3. What route should he take after disembarking, to make contact with the Government, communicate, and present the letters that he is carrying?
4. The wishes of the Government in regard to his project for the Souliots.
5. Where should the forty Souliots that he now retains be disembarked, whom his Lordship would wish to keep by him so long as this is acceptable to the Government?64
Spurred, no doubt, by Byron's insistence face to face, Delladecima added a postscript: ‘His Noble Lordship hopes to have an answer through me within twenty days.’ In the event, it would take four times that long, and much else would have happened in the meantime. For now, with all three letters on their way, there was nothing Byron could do but wait.
On 11 August, a week after their arrival, he declared a holiday. He and his companions from the Hercules would recreate the Homeric quest of his younger days, when with Hobhouse he had searched for the site of ancient Troy. Just across the channel lay Ithaca, the island kingdom that had been Ulysses’ destination in the Odyssey. They would fill the days of waiting by exploring.
Chapter 8 Wavering
Old mortality
The six days that Byron and his companions spent on the island of Ithaca were an idyllic interlude – nearly. The sun was hot and the skies cloudless. There were opportunities to swim and ride and talk about old times. Byron's moods and his conversation during these days are exceptionally well recorded. No fewer than four members of the party were taking notes, and would later write up their recollections.1
On the antiquities they were shown, while crossing Cephalonia, and in Ithaca itself, Byron was nowadays more blunt in his opinions than he had allowed Harold to be, in the days when he had been a ‘childe’. ‘I detest antiquarian twaddle’, Trelawny recorded him as saying while they were there (although the expression sounds more like Trelawny than Byron). Browne, erring perhaps in the opposite direction, records that the ‘Cyclopean remains of ancient Samos’ (today known as Sami, in Cephalonia) ‘from Byron elicited no attention, as he was a more ardent admirer of the present than of the past’.2
All the same, they made for the sites on the island that had ancient associations: a rock known locally as the ‘castle of Ulysses’, a spring and nearby cave on the seashore called the ‘fountain’ and ‘grotto of Arethusa’, and the ruins in the north of the island that were reputed to have been the ‘school of Homer’. Byron's only recorded reaction to any of these was to seize upon an elderly shepherd near the fountain and drag him back to share the visitors’ picnic, on the grounds that the hero of the Odyssey, returning in disguise, had been befriended near this spot by the faithful swineherd Eumaeus.3 As before, it was the unconscious re-enactment of the past by living people against a landscape made significant by story that appealed to Byron.
The sheer, uncomplicated beauty of the places they travelled through undoubtedly affected him as well. Unusually for the time of year, the air was clear enough that from the mountainside above the ‘grotto of Arethusa’, on the east coast of Ithaca, they could see as far as Santa Maura (today's Lefkada) to the north, Zante to the south, the mountains across the strait, and the Gulf of Patras all the way inland to where it narrows to become the Gulf of Corinth. It was perhaps at the grotto that Byron exclaimed, according to Trelawny: ‘You will find nothing in Greece or its islands so pleasant as this. If this isle were mine – “I would break my staff and bury my book.” – What fools we all are.’4
This time, it sounds more like Byron than Trelawny. Two Shakespeare plays, both of them about magic, are unexpectedly thrown together in this remark. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’, says the child-spirit Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in mock-horror at the antics of the human characters. And the quotation that Trelawny's punctuation recognises, though it is not exact, comes from The Tempest, where Prospero bids farewell to his magic art – and Shakespeare, it is traditionally supposed, to his career as a dramatist. There is an authentic melancholy about Byron's rare apostrophe, at this time in his life, to the beauty of the Greek landscape. Woven into these feelings, too, is a perhaps half-conscious memory of Shelley: ‘This isle and house are mine’, Shelley's lightly fictionalised narrator had imagined in ‘Epipsychidion’, the poem whose fulfilment is set in Greece, and which Byron had read, or reread, not long before taking the decision to come here himself.5 Much of Byron's time in Ithaca seems to have been spent recalling his own past, and his Prospero-like act of renouncing the ‘magic’ of his art.
