Byron's War

by Roderick Beaton

  Still, Mavrokordatos was now a short distance away at Missolonghi, with the fleet that he, Byron, had helped to pay for. On 12 December, the day after the arrival of the ships, he instructed Gamba to add a postscript to a copy of his letter to Mavrokordatos. Praidis would be crossing to Missolonghi any day now and would carry it. In this postscript, Gamba wrote: ‘Mr Praidis will communicate to you his [i.e., Byron's] every movement, his every intention – He wishes for nothing better than to join Your Illustrious Highness at the earliest opportunity and to act in accordance with the decree [of the Legislative Body] and for the entire liberation of Greece.’49

  Writing to Bowring the following day, Byron sounds more hesitant. The financial transaction in Zante was all but complete, but the money to pay the ships’ crews had still not arrived. After that would be the time to meet Mavrokordatos. ‘I shall probably join him at Sea or on Shore’, wrote Byron on the thirteenth. And two days later Praidis, before departing for Missolonghi himself, reported Byron still dithering whether to send the money or bring it to Mavrokordatos in person. From his knowledge of his Lordship so far, Praidis thought the latter more likely – and he would be right.50

  On 17 December, aided by ‘the calm though cool serenity of a beautiful and transparent Moonlight’, Byron once again took stock of his situation by resuming his short-lived diary. In it, he wrote: ‘I shall probably bon gré mal gré [like it or not] be obliged to join one of the factions – which I have hitherto strenuously avoided in the hope to unite them in one common interest.’51 The truth was, from the moment when he had signed the loan agreement and named Orlandos as the recipient of the funds, he already had. From now on, Byron was Mavrokordatos’ man. And the political fortunes of the modernisers in Greece would depend very largely on what Byron said and did next.

  ‘Passing “the Rubicon”’

  No sooner had the Greek ships reached Missolonghi than wind and rain made communication with Cephalonia impossible. Praidis was unable to cross over until the seventeenth, taking advantage of the same lull in the weather that encouraged Byron to organise his ideas in his diary.52 Stanhope, learning that the ships were on their way, had turned aside from his planned course and was already at Missolonghi. There, he had already presented Byron's letters to Mavrokordatos in person. Impatient as Byron now was to embark for the mainland, this was as nothing compared to Mavrokordatos’ need to have him there.

  With the immediate threat from the enemy gone, Mavrokordatos had found his welcome in the town more muted than he had expected. The governor of the province, he who had written so warmly to invite Byron, back in September, retreated into a huff from which he had not emerged almost forty years later when he published his memoirs. Konstantinos Metaxas thought himself slighted by the appointment of Mavrokordatos over his head, and from this point on did everything he could to make things difficult.53 The local chiefs and unemployed soldiery that had fallen back upon the town during the previous months’ campaign were still there, discontented, without means of support, and with nothing to do. Even more pressing was the problem of the ships and their crews that had come from Hydra.

  The Turkish brig that had been driven ashore and looted on the coast of Ithaca had been found to be carrying a huge amount of cash, many months’ arrears of pay for the garrison in Patras. Contemporary accounts are at variance as to the actual amount, but Praidis put it at 60,000 dollars, three times the amount that was expected from Byron to pay the crews of these same ships.54 On arrival at Missolonghi, the Hydriots, who had taken possession of this prize, quarrelled with the smaller contingent from Spetses. Nothing Mavrokordatos could do or say would persuade the ships’ captains and crews to remain beyond 25 December. On that day, they would be departing for home, taking their bounty with them. Only the six Spetsiot ships would be left. Their crews, too, were threatening to sail away unless the money promised by Byron arrived soon.55 No wonder Mavrokordatos was desperate.

