man Edward Ellice all deeply involved, there was no shortage of financial acumen available to the Committee, but what was required was a ‘name’, and for that only one would do. From the first founding of the Committee its most famous member had been the exiled Byron, and in a spectacular propaganda coup Blaquiere had broken off his journey to Greece at Pisa in order to persuade him to take on the leadership of the cause his verse had done so much to popularise.

It did not matter that there was not a single original idea in that verse; it did not matter that the exiled poet would as soon have gone to Spain or South America; it did not matter that he was a faddish and overweight thirty-six; or that it would take him another five months to get even as far as Cephalonia: it was the Byron name that the Committee had been after, and Hastings’s reaction showed how well they had gauged its effect. It would be hard to imagine anyone better equipped by birth or temperament to resist its lure, but from the day Hastings met Blaquiere the thought of Byron haunted his imagination, easing the frustrations and miseries of the Cretan campaign with visions of a role in the war and a strategy for winning it that suddenly seemed something more than dreams.

A ‘violent and dangerous’ relapse on his return to Hydra from Crete left it looking unlikely that Hastings would live long enough to see out the week, never mind to see Byron, but he had already prepared his brief. ‘Lord Byron’s companions Hamilton Brown & Mr Trelawny arrived & called on me,’ he noted in his journal on 11 October, after a meeting with the two ‘secretaries’ Byron had sent on ahead of him to report back from the ‘Seat of War’. ‘I gave Mr Brown my letter for Ld Byron containing my views on Greece & he engaged to forward it safely.’

Hastings’s letter had had a long and hard birth – draft after draft, heavily scored and annotated, survive among his papers – but the result is the most impressive and clear-sighted strategic document to emerge from the revolution. Behind it lies not just eighteen months’ experience of Greece, but fifteen years’ service in a navy whose strong empirical problem-solving tradition equipped him to move from the large picture to the detail with a persuasive authority.

‘Firstly,’ he wrote to Byron – having duly larded his arguments with the appropriate compliments to the ‘First Genius of the Age’, ‘I lay down as an axiom that Greece cannot obtain any decisive advantage over the Turks without a decided maritime superiority; for it is necessary to prevent them from relieving their fortresses and supplying their armies by sea.’

The only weapon against Turkish fortresses that the Greeks had, Hastings argued, was famine, and without it they would have achieved nothing. In those outposts where the Turks could resupply their garrisons – Patras, Modon, Coron, Negropont – the Greeks had been powerless, and in a terrain that made movement and supply difficult, an army without artillery, engineers or the finance to sustain itself in the field for any length of time was never going to be the answer.

If this seems self-evident now, it did not then – any number of British or European officers thought the war could be won on land – but Hastings had not finished there. ‘The localities of the countries are also such,’ he went on presciently, ‘and the difficulties of moving troops so great, that, without the aid of a fleet, all the efforts of an invading army would prove fruitless. But on the contrary, were an invading army followed by a fleet, I fear that all the efforts of the Greeks to oppose it would be ineffectual. The question stands thus, Has the Greek fleet hitherto prevented the Turks from supplying their fortresses, and is it likely to succeed in preventing them?’

The answer to both questions was ‘no’, and Hastings was one of the few to see that the comparative calm of 1823 had more to do with other pressures on the Ottoman Empire and the disastrous fire in her main arsenal at Tophana in March that year than with any real security. ‘Is it likely that the Greek marine will improve, or that the Turkish will retrograde?’ he asked, remembering, perhaps, that austere, relentless and unforgiving figure he had glimpsed from the deck of the Sea Horse thirteen years earlier.

The contrary is to be feared. We have seen the Greek fleet diminish in numbers every year since the commencement of the war, while that of the Turks has undeniably improved, from the experience they have gained in each campaign … Is the Greek fleet likely to become more formidable? On the contrary, the sails, riggings and hulls are all going out of repair; and in two years time thirty sail could hardly be sent to sea without an expense which the Greeks could not probably incur.

