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

‘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