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

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