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

noble verse and enlarged upon them in eloquent prose, and in England and France, in Switzerland, Germany, and the united States, a strong party of Philhellenes was organized to collect money and send recruits for their assistance.

The two Philhellenes of greatest note who served in Greece during the earlier years of the Revolution were Thomas Gordon and Frank Abney Hastings. Gordon, who attained the rank of general in the army of independence, had the advantage of a long previous and thorough acquaintance with the character of both Turks and Greeks and with the languages that they spoke. He watched all the revolutionary movements from the beginning, and took part in many of them. In the "History of the Greek Revolution," which he published in 1832, he gave such a vivid and, in the main, so accurate an account of them that his narrative has formed the basis of the more ambitious work of the native historian, Mr. Trikoupes. Of the vices and errors of the people on whose behalf he fought and wrote he spoke boldly. "Whatever national or individual wrong the Greeks may have endured," he said in one place, "it is impossible to justify the ferocity of their vengeance or to deny that a comparison instituted between them and the Ottoman generals, Mehemet Aboulaboud, Omer Vrioni, and the Kehaya Bey of Kurshid, would give to the latter the palm of humanity. Humanity, however, is a word quite out of place when applied either to them or to their opponents." In another page, further denouncing the Greek leaders, he wrote: "Panourias was the worst of these local despots, whom some writers have elevated into heroes. He was, in fact, an ignoble robber, hardened in evil. He enriched himself with the spoils of the Mahometans; yet he and his retinue of brigands compelled the people to maintain them at free quarters, in idleness and luxury, exacting not only bread, meat, wine, and forage, but also sugar and coffee. Hence springs the reflection that the Greeks had cause to repent their early predilection for the klephts, who were almost all, beginning with Kolokotrones, infamous for the sordid perversity of their dispositions."[A] Gordon's disinterested and brave efforts to bring about a better state of things and to help on the cause of real patriotism in Greece were highly praiseworthy; but, as another historian has truly said, "he did not possess the activity and decision of character necessary to obtain commanding influence in council, or to initiate daring measures in the field."[B]

[Footnote A: Gordon, vol. i., pp. 313, 400.]

[Footnote B: Finlay, vol. ii., p. 129.]

Frank Abney Hastings was an abler man. Born in 1794, he was started in the naval profession when only eleven years old. Six months after the commencement of his midshipman's life he was present, on board the Neptune, at the battle of Trafalgar, and during the ensuing fourteen years he served in nearly every quarter of the globe. His independent spirit, however—something akin to Lord Cochrane's—brought him into disfavour, and, in 1819, for challenging a superior officer who had insulted him, he was dismissed from the British navy. Disheartened and disgusted, he resided in France for about three years. At length he resolved to go and fight for the Greeks, partly out of sympathy for their cause, partly as a relief from the misery of forced idleness, partly with the view of developing a plan which he had been devising for extending the use of steamships in naval warfare,—to which last excellent improvement he greatly contributed. He arrived at Hydra in April, 1822, just in time to take part in the fighting off Chios. One of his ingenious suggestions, made to Andreas Miaoulis, and its reception, have been described by himself. "I proposed to direct a fireship and three other vessels upon the frigate, and, 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 fireships. The vessels were then to attach themselves to the frigate, fire broadsides, double-shotted, throwing on board the enemy at the same time combustible balls which gave a great smoke without flame. This would doubtless induce him to believe he was on fire, and give a most favourable opportunity for boarding him. However, the admiral returned my plan, saying only [Greek: kalo], without asking a single question, or wishing me to explain its details; and I observed a kind of insolent contempt in his manner. This interview with the admiral disgusted me. They place you in a position in which it is impossible to render any service, and then they boast of their own superiority, and of the uselessness of the Franks, as they call us, in Turkish warfare." Miaoulis, however, soon gained wisdom and made good use of Captain Hastings, who spent more than 7000_l._—all his patrimony—in serving the Greeks. He was almost the only officer in their employ who, during the earlier years of the Revolution, succeeded in establishing any sort of discipline or good management.

Lord Byron, the most illustrious of all the early Philhellenes, used to say, shortly before his death, that with Napier at the head of the army and Hastings in command of a fleet the triumph of Greece might be insured. Byron was then at Missolonghi, whither he had gone in January, 1824, to die in April. Long before, while stirring up the sympathy of all lovers of liberty for the cause of regeneration in Greece, he had shown that regeneration could be by no means a short or easy work, and now he had to report that the real work was hardly yet begun—nay, that it seemed almost further off than ever. "Of the Greeks," he wrote, "I can't say much good hitherto, and I do not like to speak ill of them, though they do of one another."

It was chiefly at Byron's instigation that the first Greek loan was contracted, in London, early in 1824. Its proceeds, 300,000_l._, were spent partly in unprofitable outlay upon ships, ammunition, and the like, of which the people were in no position to make good use, but mostly in civil war and in pandering to the greed and vanity of the members of the Government and their subordinate officials. "Phanariots and doctors in medicine," says an eye-witness, "who, in the month of April, 1824, were clad in ragged coats, and who lived on scanty rations, threw off that patriotic chrysalis before summer was past, and emerged in all the splendour of brigand life, fluttering about in rich Albanian habiliments, refulgent with brilliant and unused arms, and followed by diminutive pipe-bearers and tall henchmen."[A]

[Footnote A: Finky, vol. ii. p. 39.]

