Greeks have been sailors since the days of Odysseus’ twenty-year voyage home from Troy. Part of the reason is Greece’s geography; there has always been the need to travel between hundreds of scattered islands, and on the mainland it has often been easier to sail round the rim of such a mountainous country than to travel and transport goods overland. The temperament of the Greeks, ancient and modern, was suited to the type of seafaring which called for a small band of more or less equals, serving a captain for the duration of a voyage, reacting with impromptu vigour to the unpredictable changes of wind and water. In this they were the antithesis of the Romans, who were at home on land, with large hierarchical permanent armies, structures of efficient imperial administration and long straight roads.
The Greek revolutionary fleet was drawn almost exclusively from three small and separated islands: Hydra and Spétses off the north-east coast of the Peloponnese and Psará in the northern Aegean about a hundred miles south of the entrance to the Dardanelles. These islands enjoyed much more freedom than the mainland. Nominally under the control of the kapitan pasha, they were left alone provided they paid their relatively light taxes, which they collected themselves, and provided they contributed the annual quota of sailors to the Turkish navy. There was virtually no Turkish presence. The islanders were also well used to making their own voice heard. On all merchant ventures, since everyone down to the cabin-boy was to receive a share of the profits, decisions before and during the voyage were taken only after the captain had consulted the crew.
The three naval islands had prospered from their grain-carrying merchant fleets, which they had developed over the previous century, and more recently from running the British blockade of the southern French coast during the Napoleonic wars. On Hydra, the richest of the three, this wealth had gone into grand houses, which are still there, and a luxurious lifestyle. The town of Hydra was described by Gordon as ‘one of the best cities in the Levant, and infinitely superior to any other in Greece: the houses are all constructed of white stone; and those of the primates, erected at an immense expense, floored with costly marbles, and splendidly furnished, might pass for palaces even in the capitals of Italy’.1 However, this opulence was now under threat. The fall in value of the Turkish piastre was cutting profits. The defeat of Napoleon had brought not only an end to lucrative blockade-running but also a big reduction in the price of grain in Europe, and a particularly good harvest in 1820 reduced the price still further. Revolution offered a way out of economic decline.
The temperament of the islanders reflected their origins, Psará having been settled during the previous century by Greeks from Asia Minor, and Hydra and Spétses by Albanians. The Albanians were generally regarded as tough, intelligent and industrious, and were ready to emigrate to pursue their fortunes. They were willing to serve as mercenaries with whoever would reward them best, and in the course of the war of independence were to be found both on the Greek side, winning Byron’s alternating admiration and exasperation, and on the Turkish side as part of the Greeks’ conglomerate enemy the tourkalvaní. Contemporaries regularly commented on the distinctively Albanian character of the people of Hydra and Spétses, and contrasted it with the Greek temper of the Psarians. In Gordon’s view ‘the Hydriots and Spezziotes are of genuine Albanian race, rude, boisterous, unlettered, addicted to intemperance, and, with few exceptions, uncivilised: they are bigoted, and have an aversion to strangers. The Psarrians, Asiatic Greeks, although eminent among their countrymen for spirit and enterprise, are of a more humane, sprightly, and pliable temper.’2 Making a similar comparison, the English traveller George Waddington wrote that ‘vivacity, levity, vanity, attract and amuse you in [the Psarians], and are well contrasted by the sedateness, pride, almost insolence of [the Hydriots]’.3 Gordon and Waddington were thus agreed about the quicksilver temperament of the Psarians, and it is no surprise that sailors from Psará were the first to use against a Turkish fleet that most hazardous form of naval attack, the fireship.
