In Cochrane's version of the plan, it was indispensable that the rest of the army on the bay of Phalerum should begin a simultaneous covering attack to divert the Turks, but also with the aim of taking the enemy on two sides at once, the two halves of the Greek force linking up victoriously in Athens itself. Accordingly, at midnight on 6 May, the 3000 Greeks were embarked and under the protection of the Hellas were landed at Cape Colias. Dr L. A. Gosse, a Swiss volunteer who acted as Commissary-General of the Greek Navy, accompanied Cochrane. He described the troops landing on the shore at Colias "in a clear moonlight, and in the most perfect order".
An advance guard of two hundred picked troops, including volunteers from Europe and America, marched inland unopposed and reached their rendezvous. They were so close, Gosse was told, that they could hail the defenders of the Acropolis. But at the landing place itself, it was evident that things were going badly wrong. Instead of advancing, many commanders were ordering their men to dig in. From the main Greek army on the other side of the water, where the second or diversionary attack should have begun, there was no sound. Gosse discovered one leader of men on the shore, quietly smoking his pipe, who responded to suggestions that he should march his men towards Athens by saying, "When they pay me I will go." Cochrane was not in command of the troops but he was appalled to discover that they proposed to continue digging in until daybreak. They were still digging at 9 a.m. when the Turkish cavalry appeared. The advance party had been obliged to withdraw from Athens at first light and were now almost wiped out by the Turks as they retreated. The cavalry then swept down on the beach-head, killing some 700 of the main force and taking 240 prisoners. Two thousand survivors scrambled for the boats. "There was exhibited such a panic," wrote Gosse, "as cannot be described." Some threw themselves into the sea, others tried unavailingly to fight off the Turkish horsemen, using their muskets as clubs in hand-to-hand fighting. Cochrane had insisted on going ashore from the Hellas to do whatever could be done but in the turmoil it was hopeless to attempt an organised defence.
By this time too, the Turkish artillery on the hills was sweeping the plain and the shore with its fire. Cochrane fought his way back to the small boat in which Gosse was waiting for him offshore, wading out until he was neck-deep. He hurried back to the Hellas and there took command of the guns to silence the Turkish batteries. The evacuation of Greek survivors continued and they were then ferried back across the bay of Phalerum, where the main Greek force had watched the rout without even putting into effect its planned "diversionary" attack. On 5 June, the garrison of the Acropolis surrendered to the Turks through French mediation, and Athens was lost.42
Though Cochrane's experience of the land war was discouraging, he found the war at sea no more promising. He knew how much could be achieved with courage and resolution, indeed this had been shown on 20 April in an attack on the main Turkish supply port of Negroponte, as Chalcis was known. He had sent Captain Hastings in command of the steamship Karteria and five smaller sailing ships to seize and destroy enemy provision vessels. On the day in question, Hastings found eight ships anchored under the shore-batteries. With his own broadsides, he silenced the guns ashore, destroyed three of the merchant ships and took the other five as prizes. Encountering an armed Turkish brig, he disposed of it spectacularly with a well-aimed shot in the powder magazine. Pausing at Kumi, he put his men ashore to seize the grain store, and then returned safely to Poros with his booty.43
But for all this, Cochrane had only two ships on which he could rely, and even the efficiency of the crews on these was not beyond question. The first was the Hellas, which he had chosen as his flagship and the other was the Karteria, under Captain Hastings. After the ill-fated attempt to relieve the Acropolis, he left the Greek army to Sir Richard Church and set out to see what could be done to serve the cause with his two best ships.