With the Ottoman fleet again at sea, and Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptians subduing Crete before turning their attention to the Morea, there was an unarguable force to Hastings’s argument. But he also had an answer. ‘We now come to the question, How can the Greeks obtain a decisive superiority over the Turks at sea?’ he continued.

I reply, By a steam-vessel armed as I shall describe … It would be necessary to build or purchase the vessel in England, and send her out to complete. She should be from 150 to 200 tons burden, of a construction sufficiently strong to bear two long 32-pounders, one forward and one aft, and two 68-pounder guns of seven inches bore, one on each side. The weight of shot appears to me of the greatest importance, for I think I can prove that half a dozen shot or shells of these calibres, and employed as I propose, would more than suffice to destroy the largest ship. In this case it is not the number of projectiles, but their nature and proper application that is required.

Although it would be another two years, and endless disappointments, refinements and changes, before Hastings got his steamship, here in essence is the vessel that made his name. Over the past generation there had been various experiments on both sides of the Atlantic with the military application of steam, but if Hastings could not claim absolute priority – Frederick Marryat, Cochrane protégé and future novelist, commanding the sixty-horsepower Diana in the First Burma War of 1824–26 has that – such a vast gulf in terms of scale, ambition and power separates the vessel Hastings was proposing from Marryat’s that the age of steam in naval warfare only properly begins with him.

At a juncture in naval architecture at which the frigate was poised to reach its final, elegant apogee, in fact, there is something brutally modernist in Hastings’s utter disregard for the aesthetics of sail and line. The potential advantages of steam power – independence, predictability – were all the more vital among the capricious breezes of the Aegean, and what it gave Hastings above all was a delivery system that would enable him to bring to bear against an enemy the full weight of his gunnery as quickly and effectively as possible. ‘We now come to the plan of attack,’ he continued to Byron, conjuring up some steaming whirling dervish of a vessel:

In executing this, I should go directly for the vessel most detached from the enemy’s fleet, and when at the distance of one mile, open with red-hot shot from the 32-pounder forward. The gun laid at point blank, with a reduced charge, would carry on board en ricochetant. I would then wheel round and give the enemy one of the 68-pounders with shell laid at the line of metal, which would also ricochet on board him. Then the stern 32-pounder with hot shot, and again 68-pounder of the other side with a shell. By this time the bow-gun would be again loaded, and a succession of fire might be kept up as brisk as from a vessel having four guns on a side. Here the importance of steam is evident.

There would be, of course, a danger of the engine being hit, he conceded,

but when we consider the small object a low steamer would present coming head on, and the manner in which the Turks have hitherto used their guns at sea, this risk really appears very trifling. The surprise caused by seeing a vessel move in a calm, offering only a breadth of about eighteen feet, and opening fire with heavy guns at a considerable distance, may also be taken in to account. I am persuaded, from what I have seen, that in many cases the Turks would run their ships ashore and abandon them, perhaps without having the presence of mind to set fire to them.

For obvious reasons the use of red-hot shot at sea had always alarmed the men who sailed wooden vessels, but Hastings had seen too clearly for himself the effects it could have on ships not to believe there were technical solutions to the dangers. ‘Of the destructive effect of hot shot on an enemy’s ship,’ he told Byron,

it is scarcely necessary for me to speak. The destruction of the Spanish fleet before Gibraltar is well known. But if I may be permitted to relate an example which came under my proper observation, it will perhaps tend to corroborate others. At New Orleans the Americans had a ship and schooner in the Mississippi that flanked our lines. In the commencement we had no cannon. However, after a couple of days, two field-pieces of 4 or 6lb and a howitzer were erected in battery. In ten minutes the schooner was on fire, and her comrade, seeing the effect of the hot shot, cut her cable and escaped under favour of a light wind. If such was the result of light shot imperfectly heated – for we had no forge – what would be the effect of such a volume as a 32-pounder? A single shot would set a ship in flames.