Despite this, some reminders of the present were too pressing to be turned aside. The Resident, Captain Wright Knox, painted a pitiable picture of the plight of several refugee families from Chios and the Morea that had been allowed to settle in the island, and were now living in terrible poverty. It is not clear whether Byron actually met these refugees, but he immediately promised to provide for their relief – and would do so, too, shortly after his return to Argostoli. An ailing widow with three underage daughters, apparently singled out because the family had started out from a position of some wealth in Patras, he decreed should follow him to Cephalonia. There he would maintain them and take a personal interest in their welfare. It was as a consequence of this act of charity that Byron would soon fall in love (perhaps) for the last time in his life, with the widow's adolescent son, Loukas Chalandritsanos.6
A chance meeting at the Residency brought the most direct news, yet, of Blaquiere, and the chance to discover, even at second-hand, something of what Blaquiere had learned from his time at Tripolitsa. This was how Thomas Smith, a former colleague of Browne who happened to be passing through, found himself immediately swept up into Byron's party. Smith had been with Blaquiere, in Corfu, only a few days previously. At once he began to tell Byron what he knew. Back in Cephalonia, this was exactly the kind of information that Byron would have seized upon. Now, as the high spirits of the party swirled through the Residency, he seems not even to have heard Smith out. To the ‘increased amazement’ of his hearer, he turned the conversation, instead, ‘to his works, to Lady Byron, and to his daughter’.7 While in Ithaca, Byron was determined to dwell more upon the past than any serious plans for the future.
A perhaps surprising topic of conversation during those days was Sir Walter Scott and the ‘Waverley’ novels. Practically alone among the British literary establishment, Scott had earned Byron's consistent and ungrudging admiration, ever since the two had met at the home of their publisher, John Murray, in 1815. Scott had confessed to Byron his authorship of the succès fou of the previous year, the anonymously published novel Waverley. Byron had read almost every one of the series of historical novels that followed. A trunkful of them had travelled with him aboard the Hercules and would be remarked on by visitors to his house in Cephalonia a little later.8 Now, on the cusp of his expedition into Greece, Byron kept reverting to the topics of ‘Scotland, Walter Scott (or, as his lordship always called him), “Watty,” the “Waverley Novels”’.9 This was one of those occasions in his life when Byron chose to remember that he was ‘half a Scot by birth, and bred / A whole one’ – or, as he explained to Smith, apropos of some lines by Burns, ‘that he too was more than half a Scotchman’.10 The day before, he had discovered that Mrs Knox, their hostess at the Residency, was a Gordon, distantly related to his mother's Aberdeenshire family. ‘The gallant Gordons “bruik nae slight”’, he had teased Mrs Knox before the company, and been rewarded with a vigorous avowal that their guest had indeed been unjustly abused by the world.11
Perhaps this was more than nostalgia. The kinship between Scott's romantic historical novels and Byron's ‘Turkish tales’ has been recognised ever since they first began to be published. Scott's retrospect on the failed rebellion of his countrymen against Hanoverian rule in 1745, in Waverley, had not been intended as politically radical – quite the reverse. Nonetheless, the success of Waverley and its numerous sequels would lay the foundation for much of what has more recently passed for a national consciousness, not just of the Scots, but also of the En
glish. The Scots had failed in 1745, and Byron probably still shared what had always been ‘Watty's’ view: that the failure of the Scottish cause had been the best thing for Great Britain and (therefore) for humanity. But might there, perhaps, be a role model for himself, in Edward Waverley? Scott's hero is a decent, aristocratic sort, of chivalrous instincts, a ‘waverer’ between his English loyalties and a desperate, ‘romantic’ cause – a character more resembling Byron's own, later, Don Juan than any of the ‘byronic’ heroes.12 Now that Byron had come to Greece, determined ‘to scribble [no] more nonsense’,13 he must have seen the parallels between his own situation and that of the very many leading characters in Scott's historical novels who tread a precarious path similar to Waverley's. It is even possible, during the months that followed, that rereading the Waverley novels really did help him decide which would be the right political path to tread between the modernisers and the warlords on the mainland.