His first aim was to relieve Castle Tornese, on the coast of the Peloponnese opposite the island of Zante, which was now under siege by Ibrahim's army. By the time that the two ships arrived, on 22 May, Castle Tornese had fallen. There were, however, two Turkish frigates off the coast and, almost instinctively, Cochrane gave chase, firing into them. To his alarm, the guns of the Hellas were "ill-directed" and most of the crew ignored his commands. As he wrote after the encounter, "The noise and confusion on board this ship were excessive." The frigate gave up the chase. In fairness to the crew, it was no easy matter to communicate on all subjects. Even with the Greek leaders, Cochrane was obliged to talk in French or elementary Spanish, while on most other occasions an interpreter was necessary.44
The day following this abortive attack, Cochrane sighted a merchant vessel flying the British flag. He stopped and boarded her, discovering that though under British colours she was manned by Turks and Ionian islanders, the latter still under British rule. But the cargo of the vessel shocked even Cochrane. The ship was packed with women and children, prisoners taken at Castle Tornese and now destined for the slave markets of Turkey and Egypt. He at once put the ship under escort for Corfu and wrote an angry letter to the British High Commissioner there, as the representative of the governing power. He described the British flag as having been "prostituted" and demanded that the Royal Navy should play its part in "enforcing obedience to the laws of justice and humanity". He sent the crew of the slave ship as prisoners to Corfu, but warned the High Commissioner that such men might well be torn to pieces, in any future incident, by "the fury of the Greeks .. . bursting forth upon the violators of their countrywomen".45
By an irony, on the following day, Cochrane captured an armed Turkish brig. On board was part of Reshid Pasha's harem. It seems that Cochrane applied a quite different standard in the case of ladies who willingly accepted the system. With a courteous apology for having to take their ship from them, he put them ashore near Missolonghi with all their possessions.46
His complaints over the conduct of Greek crews continued, but he was apt to make too few allowances for them. To some extent he was in the position of Spanish naval commanders during the Napoleonic wars, when they had been obliged to man ships rapidly with crews whose lives had been spent ashore. The degree of education or sophistication among his Greek seamen was far behind that of the worst crews in his Royal Navy experience. In one ill-judged attempt to win the confidence of the men on the Hellas, he arranged a magic-lantern show for them. The "dissolving views" filled them with an obvious and child-like delight. Then Cochrane put on a slide of a Greek being pursued by a Turk, which melted into a picture of the Turk cutting off the Greek's head. The audience broke into wild panic, some jumping over the ship's side, others barricading themselves in the hold, from which it took many hours to coax them out.47
Cochrane's disillusionment, in this respect, was witnessed by Dr Gosse to whom he one day showed the loaded pistol he carried under his coat.
"See, my friend, see what it is to be a Greek admiral!"48
It had always been Cochrane's intention, as he promised when he accepted his commission as First Admiral, to carry the war into the enemy's homeland. Accordingly, he planned a major attack on Alexandria, where the Egyptian fleet was preparing for a final blow against Greece. Not only did he propose to destroy or capture the ships, he then planned to seize the port of Alexandria itself, as he had seized Valdivia or Maranham. The British government already feared for the safety of its subjects in Alexandria if the Egyptians discovered that Cochrane had led the Greek attack, but if Alexandria itself were in his hands, there would be no fear of reprisals.
On 11 June he assembled his squadron off Cape Saint Angelo, the south-eastern tip of the Peloponnese, for the Mediterranean crossing. Besides the Hellas and the corvette Sauveur, which he had acquired at Marseille, he had with him fourteen armed brigs and eight fire-ships. It was a slow crossing, the Hellas having to heave to from time to time so that the brigs could catch up, and it was on 15 June, at five in the morning, that Cochrane sighted Alexandria on the horizon. "The wind is fair for us, and our enterprise unsusp
ected," he told his crew, urging them to strike this one great blow against their oppressors, thereby winning Athens and setting Greece free at last. "The war is concentrated in one point of action and of time." It was an apt and succinct summary of the military situation.
He spent the rest of the day with his ships anchored just out of sight of Alexandria, while he himself prepared an explosion vessel to add to the havoc which he hoped the fire-ships would cause. There was a score of large Egyptian ships in the harbour and he ordered the attack to be made, using fire-ships, on the evening of 16 June.