The risks, too – introducing the red-hot shot before laying the guns, the problems associated with firing shells, the dangers of a shell rolling in a horizontal bore, the transport of shells around the ship – were all more apparent than real, but it seems unlikely that anyone with a boredom threshold as low as Byron’s was still reading. The central message, though, had sunk in. Finlay once remarked that there was not one but two Byrons at Missolonghi: the ‘feminine’ (as he curiously and revealingly put it) Byron who performed in company – vain, frivolous, mercurial; and the ‘masculine’ Byron, all intellect and good sense, who came out in one-to-one conversation. It was this second Byron – whatever lies to the contrary were later told – whose attention Hastings had caught. It makes it all the more of a shame that the two men never met, but Hastings’s letter would bear its posthumous fruit. As Byron moved from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and his own sacrificial death, harried and importuned on all sides, Hastings was about to discover the terrible irony of Byron’s Greek adventure: alive, there was little the First Genius of the Age could do; dead, nothing he could not. All that Hastings had to do was wait. And in the meantime, another and closer death had already brought his vision a step nearer.

VIII

It seems impossible to know now what contact he had had with Willesley in the eighteen months since he had sailed for Greece but Hastings’s departure had badly hurt his ageing father. For many years the old general had been living out his days with a more or less stoical patience, a spectator at a play that had long lost his interest, saddened by years of war, ill-health, the death of friends, the failing sight of his wife and disappointment in his sons. ‘Were it not for the sake of my children I know not whether I should have taken that trouble’ – of visiting Cheltenham for the waters – he had written as early as 1808, ‘after all – for what? To prolong the dream a few years longer – and which dream after all has not been a pleasant one – no, I think I should prefer confining myself to my convenient room, surrounded by my family, books and maps, and strive to spin out this dream at least contentedly if not comfortably – so much for sermonising.’

It would be hard, he conceded in 1813, ‘to quit the Theatre before the play is over and the curtain drops’, but with the defeat of Napoleon and the Kangaroo incident there was less and less to hold him. There is the occasional trace of him in the local newspaper – a bullock presented to the town for ‘a patriotic feast’ to celebrate Wellington’s Peninsula victories, the festivities to welcome the Marquis of Hastings back from India – but from the odd letter that survives, the only consolations of his old age seem to have been laudanum and the presence at Willesley of a little girl, a natural daughter of Sir John Moore adopted by the Hastings family after Corunna. ‘The young orphan who was a very bright, interesting and charming girl,’ Baron Louis le Jeune, a French prisoner of war at Ashby and – in the easygoing ways of a provincial town far from the sea – a dinner guest at Willesley, recalled, ‘was quite the life of the circle which her host and hostess gathered about them. The courtesy and kindness with which I was received did much to cheer my spirits, prisoner though I was.’

It is a poignant and elusive image – how she came, who her mother was, where she went, all seem mysteries – but whatever compensation the young Eliza Moore brought for the disgrace of Sir Charles’s ‘Trafalgar Hero’ it was tragically not enough. ‘My dear dear Mother,’ Frank’s older brother, Charles, wrote from Geneva on 9 October 1823, eighteen months after Frank’s departure for Greece:

This instant a courier has arrived with Mr McDonall’s letter, & the most melancholy intelligence it contains the sudden manner of its communication to me has thrown me into the greatest grief & sorrow – I am fearful to agitate your feelings my dear Mother by giving vent to my own, & I hardly know what I write or how to express myself … Keep yourself up my dearest Mother I beg of you … It is to me a great consolation that no one can have a moment’s doubt that my poor Father’s mind was quite gone …

The new Sir Charles might well have been right – ‘Oct 2’, the wonderfully named Derbyshire Coroner Charnel Bateman wrote in his accounts, ‘Willesley to view the body of Sir Charles Hastings Bart, who shot himself, being at the time in a state of temporary derangement, 21 miles £1.15s 9d.’ – but there was certainly nothing insane about the man who had made his will only months before. ‘I desire my body may be opened after my death,’ he declared, with the same robust, pagan instincts that made him so contemptuous that Bonaparte should have surrendered rather than fallen on his sword,

and buried without a coffin upon the Grove Hill on a spot marked by me, wrapped up in either woollen, oil cloth or any such perishable materials as will keep my body together until deposited in my grave by six of my most deserving poorest labourers to whom one pound will be given … and several acorns to be planted over my grave that one good tree may be chosen [the rusting iron railings still surround a tree near where Willesley Hall once stood] and preserved and that I may have the satisfaction of knowing that after my death my body may not be quite useless but serve to rear a good English Oak.

