Back in Smyrna good news awaited them: the famous firman had arrived. Only Mrs. Werry was disappointed at their departure, for like so many others, she had fallen for the beautiful poet young enough to be her son. She cried and made Byron leave her a lock of his hair. Hobhouse was not impressed, and noted rather ungallantly that she was ‘pretty well at 56 years at least.’ One can almost feel the entourage jumping with joy as they clambered onto the Salsette on 11 April, after a mercifully short three weeks in Smyrna. Two hundred years later the crew of Vasco da Gama jumped with joy too as Izmir faded into the horizon; and madam herself sprung to stations as soon as she was free of the sweaty quay and filthy water.
From Byron’s point of view the most interesting crew member on the Salsette was one of the midshipmen, the fourteen-year-old Frederick Chamier. Chamier’s grandfather, like Byron’s, had been an admiral, and Chamier himself later wrote four naval novels, became a naval historian and left us his autobiography, Life of a Sailor, from which the following scenes are drawn.
I couldn’t rustle up a midshipman for Vasco da Gama, and the last I heard about the only admiral’s grandson I know he had set himself up as a food stylist in Dubai, but in the Smyrna Beer Saloon on the town quay I had come across a French sea-hitchhiker in his early twenties, a certain Théophane Jauzzion. He asked me to where I was heading.
’Istanbul, and you?’
’Tahiti. I am hitch hiking there. By sea. From Marseilles. To see my cousin, she works for the protectorat. You need crew?’
He is a big strapping lad, hairy too. Vasco had a couple of overnighters to do in the approaches to Istanbul, and a third person to share the watches, especially one to whom to delegate the graveyard watch, is always helpful. ‘Always helpful,’ I reply, ‘but surely it’s the wrong way for Tahiti.’
’Oh, never mind. I have been in Izmir too long. I think I can find another ship in Istanbul.’
’So you are under no time pressure, then?’
He gives a Gallic puff and pout, which I took to mean ‘Non’.
Theo crews with us to Istanbul. He is amicable, reads philosophy and writes poems in his notebook, stares to himself at the horizon and is generally quite Byronic. It is soon after we leave Smyrna that we discover his one disadvantage: he sleeps for an inordinate part of the day, ten hours at a stretch, and the stretches only have short breaks between them. I tell Gillian I think he has necrophilia, she presumes I mean narcolepsy, and we agree that either would be inconvenient on watch, and - especially if I am right about his condition - particularly on the graveyard watch.
Navigating north-east under sail through the straits of the Dardanelles to the Sea of Marmara and onward to Istanbul, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea has always required, above all else,patience with the fates. Europe lies to the north and west; Asia to the south and east. A strong current flows south-west from the Black Sea into the Aegean, and to make matters worse the prevailing north-easterly winds follow and encourage the current as they funnel through the Dardanelles. Eventually the northerlies relent and one needs not just a southerly but a healthy one to overcome up to four knots of foul current. Even today, with the likes of our friend Mr.Perkins chugging away below, progress upstream is best described as leisurely.
It’s an ill wind, so they say, that does no one any good, and Captain Bathurst’s ill north-easterly off the Dardanelles those April days in 1810 certainly did Byron, Hobhouse, Darwin and Chamier some good; while the Salsette languished at anchor for seventeen days waiting for its fair wind they were able to search for the remains of the settlements of Troy, and later were all to add their opinions to the academic arguments raging about Troy at the time.
Back in Byron’s day ivory towerists had been theorising about where and when the epic siege and final battle for Helen’s hand took place, and even if the Trojans ever existed at all. Latest cat among the pigeons was Jacob Bryant, who ten years before had published his Dissertation concerning the War of Troy. This had proposed that there was no Greek expedition, no battle and not even the citadel of Troy itself, and even insisted that Troy was, if anywhere, in Egypt. What is certain is that in 1810 there would have been no evidence - beyond some random rocks and walls that one finds everywhere coastal in Turkey - of the recurring civilisations that had been created and destroyed on the site as it was not until 1865 that the English Troad farmer/American diplomat/Troy enthusiast Frank Calvert steered the German archaeologist Schliemann onto the land under which he believed Troy had stood.
