Within moments they were in the Ionian Sea and by 4 p.m. a determined south wind had risen to greet them. About fifteen miles offshore and heading due west the captain decided to tack to the south-east towards Patras, half way through which manoeuvre the main lateen sail split asunder. The galliot could not now even resume its westward course and was unbalanced, and I imagine, almost unhelmable, and being blown northwards by the gathering wind alone towards French-held Corfu. The Turkish crew promptly leapt below and the captain ‘wrung his hands and wept.’
At this point the main yard broke and with no power in the sails the ship would soon have been floundering, and the floundering would then have caused the ‘cannons to roll’ and loose cannons rolling from bulwark to bulwark across the deck would soon be smashing through the topsides. It needs little imagination to see the danger they were in: apart from the hull being in danger, the frantic flapping of the split sail, the flaying of the unstayed rigging ropes and the wielding giant’s club of the broken yard would have imperilled any soul still above decks.
The five Greeks now took over the ship. While one wrestled with the helm, the others jury-rigged a staysail and they slowly brought the galliot back under command, albeit heading still further north, but at least under some degree of control. As Byron wrote a few days later to his mother:
I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship of war, owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew, though the storm was not violent. Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Alla; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God; the sails were split, the main-yard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, and all our chance was to make Corfu, which is in possession of the French, or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) ‘a watery grave.’ I did what I could to console Fletcher, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak), and lay down on deck to wait the worst. I have learnt to philosophise in my travels; and if I had not, complaint was useless.
By the evening the wind had subsided as it is apt to do in the Ionian Sea and early the following morning the Greeks brought the galliot into Fanari Bay, still in Ali Pasha’s territory, but they had been blown twenty-five miles off course, twenty-five miles north of Preveza. Fanari Bay is today still sparsely populated, and we spent a pleasant night at anchor bobbing up and down under a waxing moon. At the south end of the bay is the mouth of the River Acheron, and a not too unreasonably drafted boat can navigate a mile or two upstream. We can presume that Byron and the entourage disembarked from their wounded galliot in the Acheron rather than the beach. Thus they abandoned Captain Dulcigniote and his stricken galliot and made their way back to Preveza by land, for as Byron wrote two days later: ‘I shall not trust Turkish sailors in future. I am therefore going as far as Missolonghi by land, and there have only to cross a small gulf to get to Patras.’ As it happens, he had to embark on one of Ali Pasha’s galliots again two days later, but this time one under Greek and Albanian supervision.
Although safe from the sea and on dry land the entourage were not totally out of danger. They were in Souli territory; and the Christian Souliotes were a fearsome race, if for now subdued by Ali Pasha’s garrisons. (It was Souliote mercenaries whom Byron hired for his private guard fifteen years later at Messolonghi, and in his final days there they proved to be an uncontrollable, unpredictable band of robbers in uniform.) To reach Preveza they had to ride near the gorge of Zalongo where two hundred Souliote women saw Ali Pasha’s brigands slowly massacring their men in a convent while they were forced to wait outside. They knew they had only been saved for slavery and debauchery. Grabbing their children in their arms, reciting psalms and singing hymns, they ran to a nearby cliff and threw themselves off in one of the strangest hetacombs in history rather than meet their fate as playthings of Ali’s brigands.
Furthermore, to ride the two days back to Preveza they had to bypass the port of Parga, also still held by the French. There was now no official escort, although the second-in-command from the galliot offered to accompany them. They set off inland, riding through the forests of Acarnania and spent the first night at Dolondoracho. The land is dominated by the Souli castle which took Ali Pasha thirteen years to capture. As they rode they picked up further soldiery, and by the time they arrived at Kastrosikia the next evening the entourage had grown to fifteen strong.
Soon they were back in Nicopolis, just north of Preveza, and Byron and Hobhouse ‘trotted off to pay another visit to the ruins.’ They spent two nights in Preveza, again at the consul’s house, but by 13 November had found another galliot, albeit commanded by the same hapless Captain Dulcigniote, who had somehow navigated himself back from Fanari Bay. Someone somewhere organised another escort, this time of thirty-five Albanian soldiers under a Captain Lato. The Byron battalion had now become the Byron brigade, a precursor to the more famous officially named Byron Brigade which he was to lead fifteen years later at Messolonghi in the War of Independence.
