Cochrane (52 page)

On
28
April, however, the two hundred or so remaining Turkish troops in Saint Spiridion had had enough of the continuing bombardment by the heavy guns of the
Hellas.
Having no hope of escape, they began to negotiate a surrender. Karaiskakes agreed that they should be allowed to march out with their arms and all the honours of war, passing through the Greek lines unmolested and returning to their own army. Cochrane withdrew the
1500
men under his own immediate command to lessen the danger of any violence between the two sides. He was standing on the deck of his schooner, the
Unicom,
which he had armed with two carronades, when the type of scene which was all too familiar in the war was repeated once again. A Greek soldier pushed forward and snatched at the sword of one of the Turks who were marching past. The Turk resisted him and there was a struggle. Two or three of the outnumbered Turks, fearing that they were about to be lynched, fired their muskets. The Greek soldiers were already angry "at finding no prizes in the deserted convent", and at this new provocation, they opened a murderous fire upon the Turkish column. When the volleys died away, there were two hundred Turkish bodies on the plain and fewer than seventy survivors. Cochrane was relieved that he had withdrawn his own men and prevented them from joining the massacre but he condemned the atrocity as "the most horrid scene I ever beheld - a scene which freezes my blood, and which cannot be palliated by any barbarities which the Turks have committed on you".
⁴⁰

For all Cochrane's triumphs in war, they had been won with an astonishingly low casualty rate, not on his own side alone but on that of the enemy as well. Most recently, his victory over the Portuguese army and navy in Brazil was one of the most bloodless campaigns that could have been devised. It was not in his character to desert a cause at the moment of its greatest need, but after the massacre of Saint Spiridion he wrote bitterly of "the mob denominated falsely the army of Greece".
⁴¹

Had they been pugnacious and determined, that would have been some recompense. Yet one excuse after another was produced for not pressing on to the relief of the Acropolis. Karaiskakes announced that they lacked food, or ammunition, or trenching tools. To make matters worse, on
4
May, Karaiskakes was fatally wounded in a skirmish. As he lay dying, the Greek commander left a message for Cochrane, urging him to carry troops across the water from the camp to Cape Colias, closer to Athens, and make the attack from there. Cochrane and Sir Richard Church had a plan in mind, whereby about
3000
men would be landed there at night, advancing in darkness to seize a height near the Temple of Zeus Olympus, close to the Acropolis. By dark, there would be less danger from the Turkish cavalry as they crossed the plain between Colias and Athens. Once they were in position on the height, they would either relieve the Acropolis or assist its evacuation.

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 unsuspected," 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.