The same mixture of singularity, clarity and generosity runs through the rest of the will, and if Sir Charles Hastings died insane, then he had probably lived that way too. There is a curious – and very Hastings – codicil disinheriting his elder son in favour of Frank should Charles ever employ their old steward again, but the clause that most affected his estranged favourite – and transformed his bargaining power with his Greek masters – came right at the beginning.

As my youngest son Frank Hastings has been provided for by a clause in the Marriage Settlement I shall entrust him to the care of his Mother and Brother who will act towards him as he behaves and I grant him my blessing and entire forgiveness … I leave to my eldest son Charles Hastings five thousand pounds to enable him to pay his brother that sum due to him by the Marriage Settlement.

‘I have written three letters to my brother,’ Charles told his mother in that same letter from Geneva, ‘in which I urge in the kindest and strongest manner I can his immediate return to England – & have desired him to draw on me for any sums of money he may want. The 3 letters go by different channels, & I think safe one’s [sic].’

There is no mention of his father’s death in Frank’s journal – although there is a copy of the will among his papers – but if it did reach him before the end of the year his brother’s plea went ignored. It seems likely in fact that Charles’s letters did not catch up with him until well into the next year, because by the end of October 1823 he had left Hydra for Athens, sailing north via Corinth with another disenchanted product of the Royal Navy, Byron’s secretary, imitator, traducer and future biographer, Edward John Trelawny.

It says something about the diversity of philhellene life that two men as diametrically opposed in character and ambition as Trelawny and Hastings could find themselves on the same side, let alone in the same boat. They had entered the navy as boys in the same year, but whereas Hastings had served in the Neptune at Trafalgar, Trelawny – to his bitter regret – had missed out on the battle, beginning a downward spiral of resentments and failures that was made bearable only by a fantasy existence of sub-Byronic adventures that he half came to believe in himself.

There was no shortage of fabulists among philhellene volunteers, but what set Trelawny apart was his genius for co-opting others into his fantasy world. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars he had found himself in the same position as thousands of other unemployed lieutenants, but not even a humiliating marriage and divorce could keep him down, and in 1822, armed with little more than his dramatic good looks and a genius for story-telling, he succeeded in ‘bamming’ and talking his way into Byron’s Pisan circle in time to preside at the cremation of Shelley’s drowned corpse on the beach near Livorno.

It had seemed axiomatic to the Byron circle that Trelawny should fill the role – hadn’t he, after all, burned the body of his Eastern child-bride after she had been attacked by a shark? – but while Byron remained fond enough of Trelawny to take him to Greece, the creature had soon outgrown his creator. He had crossed the Morea initially in order to report back on the political and military situation, but with every mile put between himself and Byron the old ties and loyalties had weakened, and long before Hydra Trelawny had resolved to throw in his lot with a man who was the antithesis of all that the dilatory Byron represented. ‘I am to be a kind of aide de camp to [Odyssesus Androutses],’ he proudly wrote to Mary Shelley in a characteristic blend of fact and fantasy. ‘The General gives me as many men as I choose to command, and I am to be always with him … I am habited exactly like Ulysses, in red and gold vest, with sheep-skin capote, gun, pistols, sabre, & a few dollars or doubloons; my early habits will be resumed, and nothing new, but dirt and privations, with mountain sleeping, are a good exchange for the parched desert, dry locusts and camels’ milk.’

Trelawny would not have known camel’s milk if he had taken a bath in it – the Wahhabi – Ottoman desert wars, though, were prominent among his fictional battle honours – but his whole life is such a triumph of imagination over reality that it would be pedantic to hold that against him. From the first time he had read a Byron poem he had modelled himself on the Byronic hero, and here at last was the chance for life to catch up with art, for reality finally to deliver among the crags and bandit lairs of Parnassus the excitements and notoriety that ten years of the navy or Bristol boarding houses had so signally failed to provide.