It had not occurred, even to Cochrane, that there would be so few volunteers to take the fire-ships in. Eventually, he mustered enough of them to man two of the eight vessels. The Hellas and the Sauveur sailed at the head of the squadron, flying Austrian colours, Cochrane's intention being to sail into the port at once and open a bombardment of the Egyptian warships. But at the harbour entrance his crews saw the array of large Egyptian vessels, and their enthusiasm for the attack vanished. There was no alternative but to stand guard at the harbour mouth while the two available fire-ships went in, under cover of darkness, at about 8 p.m. Blazing impressively, they entered the port of Alexandria.
The success of the two brulots was doubtful, one of them managed to drift alongside an Egyptian warship, which caught fire quickly and went up in flames. In terms of actual destruction it was a small recompense. But, as at the Basque Roads, the psychological effect of this was out of all proportion to the damage done. The other Egyptian ships began to head for the open sea and scatter in every direction, while the inhabitants of Alexandria, convinced that bombardment was about to follow, left their homes and fled to villages outside the city.
Unfortunately, the Greek ships assumed that the escaping Egyptian vessels were coming out against them in an organised attack, so Cochrane, in exasperation, saw most of his own squadron leading the flight. By the morning of 18 June, they were scattered over some twenty miles of the Mediterranean. With the crews of the Hellas and the Sauveur in their present mood, it was hopeless to attempt the seizure of the port. At length, Cochrane put to sea in pursuit of twenty-five warships, from Alexandria and nearby, who were sailing at full speed to escape from the frigate and the corvette. After a chase of eighty miles, he had still not brought them to battle and, reluctantly, he turned to the task of rounding up his straggling navy. As a final gesture, he effected a brief landing on the Turkish coast of Asia Minor, near Phineka, seized supplies of food and water, and wrote a second contemptuous letter from conquered enemy soil to Mohammed Ali of Egypt. It was some consolation to injured pride. Despite the destruction of one Egyptian ship and the gratifying effect on enemy morale, the Alexandria expedition had been one more illustration of the apparent hopelessness of trying to win the freedom of Greece by naval warfare.49
It had long been evident that the outcome of the struggle between Greeks and Turks would probably be decided by the attitude of the major European powers. England, certainly, had a strong strategic interest in the area by virtue of possessing the Ionian islands. A Royal Navy squadron commanded by Sir Edward Codrington was detailed to see that neutral shipping was not exposed to Turkish interference or Greek piracy. Stratford Canning, as British ambassador at Constantinople, offered peace by negotiation. Its basis was that the Greeks should acknowledge the authority of the Sultan but that they should have internal self-government. The proposal was rejected by the Turks.
During Wellington's visit to St Petersburg, in 1826, Britain and Russia had signed a protocol agreeing to the right of the Greeks to independence, in principle. While the Turks remained intransigent and Greek resistance began to disintegrate, the representatives of France, Russia, and Britain met in London. As Cochrane returned despondently from Alexandria, the three great powers signed a treaty which pledged them to enforce the St Petersburg protocol. Greece was to have internal self-government under Turkish sovereignty. If an armistice was not agreed within a month, the forces of the signatories would intervene. As might be expected, the Greeks agreed at once to the proposed settlement, and the Turks rejected it.
In the months which followed, both sides in the war fought to be in the best position when an armistice should be imposed. Independence would mean little to the Greeks if they held nothing but a few fortified positions in the Peloponnese. As for the Turks, they had everything to gain by pushing their military frontier as far south into Greece as they could.
Cochrane's part in this final struggle was to assist the remnants of the army, under Sir Richard Church, in holding as much territory as possible in Albania and western Greece. To facilitate this, he was also to do as much damage as possible to the Turkish and Egyptian fleets which had concentrated in Navarino Bay. Navarino, almost at the south-west extremity of the Peloponnese, was a natural choice as a naval base. Some five miles across and three miles deep, it was almost landlocked by virtue of the long island of Sphacteria lying like a huge breakwater across its mouth. A narrow channel at the northern end and the wider Megalo Thouro channel at the south were overlooked by fortifications and shore-batteries. On the southern shore was Navarino itself and at the northern end the ancient city of Pylos with the palace and cave of Nestor.