The first destination was Loutraki in the far south-eastern corner of the Gulf of Amvrakia, about twenty sailing miles from Preveza. This time the winds were feckless and as they drifted aimlessly overnight off the ancient Corinthian port of Vonitsa the slaves were put to work rowing through the night. (Those were the days.) The next morning was one that only autumnal Greece could light: sunrise over the hills of Agrapha to the south, flat shimmering pink Gulf seas ahead, golden marshlands off Salaóra to the north, endless layers of blue above and a fine breeze behind, insomuch as they reached the delightful little landing of Loutraki mid-afternoon.
It has been seldom on this voyage that one has found a place now more or less intact and much as Byron and Hobhouse - Hobhouse in this case - described it then. Loutraki is one such, ‘situated in a pretty, deep bay at the southeast corner of the Gulf. There is a custom house, and a lodge for soldiers, surrounded by a high wall, except at the water’s edge.’ The bay is still pretty and deep, the customs house is an occasional, rather reluctant, taverna - next to a yew tree with an Orthodox shrine built into the split at its hollow - and the base of the high wall is still there too. Along the shore are Gulf fishing skiffs, brightly painted, nets at the ready, run up on the beach and pointing hopefully out to sea.
No attempt has been made to prettify the working fishing village, and it seems amazing it has not all been turned into some ghastly holiday complex. That night two hundred years ago the party tented on the shore rather than lodged and the scene must have looked like a medieval invasion. Hobhouse ee-awed: ‘the scene at night-time was not a little picturesque, a goat being roasted whole for the Albanians. They assembled in four parties round as many fires, and the night being fine they sang and danced to their songs round the largest blaze after their manner. Several of these songs turned on the exploits of robbers, one beginning thus “When we set sail a band of thieves from Parga - we were in number eighty-two.” ‘ They were in fact all ex-robbers, as Ali Pasha’s strategy for a newly captured territory was to enlist the robbers into his army, thereby killing several birds with one stone. Their revelry that night might have had special gusto to warn off other robbers, for ‘fifteen days past, thirty-five robbers made their appearance close to the house and carried off a Turk and a Greek, the former of whom they shot, and the latter of whom they stoned, on a small green spot at the bottom of the bay (by way of bravado, as we heard). This night, including the guard of the place, our company amounted to sixty-seven people.’ As one can imagine, all this was the very grindiest grist for Childe Harold’s mill, now three weeks into its first draft, and keeping its author occupied nightly.
The next morning Childe Harold and his troupe of servants and warriors weighed camp, found some horses at the Loutraki staging post for the principals and with the kilted, fearsome, fearless foot soldiers marching and singing beside them set off into outlaw country, the fringe of Ali Pasha’s thiefdom, the magical Dytikian hills.
If Albania had been grand wide open landscapes, horizontal rather than vertical gestures, red and purple and blue, Dytiki was close bound, clusters of forested hills rising and rising, the views ascending and descending and ascending again, green and brown and golden at these hints of a southern autumn.
They spent the first night fifteen miles south of Loutraki at Katouna where they were lodged in the village primate’s house. Hobhouse noted ‘there are but a few houses, but those good, and a school-house.’ All that remained was lost in the 1953 earthquake, but the school house has not only been rebuilt but expanded enormously and the mid-afternoon roads are busy with school buses to-ing and fro-ing their charges from the nearby villages. The central square above and on top of the town is full of chattering, flirting, laughing, pouting and posing young Greek boys and girls, and around the square they bustle from the Sugar Café Club to the Café After Bar, dropping in at the Piccadilly Internet Café before topping themselves up at the Fast Food Perfecto, although one has to say that the Union Now! bookshop seems rather short of customers. Katouna is full of mountain air and the optimism of long futures.
