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

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