The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane - Earl of Dundonald Thomas Barnes Cochrane (guided reading books TXT) 📗

of a port. Portugal was an enemy's country, and Spain, by reason of his achievements in Chili and Peru, was no less hostile to him. France had not yet recognised the independence of Brazil, and therefore a stay on any part of its coast might lead to difficulties. England afforded the only safe halting-place, though there Lord Cochrane was uncertain as to the way in which, in consequence of the Foreign Enlistment Act, he might be received. To England, however, he resolved to go; and, sighting its coast on the 25th of June, he anchored at Spithead on the following day. Salutes were exchanged with a British ship lying in harbour, and in the afternoon he landed at Portsmouth, to be enthusiastically welcomed by nearly all classes of his countrymen, whose admiration for his personal character and his excellence as a naval officer was heightened by the renown of his exploits in South America during an absence of six years and a half.

His subsequent relations with Brazil can be briefly told. His unavoidable return to England afforded just the excuse which his enemies in Brazil had been seeking for ousting him from his command. They and the Chevalier Manoel Rodriguez Gameiro Pessoa, the Brazilian Envoy in London, who altogether sympathised with them, chose to regard this occurrence as an act of desertion. Lord Cochrane lost no time in reporting his arrival and requesting to be provided with the necessary means for refitting the Piranga and preparing for a speedy return to Rio de Janeiro. To expedite matters, he even advanced 2000_l._ out of his own property—which was never repaid to him—for this purpose. His repeated applications for instructions were either unheeded or only answered with insult. He was ordered to return to Brazil at once, towards which no assistance was given to him; and at the same time his officers and crew were ordered to repudiate his authority and to return without him.

Lord Cochrane had no room to doubt that by going back to Brazil he should only expose himself to yet worse treatment than that from which he had been suffering during nearly two years; but at the same time he was resolved to do nothing at variance with his duty to the Emperor from whom he had received his commission, and nothing invalidating his claims to the recompense which was clearly due to him. At length he was relieved from some of his perplexities, after they had lasted more than three months. On the 3rd of November, 1825, peace was declared between Brazil and Portugal; and thereby his relations with his employers were materially altered. The work which he had pledged himself to do was completed, and he was justified in resigning his command, or at any rate in declining to resume it until the causes of his recent troubles were removed.

This he did in a letter addressed to the Emperor Pedro I., from London, on the 10th of November. "The gracious condescension which I experienced from your Imperial Majesty, from the first moment of my arrival in the Brazils, the honorary distinctions which I received from your Majesty, and the attention with which you were pleased to listen to all my personal representations relating to the promotion of the naval power of your empire," he wrote, "have impressed upon my mind a high sense of the honour which your Majesty conferred, and forbid my entertaining any other sentiments than those of attachment to your Majesty and devotion to your true interests. But, whilst I express these my unfeigned sentiments towards your Imperial Majesty, it is with infinite pain and regret that I recall to my recollection the conduct that has been pursued towards the naval service, and to myself personally, since the members of the Brazilian administration of José Bonifacio de Andrade were superseded by persons devoted to the views and interests of Portugal,—views and interests which are directly opposed to the adoption of that line of conduct which can alone promote and secure the true interests and glory of your Imperial Majesty, founded on the tranquillity and happiness of the Brazilian people. Without imputing to such ministers as Severiano, Gomez, and Barboza disaffection to the person of your Imperial Majesty, it is sufficient to know that they are men bigoted to the unenlightened opinions of their ancestors of four centuries ago, that they are men who, from their limited intercourse with the world, from the paucity of the literature of their native language, and from their want of all rational instruction in the service of government and political economy, have no conception of governing Brazil by any other than the same wretched and crooked policy to which the nation had been so long subjected in its condition as a colony. Nothing further need be said, while we acquit them of treason, to convict them of unfitness to be the counsellors of your Imperial Majesty.

"None but such ministers as these could have endeavoured to impress upon the mind of your Imperial Majesty that the refugee Portuguese from the provinces and many thousands from Europe, collected in Rio de Janeiro, were the only true friends and supporters of the imperial crown of Brazil. None but such ministers would have endeavoured to impress your Imperial Majesty with a belief that the Brazilian people were inimical to your person and the imperial crown, merely because they were hostile to the system pursued by those ministers. None but such ministers would have placed in important offices of trust the natives of a nation with which your Imperial Majesty was at war. None but such ministers would have endeavoured to induce your Imperial Majesty to believe that officers who had abandoned their King and native country for their own private interests could be depended on as faithful servants to a hostile Government and a foreign land. None but such ministers could have induced your Imperial Majesty to place in the command of your fortresses, regiments, and ships of war such individuals as these. None but such ministers would have attempted to excite in the breast of your Imperial Majesty suspicions with respect to the fidelity of myself and of those other officers who, by the most zealous exertions, had proved our devotion to the best interests of your Imperial Majesty and your Brazilian people. None but such ministers would have endeavoured by insults and acts of the grossest injustice, to drive us from the service of your Imperial Majesty and to place Portuguese officers in our stead. And, above all, none but such ministers could have suggested to your Imperial Majesty that extraordinary proceeding which was projected to take place on the night of the 3rd of June, 1824, a proceeding which, had it not been averted by a timely discovery and prompt interposition on my part, would have tarnished for ever the glory of your Imperial Majesty, and which, if it had failed to prove fatal to myself and officers, must inevitably have driven us from your imperial service. When placed in competition with this plot of these ministers and the false insinuations by which they induced your Imperial Majesty to listen to their insidious counsel, all their previous intrigues, and those of the whole Portuguese faction, to ruin the naval power of Brazil, sink into insignificance. But for the advancement of Portuguese interests there was nothing too treacherous or malignant for such ministers and such men as these to insinuate to your Imperial Majesty, especially when they had discovered that it was not possible by their unjust conduct to provoke me to abandon the service of Brazil so long as my exertions could be useful to secure its independence, which I believed to be alike the object of your Imperial Majesty and the interest of the Brazilian people.