Rarely in the field of maritime conflict have two opposing fleets been as mismatched as those of the Turks and the Greeks in 1821. The Turkish navy consisted of ships designed and built for battle, with their supporting vessels. It was a unified force, under the command of the kapitan pasha, who stood third in the Turkish hierarchy after the Sultan and the grand vizier. It had an established base in Constantinople where it had every facility for refitting and reprovisioning, and which was totally secure from attack because protected by 160 miles of the narrows of the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara. The Greek ships however were designed not as warships but as merchantmen, though they were regularly equipped with guns to fight off pirates. Command in the Greek fleet was anything but unified. Squadrons from different islands sometimes sailed under a single admiral, but co-operation between commanders depended on arrangements made at ad-hoc meetings in the cabin of one of their number. Even command on a single ship scarcely deserved the name. The traditions of trading days persisted, sailors would usually serve only for the month for which they had been paid in advance, and for any significant change of plan the captain had to get the agreement of the crew.
Given the purposes for which they were built, it was inevitable that the Turkish ships were enormously superior to the Greek in size and in firepower. Following the categories of Britain’s navy, sailing ships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were named as ships of the line, frigates, corvettes, brigs and so on, and were classified in a confusing number of different ways: most loosely, by the number of masts; most generally, by the number of guns carried; most precisely, by tonnage, though this could be measured by several different calculations. The largest were ships of the line, that is those fit to stand in the line of battle. They had three masts and were divided into six classes or rates, though by the beginning of the nineteenth century only the first three were considered powerful enough for battle. A first-rate ship of the line carried a hundred or more guns, a second-rate eighty-four to ninety-eight and a third-rate seventy to eighty, all with guns on two or more decks. For example, Nelson’s flagship the Victory was a first-rate ship of the line of 2,162 tons with three masts, three gun decks and in all a hundred guns, with a crew of 850. Next in size after ships of the line were frigates, generally two masted, carrying between twenty-eight and fifty guns and used as scouts and protectors of the fleet. Smaller still were corvettes and brigs, also generally two masted but with fewer than twenty-eight guns. The relationship between tonnage, number of guns and number of crew for Nelson’s Victory was much the same over the whole range of early-nineteenth-century fighting ships: each gun required about twenty tons burden and about eight crew members.
The Turkish navy at the beginning of the nineteenth century consisted of about twenty three-masted ships of the line, each carrying about eighty guns and so comparable with second- or third-rate ships of the British navy; seven or eight frigates, with about fifty guns; five corvettes with about thirty guns; and forty or so brigs and smaller craft carrying fewer than twenty guns. By contrast, the Greeks at the outbreak of the revolution could muster only a mixed squadron of armed merchantmen, about forty ships in roughly equal proportions from the three naval islands; in size they were only 250–300 tons and none carried more than twenty guns, most only eight to twelve. It was almost as if an assembly of lightly armed coastal cutters had set out to oppose Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet.
However, the Turks’ advantage was a great deal less than it appeared. Their superior size of ship and firepower was of use only in a set battle at sea, in which success depended on precise seamanship – attacking ships needed to sail in line astern along the enemy’s line in order to fire broadside at it – and on accurate gunnery. The Turks were poor on both counts. ‘Nautical skill may truly be said not to exist among the Turks,’4 wrote Richard Green from Patras in October 1821, and as for gunnery, even in 1825, the fifth summer of the war at sea, the Turks kept their guns at the same elevation throughout an action instead of using wedges to change the trajectory. Moreover, in the age of sail a set battle was usually easy to avoid. An attacking fleet would have to be sailing more or less downwind to approach the enemy, who on the open seas could make use of the same wind to sail out of danger.
