The Cavaliers of Fortune; Or, British Heroes in Foreign Wars. James Grant

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[6] "Record:" Lyon Court, Edinburgh.

[7] Note of his services furnished to author from Horse Guards.

      Sir Samuel Greig.

      Sir Samuel Greig, Governor of Cronstadt, Admiral of all the Russias, and commonly called the Father of the Russian Navy, was a Scotsman of humble but respectable parentage, and was born at the ancient seaport town of Inverkeithing, in Fifeshire, on the 30th of November, 1735.[8] He was educated by the parochial schoolmaster, who lived long to boast of his pupil, for the Domini would seem to have been still alive when the old statistical account of Scotland was published in 1794.

      When very young, Samuel Greig entered the British navy, and at an early age obtained the rank of lieutenant. In 1759 he served with the fleet of Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, C.B. (afterwards Lord Hawke), when blockading the harbour of Brest, where a fine French fleet lay, under the pennant of the Marquis de Conflans. At that time a double invasion of Britain (one by the way of Scotland, the other on the coast of England) was threatened; but Commodore Boys blocked up Dunkirk, and Rodney bombarded Havre-de-Grace, while the French transports and flat-bottomed boats lay inactive in Brest, with the fleet of M. de Conflans; till a violent storm in autumn, having driven the ships of Sir Edward Hawke into Torbay, the marquis put to sea with twenty-one sail of the line and four frigates, and threw all England into consternation.

      With twenty sail of the line, Hawke left Torbay, and came up with the French fleet between Belleisle and Cape Quiberon, close in on the coast of France, and in the desperate conflict which ensued, "young Greig," though a subaltern, is said to "have eminently distinguished himself." The battle began at two o'clock, P.M., on the 20th of November.

      Sir Edward, in the Royal George, 110, lay alongside De Conflans in the Soleil Royale, 80, which was soon driven on shore and burned. He then lay alongside the Thesée, and sent her to the bottom by one broadside. La Superbe shared the same fate; the Juste was sunk off the mouth of the Loire; the Hero was burned; and thus M. de Conflans was totally defeated. Nothing saved the rest of his fleet from irretrievable ruin but the shadow of a tempestuous night, in which two British ships of the line were lost. Lieutenant Greig served with the fleet in all its operations, during the long cruise off the coast of Bretagne, and the blockade of the river Vilaine, to prevent seven French ships which lay there from joining Conflans, whose battered squadron had reached Rochefort; but so dangerous were the storms, and so incessantly tempestuous the weather, that the fear of invasion passed away. Sir Edward Hawke was at length recalled, and the thanks of Parliament and a pension were awarded to him. In this war the British destroyed, or took twenty-seven French ships of the line and thirty-one frigates. Six of their vessels perished. Thus, in all they lost sixty-four sail, while Britain, by every casualty, lost only seven line-of-battle ships and five frigates.

      The next scene of Greig's service was at the capture of several of the West India Islands.

      War having been declared against the Spaniards, an attack on their settlements in the West Indies was arranged, and Martinico, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada were taken. Then Cuba was assailed. Greig was with the fleet, consisting of nineteen sail of the line, eighteen frigates, and 150 transports, which had 10,000 soldiers on board, and sailed for Cuba under Admiral Sir George Pocoke, K.B., whose commodore was the Hon. Augustus Keppel, raised to the peerage in 1782.

      The energy and exertions of Lieutenant Greig, during that tremendous cannonading which preceded the siege and capture of the Moro Castle, elicited the praise of his commander; but no promotion followed, for the time was unfavourable for either Scotsmen or Irishmen rising in the British service. After incredible exertions, difficulties, danger, and slaughter, Havannah was captured, with 180 miles of coast; the Puntal Castle, the ships in the harbour, three millions sterling of booty, and an immense quantity of arms, artillery, and stores were surrendered to the British. Greig's share of this enormous prize-money was very small, being somewhere about 80l.

      Lieutenant Greig served in many other engagements during that successful war; and his bravery, activity, and skill as a seaman had so frequently elicited particular attention, that after the treaty of peace which was signed at Paris in February, 1763, under Lord Bute's administration, when the Court of St. Petersburg requested that a few British officers of distinguished ability might be sent to improve the Russian fleet, Greig was one of the five who were first selected, and his rank as lieutenant in the navy of Russia was confirmed by the Empress Catherine II., in 1764. The only stipulation he and the others made was, that they were to have the power of returning to the British service whenever they chose.

      Russia, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, has ever been an excellent field for Scottish talent and valour. Thus Greig, by his superior skill in naval affairs, his intelligence and diligent discharge of the duties entrusted to him, soon attracted the special notice of the Imperial Government, and the Empress appointed him a captain in her fleet. He drew many other Scotsmen around him, and, with these, he was at incredible pains to teach the half-barbarous and wholly unlettered Russians the science of seamanship and the art of gunnery, in all of which they were very deficient, "and he rapidly raised the Russian naval service to a degree of respectability and importance which it never before had attained."

      In 1769, when he was in his thirty-fourth year, a war broke out between Russia and Turkey, consequent on the civil strife which religious intolerance had kindled in Poland. The Czarina marched in her troops; and while pretending that her sole object was to rescue one body of Polish citizens from the tyranny of the other, she secretly sought to enslave them all, and render their country a province of the Russian empire.

      The growing greatness of the latter had alarmed its old hereditary enemy, the Grand Seignior, who required Catherine immediately to withdraw her troops from the Polish republic. Evasions were given, and conflicts began between the Russian and Turkish outposts, on the borders of the Ottoman empire, until the sack of Balta, in Lesser Tartary, and a general massacre of its inhabitants, by the soldiers of the Czarina, procured the committal of her ambassador to the Castle of the Seven Towers, in October, 1769; and hostilities, which were only suspended by the rigour of the season, began early in the spring of the ensuing year.

      Captain Greig was appointed commodore of the fleet which was to sail for the Mediterranean, under Alexis Count Orloff; and in that ample arena of service he had an opportunity of displaying his zeal and intrepidity in such a manner as led to his immediate promotion to the rank of flag-officer.

      A partial breaking up of the ice in the Baltic enabled some of the fleet to sail; and so early as the 14th of January, 1770, one part of the armament, under the Scottish admiral Elphinstone, consisting of one 70-gun ship, two of sixty guns each, and five others, arrived at Spithead, en route for the Archipelago.

      The other division, of twenty-two sail of the line, reached Port Mahon, in Minorca, so early as the 4th of January; and by the 6th of March appeared off Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian Isles, and, with a fair wind, bore away directly for the Morea. At Minorca they left some vessels to wait for Elphinstone, who left Spithead on the 14th of April, passed Gibraltar on the 4th of May, and before the end of July had twice defeated the Turkish fleet—on one occasion encountering three times his force, and destroying eight ships; on the second occasion, with nineteen ships, encountering Giafar Bey, with twenty-three. Giafar's largest ships were destroyed, and his fleet dispersed.

      In the great battle of the 6th of July, Greig, Mackenzie, and other officers in the Russian fleet, had an opportunity of eminently rendering good and gallant service; and by their energy and skill the world now saw a naval force, which, as Cormick says, had issued from the foot of the Baltic, able "to shake the remotest parts СКАЧАТЬ