I need to work out where to go next on the re-Tour. I was par- ticularly keen to find out about the next village, which Hobhouse called Machala, a name missing from the modern maps. This is not uncommon as many place names changed after independence, and the riddle is normally solved by finding a local person who knew someone slightly older who knew someone slightly older still who remembered the name as it was. The unravelling of clues as one retraces Byron and Hobhouse’s footsteps can easily become an end in itself, and the sleuth with his nose to the ground and his tail in the air becomes like a bloodhound fixated by the dying whiff of a tricky kipper. In this case the kipper was particularly whiffy because of Hobhouse’s enigmatic description of their lodgings in Machala, or however it is now called. ‘This house in which we are lodged is like a squire’s house in the Wiltshire downs, a little in decay. There are two courts, one before and the other behind, with a terrace, the whole being surrounded with a strong high wall which shuts out the prospect, it is true, but shuts out the thieves likewise, who always infest this country.’
In a new town in Spain or Portugal Byron and Hobhouse would always head for the monastery because they could talk in Latin to the monks, a process I had tried with embarrassingly poor results with an African monk in a convent in Estremoz in Portugal. The Ancient Greek they had learnt alongside Latin at school was of little use here as the monks had lost their contact with Hellenistic Greek, which is used in Orthodox services today, and anyway they had by now acquired the Greek Andreas Zantakis as part of the group for conversing locally. Some monks spoke Latin, rather perversely as Ancient Greek came before Latin as the sacred language of Christianity, the early Roman Church being a colony of Greek Christians. Only a few days before I had read that Napoleon remarked that the introduction of Christianity itself was the triumph of Greece over Rome; the last and most signal instance of the maxim of Horace, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (captive Greece took its rude captor captive).
Two hundred years later the equivalent of Latin as the traveller’s Esperanto is English, and so rather than seek out the nearest monastery where the incumbents would worship in Latin I had learnt to seek out the nearest Internet café where the incumbents would surf in English.
’Machala? Machala, you say?’ the student at the Piccadilly counter asks. He shouts in Greek into the room. Soon all eyes and ears are on our conversation. I show a constellation of teenage eyes the Michelin map, Hobhouse’s entry and my own attempt at Machala in the Greek alphabet. I explain it must be within a day’s walk of here. But no one knows; slowly their enthusiasm dies, heads are shaken, shoulders are shrugged, internetting is resumed.
If the internet crew doesn’t know about Machala I think it is time to revert to Byron’s ecclesiastical friends. On the other side of the square from the students’ bars and cafés is a large ochre traditional-style, but newly built, Orthodox church. A very dapper woman in a green and white cardiganed uniform is leaving as I approach. I can decipher the words ‘Traffic’ and ‘Police’ on her knitted sleeve.
’Machala? Machala? Machala?’ she muses, ‘no. Come.’ She waves me to follow and in a side street off the square she takes me into a laundry-cum-dry cleaner. There is a flurry of words and gestures, an unfolding of maps and notebooks, a rally of village names, and after a minute a consensus is reached.
’Fities,’ she announces. ‘You want Fities.’The dry cleaner has already found it on my map. He points to it; it is indeed where it might well be, a day’s march in the direction of Messolonghi. She takes me out to the street. ‘Car?’ I point to the blue and dayglo Smart in the square.’No parking,’ she looks up teasingly, ‘go end this street,’ she points to the opposite side of the square, ‘end street right. Right. Straight Fities.’ We smile, I thank, she laughs ‘no parking’ once more and wags her finger at the car as we wish each other goodbye.
The road to Fities would seem unchanged since Hobhouse wrote:’Road through a lovely woody country. Mounting the hills just before Machala, the prospect widens, and a plain enclosed to the west with high mountains to the east. Also the view is very grand - a lake and the Archelöus river, winding through a woody plain. In this country there are fewer villages, and as far as travellers, we have met none, but the houses are better than in Albania.’ The closer one comes to Fities the more the road becomes a track, and then the track, still climbing gently, clears the woods and one is left with an eagle’s view of the plains. One just needs a well armed, white kilted, gold and crimson robed, fiercely loyal, singing and marching private Albanian army escorting one’s own eccentric entourage to complete the illusion of vertical time, and to feel like Byron must have felt there and then,master of the moment, the King of Dytiki.
In tiny Fities the ‘squire’s house in the Wiltshire downs’ is easy to find; at least either it is long gone or it is one of three strong candidates, three substantial dwellings that are over two hundred years old. One is restored and freshly painted, and the other two in various states of disrepair. As I am snooping around, the slightest of old women, with the blackest dress and whitest face, appears. By sign language and shared sounds it seems the smart house is owned by someone in Athens. The other two? She gestures into the distance, owners somewhere else, not Athens.
