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

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СКАЧАТЬ with a characteristically laconic indifference to the human drama: ‘she proved to be the Badere Zaffer a large Turkish frigate, a complement of 540 men commanded by Scandali Kichuc Ali, Captain. Her consort’s name was the Alex Fesan carrying 24 brass guns and two mortars. The enemy lost 170 killed and 200 wounded, ours 5 seamen killed [two next to Hastings when a gun blew up] & ten wounded and two dangerously.’

      For all the good the Badere-Zaffer ever did the Sea Horse’s crew – the prize court refused to buy her for the navy – Scandril might as well have succeeded in a last-ditch attempt to scuttle her, but Stewart was determined to add her to the growing haul of bombards, brigs, schooners, wine, ‘senna and austrich feathers’ that he had already sent back to Malta. Over the next days her battered hull was made seaworthy enough to be towed, a skeleton crew was detained to man their prize on the voyage back to Valetta, and a Greek vessel bound for Constantinople ‘co-opted’ to repatriate their prisoners.

      It was not long before the Sea Horse was following them, because with a demi-thaw in diplomatic relations between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, she was back again at Malta in September to receive on board another old friend of Sir Charles’s, Britain’s new ambassador to the Porte, Mr Robert Adair. Through the previous months the Turks had done all they could to stall negotiations, and even in a more conciliatory atmosphere it was the end of January 1809 before the ship’s company was again manning the yards to salute ‘His Excellency Mr Adair the Ambassador on his disembarking’ at Constantinople. ‘The walls of the Seraglio are like the walls of Newstead,’ another young English aristocrat, Lord Byron, on his travels with his old Cambridge friend and future philhellene John Cam Hobhouse, recorded of his first impressions of the ‘polis’,

      but the ride by the walls of the city on the land side is beautiful, imagine four miles of immense triple battlements covered with Ivy, surmounted with 218 towers, and on the other side of the road Turkish burying grounds (the loveliest spots on earth) full of enormous cypresses, I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus, and Delphi, I have traversed great parts of Turkey and many other parts of Europe and some of Asia, but I never beheld a work of Nature or Art, which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side, from the Seven Towers to the End of the Golden Horn.

      To a young naval midshipman like Hastings, though, it was the seaward defences of Constantinople that would have been of most interest. The captains who formed part of Sir John Duckworth’s abortive expedition were adamant that the city had been there for the taking if they had only been allowed, and over the next two months of diplomatic inactivity and interminable salutes, Hastings had all the opportunity he could want to assess those defensive frailties that were still exercising his mind twenty years later.

      These were all the more obvious, too, because the Sea Horse had arrived at Constantinople at a juncture in the city’s history that was bloody even by its own violent and unstable standards. The contorted negotiations with Britain had from the first been conducted against a background of riots and rebellion, and a frenzy of beheadings, strangulations, mutilations and traditional Ottoman family planning – two hundred women of Mustafa IV’s harem were drowned in the Bosphorus – that had only paused for the murder of the Sultan and the ascent to the throne of a man to whom terror was the supreme instrument of policy.

      With his jet-black beard, his great breadth of shoulder, an eye that ‘awed’ strangers and an ‘air of indescribable majesty’, as Hobhouse put it, Mahmud II had the appearance to match his character. ‘Those who know him,’ Adair’s successor as ambassador to the Porte, Sir Robert Liston, wrote of the man against whom Hastings would expend his fortune and, ultimately, his life, ‘say he had considerable abilities, a vigorous and active mind, with such an idea of the elevation, perhaps of the sanctity of his station, and so strong a feeling of personal superiority that he deems all opposition criminal, all resistance vain and ultimate disappointment on his part impossible.’

      It would be intriguing to know what the young Hastings said of him, and there is no doubt that he saw him at least once. ‘Mann’d the yards and saluted the Sultan with 21 guns upon his passing the ship in his caique,’ reads the Sea Horse log for 6 March, ‘mann’d the yards and saluted the Sultan on his return.’ In its way, that glimpse was as crucial as the single, fleeting vision of Nelson from the quarterdeck of Neptune. With great swathes of the city still smouldering from the fires of the Sultan’s mutinous Janissaries, and France and Russia both threatening Ottoman integrity, Hastings could be forgiven for underestimating the man, but he would have had no trouble in recognising a natural enemy. Corrupt, despotic, violent, vulnerable, Mahmud II was everything a young Whig aristocrat could ask for. And so, too, for a born incendiary like Hastings, was Constantinople. As the Sea Horse weighed for Malta, Robert Adair’s mission accomplished, the memory of its burning suburbs, enfeebled defences and – still only a glint in the eye of even the most far-seeing naval moderniser in 1809 – its vulnerability to any ship capable of forcing the Dardanelles, left an impression that made those months among the most important of Hastings’s life.

      IV

      For Frank and the Sea Horse the return to Malta in the spring of 1809 meant the welcome resumption of business as usual. After her long inactivity the ship finally quitted the Dardanelles at sunset on 29 March, and by 12 April was again in Valetta where Stewart mustered the ship’s company to make ‘known to them the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty’s approbation of their conduct in capturing the Turkish frigate’.

      There was prize-money to be distributed – if not as much as they reckoned their deserts – but after three years in the Sea Horse, and growing at long last, as Stewart wrote to tell his father, it was time for the fifteen-year-old Hastings to move on. In July 1808 he had completed the requisite sea-time to be rated midshipman, and back in England Sir Charles was already mobilising old Jersey connections to secure his son’s next ship. ‘I shall be anxious to know when you have settled with Sir J. Saumarez about Frank,’ Stewart wrote to Sir Charles from Sicily in December 1809, at the end of another successful summer and autumn cruise that included two brilliant assaults on the fortresses on Isola di Giannutri and Pianosa,

      as unless something particular occurs I do not propose coming home next year unless it may be late in it & I would send Frank to you in April with a discharge into Sir J’s ship which would secure his time: I have this last time at Malta given Frank a sum of money and made him buy his own clothes which by the by are now very expensive … I have now wound up all his accounts to this day & find him still £16 in my debt but he shall not draw till he finally goes as he will necessarily want some more. I have been as moderate in his expenses as I could consistent with the high price of things and his going & living like a Gentleman. He behaves exceedingly well & I like him much.

      If Admiralty records are to be believed, Frank was not discharged from the Sea Horse into Victory until 6 May 1810, but between the two ships there was Willesley, a ‘delighted’ mother and a determined father to see. He ‘understood from Lady Hardy’, Sir Charles was soon writing to Warren Hastings’s son-in-law,

      that you and Lady Imhoff are both intimate with the Captain of Victory, on board of whom my son Frank is to go, will you have the goodness (previous to your quitting town) to leave him a letter of recommendation to your friend. He will find it very useful when on board as thro’ the Captain’s means he may be placed under the care of some Lieut. which is what I would wish as I cannot expect Sir James Saumarez will do any more than admit him on board.

      After the excitements of the Sea Horse, and the light and the colour of Sicily, the Aegean and the Dardanelles, it was a return for Frank to the dull realities of home ports and blockade duties with the Baltic Fleet. In spite of the official entry date he did not join Victory until October 1810, and he was back at Willesley again by 15 December – ‘the date of the Regency’, as Sir Charles triumphantly dated Frank’s arrival – putting his father to work to find him something more interesting than СКАЧАТЬ