  He wrote to Byron no fewer than three times during his first week at Missolonghi.56 But thanks to the weather it was not until 20 or 21 December that Praidis could be despatched back to Cephalonia, to deliver all three letters together, and to prepare Byron to embark on the Spetsiot brig Leonidas that would follow a day later. Even this plan went wrong. Praidis, sadly accident-prone, found himself stranded on one of the shoals that guard the lagoon of Missolonghi. It was not until the twenty-sixth that he reached Byron with the letters.57 By this time the Leonidas had been and gone. Now that Napier had departed for London, the port authorities in Argostoli were less likely to be accommodating towards a vessel under Greek colours. The brig had not been allowed to land.58

  On 23 December, the day the Leonidas was sighted, Byron thought he was about to embark for free Greece. Already, in his briefly resumed journal, he had returned to the fantasy he had first begun to entertain when the kilted Souliots laid siege to the Hercules. He had even worked out the cost, and decided: ‘I could maintain between five hundred and a thousand of these warriors for as long as necessary.’ He had been reading the biography of Napoleon, his old hero, that he had acquired while passing through Livorno. The money he had already advanced for the Greek fleet, he noted with satisfaction, was ‘double that with which Napoleon the Emperor of Emperors – began his campaign in Italy’.59

  There is no mistaking the rising tone of excitement in Byron's letters, first when he thought he would be going aboard the Leonidas, and then when the package from Missolonghi arrived. (Characteristically, the bearer earns not a single mention.) In the package was the long-delayed letter from the Legislative Body, dated 27 October, requesting him to cooperate with Mavrokordatos as its President for the defence of Missolonghi.60 In his own letters, Mavrokordatos stressed the urgency of Byron's arrival, but elided its true cause.61 He would not have been the first or the last politician to represent future prospects as more enticing than they really were. Now, wrote Mavrokordatos, would be the perfect opportunity to clear the last remaining Turkish outposts from the Gulf and to send a land army north as far as Thessaly. In his very first letter to Byron, back in the summer, while he had been outlining the scheme to raise a loan from London, Mavrokordatos had trailed the possibility of gaining possession of the rich agricultural lands of the plain of Thessaly. Then, if there had been an effective central government in the Peloponnese to coordinate efforts in different parts of the country, it might have been conceivable. From the base of Missolonghi in the west, it was no more than a mirage.

  This is not to say that Mavrokordatos deliberately deceived Byron. The goal of subduing the remaining Turkish fortresses on the north shore of the Gulf was surely realisable, and also features prominently in Mavrokordatos’ letters to the government over the next two months. In a public statement issued at the time he left Hydra, he claimed that these fortresses would be within his grasp, and even set his sights on Preveza, far to the north on the west coast. Others talked in similar terms. Byron's own lieutenant, Colonel Stanhope, enthusiastically added his voice of that of Mavrokordatos, and believed that Patras, at least, with the promised artillery support on its way from England, would ‘fall in a fortnight’.62 If the art of the statesman consists in articulating a vision so that it becomes reality, then Mavrokordatos was at least trying, and Byron would have respected him for it. Words, after all, are things.

  Mavrokordatos also went out of his way to flatter Byron, adopting an age-old strategy: ‘I do not flatter you, my Lord, if I assure you that I would have hesitated to accept so great a task if I did not found my hopes on your co-operation…Be assured, my lord, that on you alone depends the fate of Greece.’ That was in the first letter. In the third, he returns to the theme: ‘I should never…have accepted a task whose magnitude and difficulty I foresaw, had I not counted upon the co-operation of Your Excellency.’ There was truth here, as well as flattery. Had it not been for Byron's first letter, for the bark of his ‘jackal’ Trelawny and the cooperation of his more docile disciple Browne, it is very doubtful whether Mavrokordatos or
the fleet would now be at Missolonghi.

  Seizing upon a metaphor that was newer and more arresting then than it is today, Mavrokordatos wrote that the Greek forces would be ‘electrified’ by Byron's presence. Byron joked about this when he wrote to Hobhouse the next day.63 But he was in a state of high excitement himself. Announcing his imminent departure, he wrote to Hobhouse and Kinnaird in London, and to Barry in Genoa: all the money that can be raised from his own resources, and all that the Committee can attract, must be made available to the cause: ‘never mind me – so that the Cause goes on – if that is well – all is well’. The property he had inherited in Lancashire, that he had struggled to liquidate all his adult life, had finally been sold: ‘if the Rochdale sale has been completed I can keep an army here, aye, and perhaps command it…Why, man! if we had but 100,000 l sterling in hand, we should now be half-way to the city of Constantine.’64 Even Mavrokordatos would hardly have dared imagine so much.