Even the scanty allowance made by the Greek Government out of its newly-acquired wealth for fighting purposes was for the most part squandered almost as frivolously. One general who drew pay and rations for seven hundred soldiers went to fight and die at Sphakteria at the head of seventeen armed peasants.[A] And that is only a glaring instance of peculations that were all but universal.

[Footnote A: Trikoupes, vol. iii., p. 206.]

That being the degradation to which the leaders of the Greek Revolution had sunk, it is not strange that its gains in previous years should have begun in 1824 to be followed by heavy losses. The Greek people—the peasants and burghers—were still patriots, though ill-trained and misdirected. They could defend their own homesteads with unsurpassed heroism, and hold their own mountains and valleys with fierce persistency. But they were unfit for distant fighting, even when their chiefs consented to employ them in it. Sultan Mahmud, therefore, who had been profiting by the hard experience of former years, and whose strength had been steadily growing while the power of the insurgents had been rapidly weakening, entered on a new and successful policy. He left the Greeks to waste their energies in their own possessions, and resolved to recapture, one after another, the outposts and ill-protected islands. For this he took especial care in augmenting his navy, and, besides developing his own resources, induced his powerful and turbulent vassal, Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, to equip a formidable fleet and entrust it to his son Ibrahim, on whom was conferred the title of Vizier of the Morea.

Even without that aid Mahmud was able to do much in furtherance of his purpose. The island of Kasos was easily recovered, and full vengeance was wreaked on its Greek inhabitants on the 20th of June. Soon afterwards Psara was seized and punished yet more hardly.

On the 19th of July Ibrahim left Alexandria with a naval force which swept the southern seas of Greek pirates or privateers. On the 1st of September he effected a junction with the Turkish fleet at Budrun. Their united strength comprised forty-six ships, frigates, and corvettes, and about three hundred transports, large and small. The Greek fleet, between seventy and eighty sail, would have been strong enough to withstand it under any sort of good management; but good management was wanting, and the crews were quite beyond the control of their masters. The result was that in a series of small battles during the autumn of 1824 the Mahometans were generally successful, and their enemies found themselves at the close of the year terribly discomfited The little organization previously existing was destroyed, and the revolutionists felt that they had no prospect of advantageously carrying on their strife at sea without assistance and guidance that could not be looked for among themselves.

Their troubles were increased in the following year. In February and March, 1825, Ibrahim landed a formidable army in the Morea, and began a course of operations in which the land forces and the fleet combined to dispossess the Greeks of their chief strongholds. The strongly-fortified island of Sphakteria, the portal of Navarino and Pylos, was taken on the 8th of May. Pylos capitulated on the 11th, and Navarino on the 21st of the same month. Other citadels, one after another, were surrendered; and Ibrahim and his army spent the summer in scouring the Morea and punishing its inhabitants, with the utmost severity, for the lawless brigandage and the devoted patriotism of which they had been guilty during the past four years.

The result was altogether disheartening to the Greeks. They saw that their condition was indeed desperate. George Konduriottes, a Hydriot merchant, an Albanian who could not speak Greek, and who was alike unable to govern himself or others, had, in June, 1824, been named president of the republic, and since then the rival interests of the primates, the priests, and the military leaders had been steadily causing the decay of all that was left of patriotism and increase of the selfishness that had so long been rampant.

There was one consequence of this degradation, however, which promised to be very beneficial. Seeing that their cause was being rapidly weakened, and that their hard-fought battle for liberty was in danger of speedy and ignominious reversal by their own divisions, by the stealthy encroachments of the Ottomans in the north, and by the more energetic advances of the Egyptians in the south, the Greeks resolved to abandon some of their jealousies and greeds, to look for a saviour from without, and, on his coming, to try and submit themselves honestly and heartily to his leadership. The issue of that resolution was the following letter, written by Mavrocordatos, then Secretary to the National Assembly:—

"Milord,—Tandis que vos rares talens étaient consacrés à procurer le bonheur d'un pays séparé par un espace immense de la Grèce, celle-ci ne voyait pas sans admiration, sans intérêt, sans une espèce de jalousie secrète même, les succès brillants qui ont toujours couronné vos nobles efforts, et rendu à l'indépendance un des plus beaux, des plus riches pays du monde. Votre retour en Angleterre a excité la plus vive joie dans le coeur du citoyen Grèc et de ses représentans par l'espoir flattereur qu'ils commencent à concevoir que, celui qui s'est si noblement dédié à procurer le bonheur d'une nation, ne refusera pas d'en faire autant pour celui d'une autre, qui ne lui offre pas une carrière moins brillante et moins digne de lui et par son nom historique, et par ses malheurs passés et par ses efforts actuels pour reconquérir sa liberté et son indépendance. Les mers qui rappellent les victoires des Thémistocles et des Timon, ne seront pas un théâtre indifférent pour celui qui sait apprécier les grands hommes, et un des premiers amiraux de notre siècle ne verra qu' avec plaisir qu'il est appellé à renouveler les beaux jours de Salamine et de Mycale à la tête des Miaoulis, des Sachtouris et des Kanaris.

"C'est avec la plus grande satisfaction, milord, que je me vois chargé de faire, au nom du Gouvernement, à votre seigneurie, la proposition du commandement général des forces navales de la Grèce. Si votre seigneurie est disposée à l'accepter, Messieurs les Deputés du Gouvernement Grèc à Londres ont toute l'autorisation et les instructions nécessaires