It is way beyond the scope of this book to follow the archaeological machinations and lootings at Troy since 1865, save to observe that archaeologists by necessity destroy what they hope to prove and, in the case of Troy, at times appear to have been more preoccupied with an almost Homeric sullying of each other’s reputations than unearthing evidence of advantage to the rest of us. Many too seemed to have had light fingers and big trousers. For those interested not just in Troy as it was but also in the archaeological subplots I can recommend the excellent The Search for Troy by the BBC historian Michael Woods. For those interested in the siege and battle for a whole civilisation I can recommend Robert Fagles’s translation of Homer’s Iliad with its wonderful introduction by Bernard Knox.
Reading Michael Woods’s updated postscript was exciting for the crew of Vasco da Gama, as we seemed to be in the right place at the right time. The latest high-technology surveys place the tomb of Achilles at Besiktepe just behind Besika Bay, five miles south of the Dardanelles, where we are at anchor. Woods concludes the evidence suggests that, just like Byron, Xerces and Alexander the Great, the Greek fleet anchored in Besika Bay and landed on its beach on their way to Troy. Homer conjures up the scene of the Greek invasion fleet at Besika Bay I saw yesterday afternoon:
Their ships were drawn up far from the fighting.
Moored in a group along the grey churning surf-
first ships ashore they’d hauled up on the plain
then built a defence to landward off their sterns.
Not even the stretch of beach, broad as it was,
could offer berths to all that massed armada,
the troops were crammed in a narrow strip of coast.
So they had hauled their vessels inland, row on row,
while the whole shoreline filled and the bay’s gaping mouth
enclosed by the jaws of the two jutting headlands.
Byron’s first visit to Besika Bay and the plains of Troy is best described by young Chamier:
The next day I was nominally at work again in the cabin, when Lord Byron requested he might be landed on the plains of Troy: in point of fact, he had been gazing through a telescope on the scene of the brilliant actions of antiquity for hours before.
‘I will take this young acquaintance of mine with me, with your permission, Captain Bathurst.’
‘Certainly,’ replied that excellent man; and in one minute my books were closed, the chronometer sights handed over for the benefit of others, and I down below, ‘cleaning myself,’ as the term is on board ship, to go ashore.
His lordship had his fowling piece handed into the boat, and we shoved off, all in high spirits. It blew a stiff breeze, and the boat surged her gunwhale in the water, as she lifted over the wave. The cockswain ventured to hint that she would go faster for having a reef in. This was strenuously opposed by Lord Byron, who was a capital sailor, and we arrived, safe and sound, though by no means dry, in the bay, where it is supposed the Grecian fleet was formerly hauled on shore.
His lordship being accompanied by two servants (Vassily and Dervish Tahiri) - presents from that furious monster, Ali Pacha; as Lord Byron called him, ‘the mildest looking gentleman he ever saw.’ These two were his constant bodyguard; and the attachment between master and men was reciprocal.
Troy and its plains were hallowed ground to his lordship, which I ventured to profane, by blazing away at
every bird I saw; and while the poet was imagining the great events of former days, I was lost in the sweet hope of the next day’s dinner.
We had a long walk round old walls, and I was tired enough when his lordship brought himself to anchor upon the tomb of Patroclus, producing a book, which he read with the utmost attention, occasionally glancing his quick eye over the plains. It was a Homer.
***
We are at anchor in Besika Bay too. To landward of Vasco da Gama the bay and beach are deserted, while on a slight gradient to the south a dozen wind monsters are whirring away. Homer said the plains of Troy were ‘windy, windy.’ Byron noted the ‘The ringing plains of windy Troy.’ Behind, to seaward, lines of supertankers, coasters, cruise schooners and warships position themselves to enter the Dardanelles. The captain and first mate on Vasco da Gama remark how alike the Trojan coast is to Dorset, or maybe more to the point as a large expeditionary invasion was mounted across its beaches, to Normandy. Theo is asleep and so cannot confirm.