Trelawny’s hopes were to be realised, too – life was briefly, tardily but dramatically about to give him everything down to the statutory Byronic child-bride he craved – and even in embryo he was a riskily outlandish companion with whom to travel. He and Hastings had arrived at the Corinth isthmus on the eve of the formal capitulation of the citadel, and in the heightened tensions that always followed a surrender the mere appearance of anyone as theatrically exotic as ‘Greek’ or ‘Turk’ Trelawny was enough to get the pair of them almost shot as spies.

It cannot have escaped Hastings, however, as they picked their way through the whitening bones of Dramali’s men and horses – 10,000 of them, he reckoned – and crossed for Athens, that for all his absurd posturing Trelawny was probably closer to the philhellene ‘type’ than he was himself. For the best part of two years Hastings had railed against Greek ingratitude, but with only one or two exceptions he remained as much a loner in volunteer company – coldly remote with his own countrymen, contemptuously suspicious of ‘soi disant’ French ‘experts’, and perfectly ready, in the face of Jarvis’s American vulgarity, to enforce a proper respect at the end of a duelling pistol if necessary.

There was as ever, though, a resilience about Hastings that kept him going, and with the imminent promise of ‘English gold’ he was no sooner in Athens than he was again writing to exhort Byron to prevent the money falling into a bottomless Greek sink. In the months since his first letter nothing had occurred to make him change his mind, but he had seen enough of the country’s politics to know that with every snout in the trough – as he elegantly put it – it was going to be hard enough to persuade the Greeks to finance a single steamship, let alone a fleet, if they had control of their own gold.

£20,000, that was all he needed – all Greece needed if she was ‘yet to be saved’ – and for once Hastings seemed lucky in his timing. ‘Trelawny gave a dinner to Goura’ – just about the basest of all the Greek leaders – he noted on 13 December, exultant after hearing that Byron and Colonel Napier, the Resident on Cephalonia and a soldier with a distinguished past and a sinful future, had at last ‘approved’ his plan: ‘… in the middle Mr Finlay arrived … Mr Finlay is quite a young man – he has studied in Germany & pleases me much … Mr Brown informs me by letter that he is likely to return to England & I may get a steamer – I hope to God he may succeed and in that case it is not impossible I may be named to the command of her if so my destruction … of the Turkish fleet must ensue in the summer.’

The young George Finlay had made an even stronger impression on Byron – he thought the ghost of Shelley had walked in when he first met him – and over the next four years he was to become Hastings’s closest friend and ally in Greece. The following day the two men went to ‘visit the antiquities’ together, but it is a fairly safe bet that if Hastings had his way the conversation was all tactics, hot shot and the ‘one or two Steam vessels’ with which he had promised Byron he could destroy ‘even Constantinople’.

It was a tragedy that it would take Byron’s death in April 1824, and the subsequent wash of sympathy it caused, to realise Hastings’s vision, but even with the arrival of the first £40,000 of the loan he was still made to wait. ‘During the summer of 1824,’ Finlay wrote,

Hastings endeavoured to impress the necessity of rendering the national cause not entirely dependent on the disorderly and tumultuous merchant marine, which it was compelled to hire at an exorbitant price. It is needless to record all the difficulties and opposition he met with from a Government consisting in part of ship owners, eager to obtain a share of the loan as hire for their ships. The loan, however, appeared inexhaustible; and in the autumn of 1824, Hastings returned to England, with a promise that the Greek government would lose no time in instructing their deputies in London to procure a steam-vessel to be armed under his inspection, and of which he was promised the command.

It had taken more than two years for Hastings to get the promise of his steamship. It was just as well that he did not know, as he disembarked in England at the end of 1824, that it would be another two before he would have the chance to fight in her.