The Turks were also at a disadvantage because they relied on Greeks and others to provide their crews. ‘The vessel is sailed and steered by Europeans,’ wrote Richard Green of the Turkish 1821 navy, ‘while the fighting part belongs exclusively to the Turks.’5 On the outbreak of the revolution nearly all the Greeks in the Turkish navy naturally defected, so that the Turks had quickly to recruit new sailors by their customary method of impressment. This commonly meant that the owner of a Constantinople waterfront bar would discover a ship’s captain’s need for crew, and then ply enough of his customers with drink until they signed an irrevocable service agreement, a practice called ‘crimping’ in the British navy, which also resorted to it when manpower was short. These new recruits then had to be trained, as Richard Green describes:
The confusion on board a Turkish vessel is absolutely ridiculous. One half of the men are, perhaps, horribly sea-sick, sprawling about the deck; while the other half are pulling at ropes, of which they have no knowledge. The Chaouses [officers] are seen running here and there, bastinadoing right and left, and forcing the men to their duty. Indeed, the way in which the sailors are taught to handle and know the different ropes is, as I was informed, quite on a par with the rest of the system. Vegetables, pipes, pieces of cloth, &c are attached to the rigging and the cordage, and then the command is given, ‘haul up the long pipe; let go the cabbage,’ &c.6
Despite Green’s implied scorn, the use of vegetables and homely objects to identify bits of rigging was rather a good idea: a precursor of today’s colour coding. Nearly a century later a similar system was used by the Greek army in the Balkan wars. Illiterate recruits did not know left from right, so were made to hang a clove of garlic on their left ear and an onion on their right, and were taught to turn to the garlic or the onion.
The balance between the Turkish and Greek fleets was further redressed by two Greek advantages. The first was manoeuvrability: their ships were lighter and could get under way and tack more quickly than the Turks’. Their racing skills and boat design had been so far developed for beating the blockade of the southern French coast that when the British captured three Hydriot blockade runners they regarded the masts as dangerously high for the size of boat, and shortened them before using the vessels themselves. The second and crucial Greek advantage, the stone in the sling of David against Goliath, was the use of fireships.
Fireships were not a new invention. Thucydides describes their use in the fifth century BC, they were employed successfully against Alexander the Great, unsuccessfully against the Turks at the fall of Constantinople, and to devastating effect at the battle of Palermo in 1676 by the French, who for another century retained separate ranks for the bruloteer crews of their fireships. Some Greek historians like to emphasise the long history of the fireship to demonstrate that it was not a fiendish and somehow unfair weapon of war which pre-eminently they exploited.
The Greeks had achieved a memorable success with fireships in support of Russia against Turkey at the time of the Orlov revolt in 1770. The Turkish fleet had been driven into the harbour of Chesme near Smyrna, and under cover from both darkness and the smoke from an exchange of gunfire four Greek fireships, with Greek crews mainly from Psará but with Russian or English captains, sailed into the middle of the crowded Turkish fleet. At least one fireship found its mark, and the flames spread to other Turkish ships. By daybreak the Turkish naval force was destroyed, only one of their fifteen ships of the line and a few smaller vessels remaining undamaged, and it is estimated that of their total crew of 15,000, many of them Greeks, only 4,000 survived.
Fireships were substantial vessels, typically brigs of around 200 tons and about seventy feet long, with two masts carrying enough sail to enable them to sail rapidly downwind against the enemy, and needing a crew of twenty-five to thirty men. A single deck covered the hold, in which a trough about six feet wide was constructed along both sides to contain the combustible material. A simple form of this was dried furze dipped in pitch and oil and sprinkled with sulphur, a more elaborate one was a compound of gunpowder, alcohol, naphtha, sulphur and powdered charcoal rolled into balls. Smaller transverse troughs led to barrels of powder. Twenty or more openings, about two feet square and covered by hatches, were cut in the deck so that when the hatches were opened air would feed the flames below. Hold, deck and masts were smeared with pitch, and the sails soaked in turpentine. The captain and crew remained on board until the fireship was firmly attached to its target by hooks fixed to the ends of the yards, and also if possible by the prow being rammed into one of the enemy’s lower gun ports, which would have been only five or six feet above the water. At the final moment the fireship crew scrambled into the escape boat which had been towed behind – in the French navy by a chain, to ensure that this vital lifeline was not cut. The captain left last, lighting a powder train from the stern as he did so. As captain and crew rowed away, fire spread through the fireship’s hold until it reached the powder barrels whose explosion blew open the hatches and turned the vessel into a blazing inferno. The target ship now caught fire, and when the flames reached its powder store was blown to smithereens.