I venture the two hundred metres ashore in the dinghy. There is no one in sight, and I cross over a dune and a dirt track and find myself in front of Besiktepe, the tumulus of Achilles. It’s impossible to say if Byron stood here too, still less climbed the mound as I do now. But just in case he didn’t, and to pay my own homage, I climb the one hundred-metre slope. Crouching on top of it, and after looking around to make sure no one is watching, I lie down on its summit and hug the hill. I tell Achilles, ‘Om! Paramatmane Namaha’; I hear Byron say, ‘I’ve stood upon Achilles tomb and heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome’; Homer says, ‘I told you so.’ I pass on the messages.
Sorry about that, getting a bit carried away back there. Ashore too the similarity to southern England in August skews the expectations of ancient Troy. There are wheat and barley fields waving in the wind, oak and poplar trees guarding their shade, poppies showing off and butterflies playing in the sun, surrounded by dirt tracks plied by dusty tractors. In a field half a dozen Anatolian peasants are crouched in a circle, presumably for a çay break.
After a further kilometre or so, but still some way inland from what we now know to be Troy, I think it’s time for this Byron mini- tour to turn back in a half circle to the shore. He would have had no way of knowing where the site we know today was, and anyway he could not walk over rough ground for very long. On the way back I come across a wall, which may or may not have been the one that Chamier referred to. Looking up, there is a new view of Achilles’ tomb and it could be - perhaps should be if Elgin really wanted a coup de théâtre and international outcry - reposing among the other tumuli somewhere near Glastonbury.
On another visit, this time with Hobhouse and Bathurst, Byron heard that ‘When the English came here in wartime, they asked us only for a draught of water - but the Russians, they burnt our town and took everything, as you see.’ Later that week Byron’s group was confronted by a posse of Turkish cavalry who thought they were Russians. As Chamier takes up the story:
... we came suddenly upon a squadron of Turks, all mounted upon spirited animals, and all as surprised at meeting Giaours, as we were at finding ourselves so near the true believers. However, in the distance... they imagined we were Russians; and... drew their sabres... their countenances betrayed their eager desire for the encounter. In the mean time, our party began to make all preparations for fight; and had it not been for Lord Byron’s coolness we should have been minus a head or two before long; for the foremost of the hot-headed Turks waved their sparkling cimeters over their turbaned skulls, whilst those in the rear drew
forth their splendid pistols, and cocked them. No sooner, however, did they learn that we were friends... than they expressed their satisfaction in suitable terms, returned their sabres to their scabbards, gave a very oriental and elegant bend, and... trotted past us at a quick pace.
Now that we know so much more about Troy than they did then, it is hard to feel the strong emotions the questions about its reality, factual or mythological, stirred at the time. I agree comitante comite Byrone that if something is experienced in consciousness it is real. It may not be factual but it is still real, that is to say that something unfactual experienced in full consciousness is more real than something factual experienced in ignorance of consciousness. This is where one can easily mistake the lesser reality of facts with the greater reality of, well, reality. Ten years later Byron was to write:
We do care about the authenticity of the tale of Troy. I have stood upon that plain daily, for more than a month, in 1810; and, if any thing diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity. It is true I read ‘Homer Travestied’ (the first twelve books), because Hobhouse and others bored me with their learned localities, and I love quizzing. But I still venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise, it would have given me no delight. Who will persuade me, when I reclined upon a mighty tomb, that it did not contain a hero? - its very magnitude proved this. Men do not labour over the ignoble and petty dead - and why should not the dead be Homer’s dead?
He would not be surprised that he has had his cake and eaten it, and that his tombs did indeed contain mighty heroes.
All foul winds eventually turn fair, and after nearly three weeks at Besika Bay, the Salsette entered the Dardanelles, then called the Hellespont. Progress was predictably tedious and in the meantime Byron had hatched a plot to swim across the straits from Sestos on the European side to Abydos on the Asian side, all this in a conscious attempt to imitate Leander who swam across to meet Hero, priestess of Aphrodite. On 3 May, as the Salsette was anchored in a small bay south of Abydos his chance arrived. Bathurst soon calculated that with the strong current running alongside him Byron would have to swim four miles over the ground: the current would account for three of the miles, Byron’s prowess for the other one. I’m sure he further reflected that Hero too had done her leeway vector projections before giving Leander his task.