IX

If Hastings knew the Greek government too well to imagine that his problems were over, even his cynicism can have done little to prepare him for the vexations ahead. He had sailed back to England in the company of Edward Blaquiere, and within days had exchanged the open corruption of Greece for the more impenetrable mire of Blaquiere’s philhellene friends, the brazen robbery and violence of sectarian fighting for a financial world in which it is now almost impossible to define where greed shaded into outright criminality and incompetence into deliberate malpractice.

The sordid history of the English loan concerns Hastings only in so far as it affected the construction of the new Greek fleet, and all that needs stressing here is that of the £2,800,000 raised from British investors only a tiny fraction was ever converted into the arms or munitions that might have helped win the war. Hastings had himself promised £5,000 to the construction of a steam vessel, but even with that carrot dangling in front of them it was not until March 1825 that the Greek deputies finally authorised the construction of a ship on the Thames at Deptford and of an engine for her to be built by a man who would come to figure large in Hastings’s pantheon of criminal incompetents, the Smithfield engineer Alexander Galloway.

The commission came just in the nick of time – a month earlier, and Hastings had been resolving ‘neither to be a dupe or dupeur’, a month later and he would probably have been back in the Royal Navy – but he knew himself too well to pretend he was done with Greece. ‘I came to town at the instigation of my relations & Naval friends to endeavour to get re-established in the British Navy,’ he wrote soon after getting the invitation to command the steamship.

My brother had seen Lord Melville over the subject & there seems little difficulty attending it …

There is nothing I am aware of that would give me such sincere satisfaction as to aid the delivery of Greece & there never was perhaps an opportunity that offered itself of gaining such lasting renown at so little hazard – I mean there never was an exploit to which such credit was attached so easy of execution as the destruction of the Turkish fleet: & could I feel satisfied that the proper measures would be pursued for attaining that end I would not hesitate an instant to resign my commission was I even Admiral in the British Navy for the purpose of carrying those plans into execution. [If they accept his plan] I shall be that instant ready to renounce the British service & lay down at your disposal the sum of money I had proposed to the Greek Government.

And for any non-establishment naval man, let alone philhellene, there was one further inducement to fight for Greece when her government appointed Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald, to command her new fleet. If it had done nothing else the appointment would have signalled the final shift from a military to a naval strategy that Hastings had long been advocating, but it was above all the name of Cochrane – the most brilliant and controversial of the young sea captains to make their reputations during the French wars – that would most vividly have caught the imagination of a born warrior and innovator like Hastings.

On an infinitely grander and more flamboyant scale, Cochrane’s background, character, politics, cussedness, originality and naval career bear striking parallels to Hastings’s own. The tall, red-headed, angular-featured son of an impoverished and eccentric Scottish earl, Cochrane had fought from the outbreak of the French wars, winning himself a reputation for brilliance and insubordination in just about equal measure until a stock market scandal gave his political and professional enemies the excuse they needed to have him drummed out of the service, ceremonially stripped of his knighthood in a midnight ritual of degradation, and thrown into prison.

There seems every possibility that Cochrane was in some way involved in the swindle that brought him down; but, supremely litigious and stubborn by nature, he fought to establish his innocence with the same dogged ferocity that characterised his seamanship. He would have to wait for another generation and a different England to regain his domestic honours, but by the time his and Hastings’s paths crossed he had already made a second and even more glittering reputation in South America’s liberation wars, in command of the nascent Chilean fleet against the Spaniards and then of the Brazilian ships in that country’s struggle for independence from Portugal.

The only drawback to Cochrane, in fact, was that for all the grandiose titles that came his way – Vice-Admiral of Chile, Commander-in-Chief of the Naval Forces of the Republic, First Admiral of the Brazils and Marquess of Maranham – he had never commanded anything that remotely resembled a fleet. The novels of Frederick Marryat are evidence enough of his ability to inspire the men under his immediate command, but Cochrane’s virtues – audacity, ingenuity, courage, unorthodoxy, seamanship, individual flair (and no one ever had them in greater measure) – were supremely those of the frigate captain rather than admiral, the lone ‘sea wolf’ rather than the politician needed to navigate the notorious shallows of Greek naval life.

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.’

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