  All thought of turning back had vanished. ‘I am passing “the Rubicon”’, Byron declared in high excitement to Kinnaird on his last day at Metaxata, ‘recollect that for God's sake – and the sake of Greece.’ To Barry in Genoa he had already announced: ‘I have no intention of an immediate return…I must see this Greek business out (or it me).’ The long-delayed moment had arrived: ‘Till now – I could have been of little or no use – but the coming up of Mavrocordato – who has not only talents but integrity, makes a difference.’65 He was throwing in his lot with a leader he still saw as a ‘Washington or Kosciusko kind of man’, the nearest Greece had to the founding president of the United States of America or the Polish national hero of the 1790s. Although he expressed it in joking terms (‘playing at Nations’), he was about to commit himself, alongside Mavrokordatos, to the joint project of turning Greece into a new, modern nation. To this end, in the euphoria of those last days in Cephalonia, he even contemplated intervening directly in the civil war, exactly as Praidis had understood him to be implying. If the parties would not agree to be united under what Byron had now decided was the legitimate government: ‘why we must go over to the Morea with the Western Greeks…– and try the effect of a little physical advice – should they persist in rejecting moral persuasion’.66

  Byron must have had the option of setting out immediately with Praidis. Even if the Greek boat had been too small to accommodate all of his party, with the horses, printing press, and other equipment, he could have arranged for these to brought on later. Dislike or disdain for the man he called Delladecima's ‘friend Raidi’ cannot have been sufficient reason. Gamba states, without explanation, that ‘Lord Byron declined the offer, and preferred hiring vessels for himself.’67 He might have thought that the neutral flag of the Ionian Islands would give him better cover en route. If so, he was wrong. He would have enjoyed a much less eventful journey with Praidis.

  The real reason was that the money destined for the ships at Missolonghi was still in Zante, awaiting collection. To have sailed into the port of Zante in a Greek warship would have been a flagrant violation of his own country's neutrality – and Byron was throughout punctilious about such matters. So two small vessels were chartered. Byron himself would travel in a mystiko, a type of craft whose name means ‘secret’, no doubt because it was favoured by smugglers and blockade-runners for its speed and small size. A larger craft, a bombarda, was hired for the horses and supplies.

  All these arrangements took time, and then the weather was against them. Byron lodged for two nights in Argostoli, at the house of Charles Hancock, the merchant who had helped him cash his bills. There, he seized upon the latest published of Scott's Waverley novels, Quentin Durward. The time of wavering was long past. But he could not resist seeing himself once again in the mould of one of Scott's heroes – embroiled in a desperate, ‘romantic’ cause to which he alone can contribute a decent, honourable, rational humanity. He could not be coaxed out of his room until he had finished Quentin Durward.68

  On the afternoon of Monday, 29 December the boats were ready to depart. The wind was still strong and spray was blowing. Delladecima, who was in Praidis’ confidence and knew the urgency, had been doing his best to hustle forward the preparations. But the Ionian count had grown sincerely fond of Byron, too. He reported a pang of conscience when Byron parted from him, that morning, with the words, ‘Delladecima, you couldn't wait for me to leave Cephalonia, and now you want me to go aboard in terrible weather – I shall do everything as you wish.’69

  Friends from the British garrison rowed out with him to the mystiko. With Byron in the smaller boat went Dr Bruno, his valet Fletcher, a dog called Lyon, and the young Loukas Chalandritsanos, the son of the distressed family from Patras that he had been supporting since August, whom he had now taken into his service.70 Byron was full of high spirits, ‘animated at finding himself embarked once more on the element he loved’. It must have been from one of those present, if not from his own imagination, that Trelawny captured the vividness of the moment: ‘as he sprang aboard the Mistico – and felt the salt spray dash over his face, he rubbed his hands joyously – and said – this is what I like – now hurrah for Greece’.71

  The short crossing to Zante was quickly made, and the two vessels lay off the port town for twenty-four hours. Byron did not go ashore, but received several visitors, including the Resident, Sir Frederick Stoven, and Samuel Barff, Hancock's business partner from whom he finally took delivery of the 20,000 silver dollars destined for the fleet at Missolonghi, together with some additional ‘specie’ for contingencies. Sixteen thousand dollars went with Byron aboard the mystiko, 8,000 with Gamba on the bombarda.72 It was a lot of money to risk in unsafe waters, the equivalent of almost 5,000 pounds sterling. But there was no other way of getting it into Greece, to where it was needed.