Whatever the case, for at least some of the time in Ithaca, ‘Lord Byron's spirits were buoyant and elastic;…he overflowed with an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, replete with brilliant wit and humour.’14 In this frame of mind, his purpose in coming to Greece was all but forgotten. Smith was struck by his ‘intention, expressed and implied, more than once, of paying a visit to Sir Walter in the then ensuing spring.’15 In much the same spirit, while at anchor off Livorno, he had promised to visit Goethe in Weimar. In this mood, which would be noted by other observers, too, after his return to Cephalonia, Byron had clearly no thought that he might be on a one-way mission.16
But the violent mood swings, that Browne had noted aboard the Hercules, returned. Smith was shocked the morning after his first meeting with Byron:
I never saw and could not conceive the possibility of such a change in the appearance of a human being as had taken place since the previous night. He looked like a man under sentence of death, or returning from the funeral of all that he held dear on earth. His person seemed shrunk, his face was pale, and his eyes languid and fixed on the ground. He was leaning upon a stick.
Almost more shocking to Smith was the suddenness with which Byron recovered himself.17 But worse was to come.
Saturday, 16 August began with Byron swimming off the quarantine station at Vathy, the island's capital. There followed a ride, in the August heat, across the island, to meet the boat that had been summoned to take them back to Sami, in Cephalonia. While waiting for the boat, Byron swam again. Trelawny challenged him to swim across the strait, a distance of some six miles. Byron refused the challenge, but still ‘persisted, in despite of the entreaties of his medical attendant, in remaining a very considerable time in the water, exposed to the ardent rays of a very hot sun’.18 Once the party had been conveyed across the water, a large meal was provided for them at the British military station at Agia Euphemia. After that, for a night's lodging they had a steep ride to a monastery, high above the village. It was dark before they got there. It was probably Byron who compared the setting to a scene in one of Scott's novels.19 While the monks gathered inside to welcome their guests, Byron jumped down from his horse, outside the walls, and re-enacted the scene from Hamlet in which the hero throws himself into the open grave of Ophelia. From the depths of a stone sarcophagus, he intoned ‘unconnected fragments’ that Smith recognised as belonging to the episode of the play in which Hamlet muses upon the skull of the jester Yorick. A character not unlike Shakespeare's gravedigger provides the title for another novel by Scott, that Byron knew well, and that must have cropped up often in the conversations of the past days and hours, Old Mortality. Byron had come to grips with his old enemy at last.
What happened next has been much described. It had been a long day. Too much sun and too much swimming no doubt contributed, as those who witnessed it thought. Imbibing ‘gin swizzle’ while being rowed in an open boat in the midday heat, the day before, will not have helped. A severe blow to the head, while riding under a low branch in Ithaca, could perhaps have caused concussion. And there was fatigue – it was dark by the time they reached the monastery. The path was so steep that even Byron had been forced to dismount and cover part of the ascent on his lame foot. It is often said that at the monastery Byron had some kind of fit, a precursor, perhaps, of the ‘convulsive’ episode he would experience six months later in Missolonghi. But as with the dramatic change in his demeanour that had previously appalled Smith, there is no evidence that on this occasion there was anything physically the matter with him.20
Emerging from the sarcophagus and holding forth in a lively manner about productions of Hamlet that he had seen, Byron entered the monastery with the travellers. Almost immediately, while the servants were preparing their beds, he retired, not waiting to hear the lengthy speech of welcome that the abbot had begun to deliver over coffee. A few moments later, all hell broke loose. Dr Bruno came running in. His master had been seized by violent spasms, ‘his brain was excited to dangerous excess, so that he would not tolerate the presence of any person in his room’. From the sala, the rest of the party, which must have included the abbot and the monks, ‘could hear him rattling and ejaculating’. Trelawny, Browne, and Smith in turn went in to try to pacify him. Trelawny, years later, would describe a ‘paroxysm of rage’, accompanied by ‘flashing eyes’. Browne adds that ‘the paroxysm increased so as almost to divest him of reason’. Smith found him ‘standing in a far corner like a hunted animal at bay’, and then had a chair hurled at his head for his pains. Eventually, Bruno's ‘blessed pills’ had their effect and Byron slept, to awake composed and contrite in the morning.21
No doubt many factors contributed to Byron's extreme behaviour that night. But a clue to its deeper explanation is provided by Browne: ‘like one possessed, he cried out, “my head is burning”’. Byron can have spoken of this to no one, because if he had, they would all have thought of it, and no one did. Neither, apparently, have his biographers, since. But in the boat back from Ithaca, he had been reminiscing about Shelley. And it had been on this day, one year ago, that Byron had swum far out to sea and been ‘St Bartholomewed’ by the sun, while on the beach Shelley's remains were being consumed by fire.22
‘A fool's errand’
Next day, the seventeenth, the party was back aboard the Hercules, at anchor in the bay of Argostoli. None of the awaited letters from the mainland had arrived while they had been away. Used as he was to letters passing between Italy and England in a fortnight, Byron must have been fuming.