That is what happened if all went to plan for the Greeks, but fireships often failed to attach themselves to the enemy ship, and fireships were expensive. All Greek boats were privately owned, and the owner would have to be paid the equivalent of about £800 in the currency of the day for a ship, even an old one, to be converted. The conversion cost another £800, and the crews were paid above the normal rate. Success added to the cost: the crews then received a further payment of 100 to 150 piastres depending upon the size of the enemy ship destroyed, a bonus equal to about two months’ pay of an ordinary seaman in the British navy of the time. The captains, however, were said to refuse this bonus, as they would ‘consider it a disgrace to accept a recompense for doing their duty to their country’.7
Spétses was the first of the three islands to join the revolution on Palm Sunday 1821, the very day when at Patras the Turks under Yussuf Pasha surprised the Greeks in their beds. Psará followed Spétses a week later, on Easter Sunday, in spite of its exposed position only forty miles from the Turkish coast and in the direct path of any Turkish fleet issuing from the Dardanelles. After a further week independence was proclaimed at Hydra, where the two leading captains were Iakoumákis Tombázis and Andréas Maioúlis. In the first months of the war a Greek fleet under Tombázis had the Aegean Sea to itself, carrying calls for revolution to other islands and seizing isolated Turkish merchant ships. But at the beginning of June the Turkish fleet sailed out of the Dardanelles under Kara Ali as kapitan bey or admiral. It had two principal aims: to restore Turkish control over the Aegean islands that were in revolt, and to support Turkish garrisons beleaguered in fortresses round the Greek coast.
During the rest of the summer of 1821 there were three separate Turkish naval expeditions, each opposed with varying success by Greek fleets. The first Turkish naval expedition in early June was challenged by the Greek fleet before it had sailed a hundred miles from the mouth of the Dardanelles. The Turkish fleet took shelter in the Bay of Sígri on the north-west coast of the island of Lésvos, but their second largest ship of the line, a seventy-six-gun vessel, was let down by poor seamanship. Although the wind was favourable, it failed to join the rest of the fleet in the Bay of Sígri and found itself isolated at the wide sandy beach of Eresós, a few miles to the south. This was an ideal opportunity for the Greeks to make use of fireships. There was nobody who knew how to prepare them except a few old men in Psará, survivors of the fireship success at Chesme fifty years before, and it was a Psarian shipbuilder who came forward with the necessary skills. One fireship, with a Hydriot captain and crew, was launched against the isolated Turkish vessel at Eresós, but failed because the powder train was lit too soon. Nothing could be done on the next two days because of calm or contrary winds, but on the third day two more Greek fireships were despatched, manned by Psarians. One of them failed, but the other was successfully attached and fired. The Turkish captain cut his cables and his ship drifted on shore, making escape easier for his crew, but after three-quarters of an hour the flames reached the powder store of the Turkish ship, which was blown to pieces with the loss of some five or six hundred lives. The Turkish fleet retired to the Dardanelles having accomplished nothing and the Greek ships returned in triumph to their home ports.
A month later, in mid-July, the Turks were ready for a second naval venture, this time with the specific purpose of subduing the island of Sámos. Sámos had joined the revolution early, and parties of Samians were raiding the nearby Turkish coast, plundering houses and driving away livestock. The Turkish fleet under Kara Ali now consisted of four ships of the line, five frigates and about twenty smaller ships, and the plan was to bring across to Sámos an army of 12,000 or so assembled at Kuşadasi on the coast opposite. However these troops, kept waiting for transport, became increasingly disorderly, fell to plundering and slaughtering the Greeks of the town, and largely dispersed with their plunder. Kara Ali tried to land small parties of soldiers on Sámos, but they met fierce resistance and were driven back. By the time that he had managed to assemble ten transport vessels full of troops, perhaps 1,000 men in all, the Greek fleet had arrived. It numbered ninety ships from the three naval islands with some from Kásos to the south, and was one of the largest Greek fleets to put to sea in the whole course of the revolution. The Greeks forced Kara Ali’s transports back to the Turkish mainland, the Turkish troops were driven away from the shore by grapeshot and the transports burnt. Kara Ali made no further attempt to land on Sámos, and the island remained unsubdued, attempting in the following year to involve its peace-loving neighbours of Chios in the conflict. Kara Ali sailed south to Rhodes, where he joined forces with a flotilla from Egypt, under the command of Ismael Gibraltar. By mid-August the Turkish fleet with its Egyptian allies was back within the Dardanelles, and the Greeks, after touching at Sámos where they received a blessing from the exiled patriarch of Alexandria, were again in their home ports.