In the years to come Byron said his Hellespont crossing had meant more than any other event ‘political, poetical or rhetorical.’ If so, and as we have become rather friendly of late, I think I had better have a go too and on 4 June one hundred and ninety-nine years later make my own attempt at crossing the Dardanelles.
First problem was and is that there is nowhere to anchor, or even tie up, near Sestos. We know that the Salsette spent several days at anchor in the bay behind Abydos, and the only conclusion is that Captain Bathurst sent Byron and his swimming companion, Lieutenant Ekenhead, over to Sestos in the jolly-boat, no doubt rowed by a team of heaving and reluctant ‘volunteers’. Having deposited Byron and Ekenhead ashore at Sestos, the jolly-boat would follow them across, now needing just the occasional paddle, at a discreet distance. On reading this, and to hedge bets, I ‘volunteer’ Theo to be part of our own two-man attempt, albeit as a relay not solos.
Unfortunately one can no longer anchor at Abydos, which is now renamed Fort Abydos and is yet another Turkish military installation. So we hatch a plan whereby Gillian will keep Vasco da Gama steady against the current off Fort Abydos, and Theo and I will outboard over to Sestos in the dinghy, scramble into our Speedos, and take it turns to be in the water or alongside in the dinghy.
Byron was clearly not just a ‘mighty scribbler’ but a mighty paddler, having already swum across the Tagus in Lisbon - actually further than the Hellespont - and had recently been swimming several times a week in Piraeus. I’m not much good at swimming outside a bath, but Theo says he is a strong swimmer, and so he looks, although I am frightened he will fall asleep mid-channel. It is not long after setting off in the dinghy that we notice the obvious snag to our plan, a snag with which Byron did not have to contend: the endless procession of supertankers, coasters, cruise schooners and warships which we had seen positioning themselves outside the Dardanelles are now in line astern in this narrowest part of the straits; not only that, bu
t an equal number of supertankers, coasters, cruise schooners and warships are heading the other way only a few hundred metres apart.
From dinghy height the channel at this narrowest point is a churning mass of wash and wake, never mind tens of thousands of tonnes of determined tankers steaming at twelve knots and the regulation five hundred metres apart. One doesn’t need a calculator to work out that to try is to die - and so with a great pretence at disappointment we agree to abandon our attempt to follow in Leander and Byron’s breaststrokes and further agree to complete several lengths of the next swimming pool as a forfeit.
Afterwards Byron was so exhausted he wondered if ‘Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise.’ He later wrote the light-hearted ‘Swimming from Sestos to Abydos’.
By journey’s end Byron had cheered up a notch and wrote to Drury:’I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save thatwe have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little... in England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, Sodomy and smoking,we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and pathic. I can swear in Turkish, but except one horrible oath, and “pimp” and “bread” and”water”, I have no great vocabulary in that language.’
How would Byron have written to Drury today? Maybe: ‘I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save that they drink raki and we wine, that we are trying to smoke less and they are succeeding in smoking more, that we are told to be politically correct and they would not stand the telling, that our sexes prefer the other and their sexes - in company at least - each other’s. They are misplacing their taboos, as did our Catholics of recent times. We go home in the early evening and they go home in the early morning; we have lost our manners and they maintain a courtesy beyond etiquette. The division of work between men and women seems entirely equitable in Anatolia if not in Notts.: the women work all day in the fields or as porters in the markets or as menders of the roads, while the men rest in the cafés drinking çay and playing backgammon, occasionally looking out to make sure the women are doing their jobs properly. At dusk the women go home, clean the house, make dinner, clear it up and repair the roof, and in their spare moments produce more children & so the cycle continues much as before. I know not much Turkish, save I have learnt that here “mullet” means a haircut & not a red fish to eat.’
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