One of Cochrane's first duties was to transport Sir Richard Church's army from the Gulf of Patros to Albania, to fuel the rebellion against Turkey on the Adriatic coast. He had been cruising off Navarino, which he left on 11 September, and entered the Gulf of Patras six days later. While he was waiting there for Sir Richard Church's army, H.M.S. Philomel appeared and her commander, Lord Ingestre, hailed the Hellas. He had been instructed to bring a message from Sir Edward Codrington, Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. Codrington had enjoyed a distinguished naval career, as captain of the Orion at Trafalgar, at Cadiz, and in the Scheldt, as well as in the actions at Baltimore, Washington, and New Orleans in the war against the United States. It was now his duty to enforce the agreement of the great powers, ensuring that Ibrahim's fleet remained in Navarino Bay and that Cochrane's activities ceased. The menace of his warning to Cochrane was subdued but clearly present.
Whereas I am informed by Sir Frederick Adam that Lord Cochrane, with the Greek fleet, is about to embark the army of General Church in the neighbourhood of Cape Papas, for the purpose of conveying them to the coast of Albania, you are hereby directed to make known to the commander of that expedition that I consider it my duty, in the present state of affairs, to prevent such a measure being carried into execution, and that I shall shortly present myself in that neighbourhood for that purpose.50
Novel though it might have been for Cochrane to engage a Royal Navy squadron in battle, he obeyed the command. But Captain Hastings, with the Karteria and the Sauveur, was operating independently. He did not even know of the agreement between Ibrahim and the admirals of the English, French, and Russian squadrons patrolling the area, that there should be a cessation of naval hostilities under the terms of the London treaty. The Turks had reluctantly agreed to this maritime truce when the warships of the three powers appeared in Greek waters. Captain Hastings spent an unusually fruitful week in the Gulf of Lepanto attacking a few Turkish ships which were still anchored there. He attacked them with solid shot from the Sauveur and red-hot shells from the Karteria. He destroyed seven of the Turkish ships and captured three. Then he heard of the armistice.
At Navarino, Ibrahim received news of this outrage, which had occurred on 30 September. On 1 October thirty warships broke out of the anchorage to take vengeance on Captain Hastings. But Sir Edward Codrington overtook them and escorted them back to Navarino. On the evening of 3 October, Ibrahim sent off another squadron of ships but Admiral Codrington rounded up these as well, and drove them back to the anchorage. Infuriated by this, Ibrahim sent out a punitive expedition by land to burn the villages of the Peloponnese, destroying the olive groves and the crops.
In response to this wholesale repudiation, the combined fleet of the great powers sailed for Navarino. Whether their intenti
on was to subdue Ibrahim by a mere parade of force alone is debatable. At the head of the fleet were ten British ships under Codrington's command, followed by seven French ships under Admiral de Rigny, and eight Russian under Count Heiden. At 2 p.m. on 20 October, Codrington in H.M.S. Asia led them into the wider Megalo Thouro channel at the southern end of Navarino Bay. Twenty thousand Turkish troops camped on the slope above watched the billowing armada sail past. Within the shelter of the bay, the eighty-two warships of Ibrahim's fleet were anchored in a horseshoe formation. One by one, Codrington's ships came to rest close by them, without any indication of what was intended.
In the crowded anchorage, it was a Turkish soldier or seaman who fired the first, unauthorised musket shot. Other ships of the Turco-Egyptian fleet, believing that they were being attacked, joined in. There was, in Codrington's words, "a fire of musketry" which soon turned to exchanges of cannon shot. The British admiral at once gave his orders, he and de Rigny taking on the battleships, while Count Heiden's squadron dealt with the frigates and sloops. Despite the numerical superiority of Ibrahim's fleet, it was no match for the gunnery and tactics of the allied force. Codrington at once laid H.M.S. Asia alongside the Turkish flagship, true to the traditions of the great sea battles of the past. At almost point-blank range the broadsides of his ships tore through the hulls of the Turks and Egyptians, until the whole of Ibrahim's fleet seemed to be ablaze. The Ottoman army on the cliffs above looked on helplessly.
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