  Byron seems to have thought that after leaving Zante he would pick up a Greek escort. Certainly, he blamed Praidis for what happened next. Unknown to anyone aboard the two craft, the greater part of the Greek fleet had abandoned Missolonghi for Hydra, as the crews had threatened, on Christmas Day. Emboldened by their departure, the few Turkish ships remaining in Patras had begun venturing out into the Gulf again. On form so far, an armed Greek brig of war might not have been challenged, so great was the awe in which the islanders were held by the Ottoman navy. But Byron's two boats were an easy prey, despite their Ionian colours and the false papers that had been obligingly provided for them in Zante.73

  The bombarda carrying Gamba, the servants, horses, and stores, was arrested on the high seas and taken into Patras. Byron's own boat had a narrow escape. Challenged in the darkness by a Turkish frigate, and at daybreak discovering the way into the lagoon blocked by another, the skipper ran for the nearest point of land. The mystiko found shelter in a creek known as Skrofes (‘sows’), on the tip of land where the Acheloos river flows into the sea. Young Loukas and another Greek were despatched, partly for their own safety, by land to carry news of what had happened to Mavrokordatos and Stanhope in Missolonghi. That Byron's feelings for Loukas were more than ordinarily humanitarian can be seen from the sudden vehemence of his language in the letter he wrote to Stanhope for him to carry. Were the boy to fall into the hands of the Turks, ‘you know what his fate would be; and I would sooner cut him in pieces and myself too than have him taken out by those barbarians’.74 Before leaving Cephalonia, Byron had bought two dictionaries for Loukas, who could speak some Italian. Perhaps, in his new life at Missolonghi, he would be able to resume the idyll that had begun with Nicolo Giraud, who at the same age had taught him Italian and some Greek in the Capuchin monastery in Athens, twelve years before.

  Even at Skrofes they were not safe. One of the two frigates in sight showed signs of pursuit. To reach the safety of the lagoon of Missolonghi, the mystiko would have to tack up-wind, under the guns of the Turkish frigate. There was nothing for it but to head the other way, northwards along the western side of the Acheloos delta. As Byron described it two days later: ‘we dashed out again – and showing
our stern (our boat sails very well) got in before night to Dragomestre’.75

  Now called Astakos, this small port is protected by a string of islets and reefs. Here they would be safe from pursuit. The shortest way to Missolonghi from Dragomestre would have been by road. But Mavrokordatos, probably worried as much about the security of the dollars as of Byron's party, was horrified at the idea of a land journey. The long-suffering Praidis was sent with three boats to collect them.76 Even now Byron's adventures at sea were not over. While they retraced their route through the channel between Skrofes and the island of Oxeia, adverse winds twice blew the mystiko on to rocks. As Byron laconically expressed it, ‘the dollars had another narrow escape’. So did young Loukas, who had showed sufficient devotion to his master to return with one of the boats, and now had to be saved all over again. This time, Byron told the boy to cling to his back and he would bring him safely to shore – to the dismay of Dr Bruno, who was not much older and could not swim either. In the event, several of the Greek sailors abandoned ship and had to be taken off by one of the other boats. But the mystiko remained afloat, the dollars were saved, and no one had to swim for his life.77

  It was Sunday, 4 January 1824, when Byron entered the lagoon of Missolonghi. Gamba and those aboard the bombarda, having been released after a courteous detention by Yusuf Pasha in Patras, had arrived earlier in the day. Byron must have sent word to Mavrokordatos, perhaps by Loukas. He was not going to make himself known, in brine-soaked clothes after a week in an open boat, late in the afternoon on a day of rest. The first thing he did was to take a swim.78 That night was his last aboard the mystiko, that had well lived up to its name and reputation.