The seat of the Wiltshire squire soon becomes obvious. What was once ‘a little in decay’ is now turning from decay to dust. The ‘high wall’ no longer shuts out the prospect or the thieves, but what is left of it still forms the boundary. Someone at some stage has made the two courts into one, and the terrace remains, although now reverted to Fities flora and fauna. I am soon talking myself into buying it, how high to build the wall, where to extend the terrace, how to be a Wiltshire squire, all very satisfactory. The moment refuses to let go, and as a message in a bottle I give the old Greek lady my card and point at the ruin. She looks puzzled. I fish a €10 note out of my pocket and wave that at the house and my card, her face lights up, the drachma has dropped!, but at the time of writing the house still belongs to owners somewhere else, not Athens.
From Fities they started the gentle descent towards the flatlands, the mangrove swamps and salt marshes that lead to and then surround Messolonghi. Two hundred years ago one had to approach Messolonghi from the north by punt, from the salt marsh island town of Etolica, built as Hobhouse said in ‘the Venetian fashion’. The illusion of Venice in the offing continues as one nears Messolonghi as reeds, then stilts, then stilts with seats, then stilts with shelters, then stilts with shacks grow out of the salt flats. Punt was the only way to arrive then, and it is still an alternative way for tourists to arrive now, and so the brigade became marines as they entered Messolonghi.
They were met by the British consul who thought Byron was an ambassador and insisted on speaking to him in French. Funnily enough I was met by the British consul too, although at the ti
me I only knew her to be the president of the Messolonghi Byron Society. Her name is Rosa Florou, and knowing this little bundle of Greek energy as I now do I’m surprised she isn’t just president of the Messolonghi Byron Society, the British consul and a director of the National Bank of Greece, but also prime minister of Greece and Greek ambassador to the United Nations, as well as the current incarnation of the goddess Demeter.
Messolonghi is like a shrine to Byron’s memory and Rosa is the high priestess. She takes me to the temple, Byron House, a handsome square three-storey building on reclaimed land on the shore of the salt flats. Built by the Greek state in 1991, with an enormous bronze statue of our man outside, it also houses the Byron Research Centre, dedicated to the ‘study of Lord Byron and Philhellenism’. The top floor library has first editions onwards of works by Byron, letters from and to Byron, lives of Byron, books about Byron and his philosophy, Byron and his women, Byron and his radicalism, Byron and his contemporaries, Byron and the Romantics, Byron and mythology, Byron and religion, Byron in Italy, Byron in Switzerland, Byron in Greece, but nothing, thank heavens, about Byron and his Grand Tour. There is one empty space on the shelves, and Rosa promises to keep it free, but I think she says that to all her boys.
Every year the Byron Research Centre runs the International Byron Student Conference and in autumn 2009 hosted the annual International Byron Society Conference, with hundreds of delegates from the Byron Societies of thirty-five countries from Albania to Uruguay. There the international Byronistas presented no fewer than seventy academic papers, visited Athens University and Byronic and ancient sites, were handsomely wined and dined, and all organised by the redoubtable Rosa.
We tour the town. No one knows where he stayed for those two nights in 1809; the town was destroyed in the War of Independence and most of its inhabitants massacred by the Turks in the Exodus of 1826 when those still alive in the town tried to break through the besieging Ottoman lines, but were betrayed and slaughtered. Those who remained blew themselves up rather than be taken alive by the Turks. The War is remembered in the Garden of Heroes in the town centre, an ironically enlivening Valhalla of philhellenes from every corner of Europe, and in the centre of them all, in pride of place, the only Hero accorded a full statue, is the figure of a proud and defiant Byron, hero still to the Greeks. Under the statue in a silver urn are his lungs. Nearby is a cross which stands where Byron died on 19 April 1824. Modern analysis suggests he died of an infection brought on by Mediterranean tick fever, probably caught from one of his pets, either Lyon the Newfoundland or Moretto the Bulldog. That alone would have been feverish but survivable, but the doctors and prevailing wisdom insisted on bleeding him with leeches and he was drained of over half his blood, and a combination of the fever and blood loss led to a slow, but by all accounts, peaceful death by dog and doctor.
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