By modern standards, communications within revolutionary Greece were unimaginably slow. There was no postal service. Letters had to be carried on horseback over mountain passes and (in winter) flooded rivers, often for part of the journey also by sea. At every point there was a risk of interception – potentially by the enemy or, in Ionian waters, by the British, but more often by rival factions within Greece itself. Important letters were often copied several times and sent by more than one route. Couriers had to be found who were willing to face the hardships of the journey and could be trusted. For Byron, the return to Cephalonia marked the beginning of a period of intense frustration.
To readers today, and even to many of Byron's contemporaries, including some who were with him, the length of time he spent in Cephalonia has always seemed an inexplicable delay, a sign of wavering, or worse. This was true only during the weeks immediately following the expedition to Ithaca, and there were very specific reasons for it. Thereafter, the twists and turns of the politics in which Byron would become involved would be dictated, very largely, by the time it took for messengers to cross to and from Cephalonia, and from one part of Greece to another. This part of the story was to be played out with inexorable slowness, interspersed by bursts of sudden activity. At the time, it could easily have seemed, and probably felt, like idleness. Not patient by nature, if he was going to enter the world of Greek politics, of which as yet he knew little, Byron was going to have to learn patience. And the remarkable thing is that he did.
Once letters did begin to arrive,
the news they brought was anything but good. Byron's party had been back aboard the Hercules for at least a week, before his messenger returned from Missolonghi. With him he brought a courteous reply, dictated by Markos Botsaris from his camp in a small village near Karpenisi and translated into Italian. Almost alone among the warlords, Botsaris enjoyed the trust of Ignatios and Mavrokordatos, and seems to have been consistently loyal in return – no doubt because he was old enough to have known Ignatios during his years as Bishop of Arta, under the rule of Ali Pasha. But along with the letter came the news that three days after writing it Botsaris had been killed during a daring night raid on the enemy camp. This action, on 21 August, would be described by Finlay as ‘one of the most brilliant exploits of the war’.23 But the death of Botsaris deprived Byron, right at the beginning, of the only tenuous contact he yet had with the military forces engaged on the mainland.
It might have been from the same messenger – if not, it was very shortly afterwards – that Byron also heard the first, confused accounts of events at Tripolitsa, while he had been at sea. An early report even had Mavrokordatos killed. Writing just over a month later, by which time he still had received no direct communication from the Morea, Byron would sum up what he had learned at this time: ‘that the Greeks are in a state of political dissention amongst themselves – that Mavrocordato was dismissed or had resigned (L’Un vaut bien l'autre [the one means much the same as the other]) and that Colocotroni with I know not what or whose party was paramount in the Morea’.24
His messenger from Corfu had no better news. Blaquiere had already left for England before the Hercules reached Cephalonia. So there had never been any chance of intercepting him. Blaquiere had left no letter to explain his conduct. Of the promised letters from Blaquiere's confidants close to the Greek government, Louriotis and Mavrokordatos, there was no sign either. To cap it all, Byron now discovered that a package addressed to him had arrived at Zante and was being held up there, for a reason that was never made clear. As the dog days of August lengthened, he came as close as he ever did to giving up the entire expedition.
Byron's War Page 23