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

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.’