"If the counsels of such persons should prove fatal to the interests of your Imperial Majesty, no one will regret the event more sincerely than myself. My only consolation will be the knowledge that your Imperial Majesty cannot but be conscious that I, individually, have discharged my duty, both in a military and in a private capacity, towards your Majesty, whose true interest, I may venture to add, I have held in greater regard than my own; for, had I connived at the views of the Portuguese faction, even without dereliction of my duty as an officer, I might have shared amply in the honours and emoluments which such influence has enabled these persons to obtain, instead of being deprived, by their means, of even the ordinary rewards of my labours in the cause of independence which your Imperial Majesty had engaged me to maintain,—which cause I neither have abandoned nor will abandon, if ever it should be in my power successfully to renew my exertions for the true interests of your Imperial Majesty and those of the Brazilian people.

"Meanwhile my office as Commander-in-Chief of your Imperial Majesty's Naval Forces having terminated by the conclusion of peace and by the decree promulgated on the 28th of February, 1824, I have notified to your Imperial Majesty's Envoy, the Chevalier de Gameiro, that I have directed my flag to be struck this day. Praying that the war now terminated abroad may be accompanied by tranquillity at home, I respectfully take leave of your Imperial Majesty."

All Lord Cochrane's subsequent correspondence with Brazil had for its object the recovery of the payments due to him and to his officers and crews for the great services done by them to the empire. Lord Cochrane had saved that empire from being brought back to the position of a Portuguese colony, and had enabled it to enter on a career of independence. In return for it he was subjected to more than two years of galling insult, was deprived of his proper share of the prizes taken by him and his squadron, was refused the estate in Maranham which the Emperor, more grateful than his ministers, had bestowed upon him, and was mulcted of a portion of his pay and of all the pension to which he was entitled by imperial decree and the ordinances of the Government. His services to Brazil, like his services to Chili, adding much to his renown as a disinterested champion of liberty and an unrivalled seaman and warrior, brought upon him personally little but trouble and misfortune. Only near the end of his life, when a worthy Emperor and honest ministers succeeded to power, was any recompence accorded to him.

CHAPTER XIII. THE GREEK REVOLUTION AND ITS ANTECEDENTS.—THE MODERN GREEKS.—THE FRIENDLY SOCIETY.—SULTAN MAHMUD AND ALI PASHA'S REBELLION.—THE BEGINNING OF THE GREEK INSURRECTION.—COUNT JOHN CAPODISTRIAS.—PRINCE ALEXANDER HYPSILANTES.—THE REVOLUTION IN THE MOREA.—THEODORE KOLKOTRONES.—THE REVOLUTION IN THE ISLANDS.—THE GREEK NAVY AND ITS CHARACTER.—THE EXCESSES OF THE GREEKS.—THEIR BAD GOVERNMENT.—PRINCE ALEXANDER MAVROCORDATOS.—THE PROGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION.—THE SPOLIATION OF THE CHIOS.—ENGLISH PHILHELLENES; THOMAS GORDON, FRANK ABNEY HASTINGS, LORD BYRON.—THE FIRST GREEK LOAN, AND THE BAD USES TO WHICH IT WAS PUT.—REVERSES OF THE GREEKS.—IBRAHIM AND HIS SUCCESSES.—MAVROCORDATOS'S LETTER TO LORD COCHRANE.

[1820-1825.]

While Lord Cochrane was rendering efficient service to the cause of freedom in South America, another war of independence was being waged in Europe; and he had hardly been at home a week before solicitations pressed upon him from all quarters that he should lend his great name and great abilities to this war also. As he consented to do so, and almost from the moment of his arrival was intimately connected with the Greek Revolution, the previous stages of this memorable episode, the incidents that occurred during his absence in Chili and Brazil, need to be here reviewed and recapitulated.

The Greek Revolution began openly in 1821. But there had been long previous forebodings of it. The dwellers in the land once peopled by the noble race which planned and perfected the arts and graces, the true refinements and the solid virtues that are the basis of our modern civilization, had been for four centuries and more the slaves of the Turks. They were hardly Greeks, if by that name is implied descent from the inhabitants of classic Greece. With the old stock had been blended, from generation to generation, so many foreign elements that nearly all trace of the original blood had disappeared, and the modern Greeks had nothing but their residence and their language to justify them in maintaining the old title. But their slavery was only too real. Oppressed by the Ottomans on account of their race and their religion, the oppression was none the less in that it induced many of them to cast off the last shreds of freedom and deck themselves in the coarser, but, to slavish minds, the pleasanter bondage of trickery and meanness. During the eighteenth century, many Greeks rose to eminence in the Turkish service, and proved harder task-masters to their brethren than the Turks themselves generally were. The hope of further aggrandisement, however, led them to scheme the overthrow of their Ottoman employers, and their projects were greatly aided by the truer, albeit short-sighted, patriotism that animated the greater number of their kinsmen.