Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ could have been no better theatre for Hastings to learn the importance of this brand of warfare, and with the exception, perhaps, of Cochrane, few abler teachers than Stewart. In the scale of European events these victories might have seemed little more than pinpricks, but quite apart from the effects on national morale, the mayhem caused along the French and Spanish coasts by ships like the Sea Horse or Imperieuse demonstrated that under the right command naval power could exert a strategic influence on land warfare out of all proportion to numbers or firepower.

      Hastings would never be averse to the kind of verve and élan that characterised these operations – the Kangaroo demonstrates that – but there were other lessons, too, of a dourer and more professional kind, that he was taking in. At the age of fourteen he had served under two captains of very different temperaments, and if there was one thing he had learned from both, it was that if there had to be war – ‘the art of killing in the most speedy way possible’, as Hastings bluntly put it – then it had to be fought with all the ruthlessness and efficiency that could be mustered.

      Implicit in this credo was the conviction that the end justified the means – fireships, mortar ships, ‘stink vessels’, hot shot, anything – because wherever the Battle of Waterloo was to be won, Trafalgar had most certainly not been won on the playing fields of Eton. ‘The objection of unfair is so ridiculous, and so childish,’ Hastings would again write, haughtily showing just how well he had absorbed the lessons of the Mediterranean, ‘that I should consider I was insulting the understanding of the public by mentioning it, had I not heard it reiterated so often, and by people whose opinions go for something in the world … I have heard pretenders to humanity talk of the cruelty of hot shot, shells, etc; it really appears to me the superlative of cant to talk of the art of war (or, in other words, the method of killing men most expeditiously) and humanity in the same breath.’

      This might have been Cochrane talking, and with the political situation deteriorating – Portugal under threat, Turkey and Russia (a nigh impossible ‘double’) both hostile, Denmark implacable, Sicily in danger, America muttering, France threatening the Ionian Isles and Britain without an ally to her name except the bizarre Gustavus of Sweden – Hastings would have found few dissenters in the Mediterranean Squadron. ‘We have been out from Syracuse ten days looking after the Toulon fleet which is expected to be making for Corfu,’ Captain Stewart – as ever spoiling for a fight – wrote to Sir Charles Hastings. ‘Thornbrough is following them up & Ld Collingwood (with whom we are) sitting in their route, our force is five of the line, myself & a brig; theirs five of the line, four frigates & several corvettes besides transports in all 20 sail, we are full of hopes and ardour & night or day they are to be attacked the moment we can meet them.’

      Stewart was disappointed of his ‘Toulon Gentlemen’, but by the time he wrote – 11 January 1808, dated ’07 in error – the Sea Horse was in the eastern Mediterranean and facing a very different kind of challenge. Towards the end of the previous year Collingwood had negotiated an arrangement with the Porte to exclude Turkish warships from the Aegean, but as the Greek islanders took advantage of their masters’ absence and Anglo-Ottoman relations hovered somewhere between war and peace, the Sea Horse found herself the solitary British presence in an exclusion zone that the Turks had no intention of honouring. ‘You will expect me to say something about the Turks,’ Stewart told Sir Charles, warming to a subject dear to every frigate captain’s heart – prize-money –

      with whom we have been Philandering for so long, in fact from the hour that Sebastiani [Napoleon’s envoy to the Porte] knew of the Treaty of Tilsit, Sir A. Paget [Britain’s Ambassador] might have departed, as it was (between friends) it ended in them at last sending him away & saying they would not receive any more flags of Truce from the ship he was in. We in my opinion did wrong in forbearing from making war on them during the negotiations … had we done as we have since done, take burn & destroy, I seriously believe they might have made peace with us … Now I understand they want to begin a negotiation, we are not now at war they say & it is no prize money to us Captains, but I would like to know what name can be given to our footing with that nation, we must coin a word. I alone destroyed or took twelve of their vessels, only four of which are in Malta, who is to account for the rest?

      ‘Take burn & destroy’ – it might have been the motto of the Mediterranean fleet – and whatever his fears over the legal status of his prizes, they were never going to stop Stewart when the chance came. Through the early months of 1808 the Sea Horse had been constantly engaged in capturing or destroying cargo bound for Constantinople, and when on 1 July, while riding at anchor off the island of Sira, wind came of bigger game with the news that, in defiance of Collingwood’s agreement, a substantial Turkish flotilla had come through the Dardanelles to punish their rebellious Greek subject, Stewart did not hesitate.

      The same day he began working the Sea Horse up from Sira against a north-north-easterly, and at noon on the fifth he received confirmation of the Turkish movements from a Greek ship bound for Malta. Taking advantage of a light south-easterly the Sea Horse immediately made all sail, and at 5.45 p.m. saw between the islands of Skopelos and Dromo two enemy men-of-war, the twenty-six-gun Alis-Fezan and the larger and more powerful fifty-two-gun, 1,300-ton Badere-Zaffer, Captain Scandril Kitchuc-Ali.

      Stewart had, in fact, been expecting far longer odds for the forty-two-gun Sea Horse, and faced with only two opposing vessels, closed on the Turkish ships until at 9.30 he was near enough to hail the Turkish commodore and demand his surrender. ‘This Captain Scandril flatly refused,’ William James, prize court judge, historian and shamelessly partisan hammer of the American navy, wrote, ‘and into the hull of the Badere-Zaffer went a whole double-shotted broadside of the Sea Horse. Nor was the Turkish frigate slow in returning the fire. In this way, with the wind a light breeze about two points abaft the starboard beam, the two frigates went off engaging; the Badere-Zaffer gradually edging away to close her consort, who was about a gun-shot distant.’

      For the next half-hour the two ships manoeuvred for position, with the heavier and better-manned Badere-Zaffer attempting to board, and Stewart employing all his seamanship to fight the battle on his terms. At 10 o’clock he had again got his ship on the larboard quarter of his enemy when the Alis-Fezan interposed herself, taking from Sea Horse at a range of no more than a cable’s length a devastating starboard broadside that within ten minutes had driven her out of the action.

      As the Alis-Fezan limped burning into the Aegean night, her crew decimated by the Sea Horse’s gunnery, her hull racked by explosions, Stewart turned his attention back to the Badere-Zaffer. The Turkish captain was as determined as before to exploit his overwhelming advantage in manpower, but as the two ships ran before the wind exchanging broadsides and Captain Scandril again closed to board, Stewart swung the Sea Horse across the Badere-Zaffer’s bow – losing her gaff vangs and mizzen and starboard mizzen back-stays to the enemy bowsprit as he did so – and raked her crowded forecastle with grape from his stern-chase guns as she passed.

      Outsailed and outgunned as they were, the Badere-Zaffer’s crew gave place to no one when it came to courage, and the two ships continued to exchange broadsides until the Turkish cannon at last fell silent. As the Badere-Zaffer settled helpless in the water, shortly after I o’clock in the morning, her mizzen, fore and main topmasts all gone, her hull so badly shot up she could barely float, Stewart brought the Sea Horse under her stern and hailed her to surrender. A desultory fire from her after-guns was the only answer, and with one last starboard broadside, Stewart, ‘finding that his shattered opponent would neither answer nor fire, very prudently, and very humanely too, hauled off; and, after standing on a little further, brought to on the starboard tack to wait for daylight’.

      It took one more broadside, and a mutiny of the Badere-Zaffer’s surviving officers – who hauled down her colours from the shattered stump of her mizzenmast while they held the half-mad Scandril in his chair – СКАЧАТЬ