After only a few weeks’ respite, the Turkish fleet under Kara Ali, with its allies from Egypt, sailed out on their third and last venture of the summer. This time they switched their attack to the west, to the Ionian rather than the Aegean Sea. This gave them several advantages. First, they were well away from possible interference or attack by the Aegean islanders of Hydra, Spétses and Psará. Second, the British authorities in the Ionian islands, despite their declared neutrality, still allowed Turkish ships to use their harbours: it was not until the end of October that belligerents on both sides were barred from Ionian ports. Third, on its voyage round the Peloponnese the Turkish fleet could fulfil one of its main obligations, the support and provisioning of the Turkish-held strongholds on the coast.
This they proceeded to do. Kara Ali’s fleet brought provisions for the Turks in the citadel of Methóni, and at Koróni joined the Turks beleaguered in the fortress in driving back the Greek besiegers. The Turkish fleet tried to land troops at nearby Kalamáta, but were repulsed by energetic resistance. After taking on provisions at Zákinthos without objection from the Ionian authorities Kara Ali’s fleet reached Patras, where it was joined by ships from the Epirus coast which had been withdrawn from operations against Ali Pasha. At the sight of the Turkish fleet, the Greeks besieging Patras by sea withdrew to the Gulf of Corinth and the shelter of the harbour of Galaxídhi. Thus all three of the remaining Turkish-held fortresses on the western side of the Peloponnese – Methóni, Koróni and Patras – were now more securely in their hands.
The Turks’ next target was the flourishing merchant port of Galaxídhi on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. The Greek ships blockading Patras had withdrawn there, but the port was defended only by a few guns on an island at the mouth of the harbour and by 200 Greek irregulars. Kara Ali despatched to Galaxídhi a flotilla consisting mainly of Egyptian ships and commanded by Ismael Gibraltar, accompanied by around 1,000 soldiers and by Yussuf Pasha, the Turkish commander at Patras. The defenders of Galaxídhi withstood two days of Turkish bombardment but to no avail: their guns on the island were eventually silenced and the Greek irregulars, with most of the population, made for safety in the hinterland. The Turks landed, seized the best thirty-four of the ships in the harbour, burnt the town with the rest of the ships, and took some thirty Greek sailors captive. The Greek fleets of Hydra, Spétses and Psará were now roused to action, having been inactive for a month because of disagreements between Hydra and Spétses, but could do no more than harass the Turkish fleet on its way back round the coast of the Peloponnese. Kara Ali, after stopping again at Zákinthos, which was still open to him, finally reached Constantinople at the end of November with the thirty-four ships captured at Galaxídhi, from the yard-arms of which, as grisly trophies, hung the bodies of his thirty Greek captives. As a reward for his services Kara Ali was promoted from kapitan bey to kapitan pasha, supreme commander of the Turkish navy and governor of the Greek islands.
Kara Ali had not done very much to justify his elevation, though Gordon’s judgement that his conduct was ‘a tissue of folly and cowardice’8 is probably too harsh. He had failed to crush the revolt on Sámos, he had failed to inflict any serious damage on the Greek naval fleets and he had failed to develop a defence against the Greek fireships. His successes lay in the supply and reinforcement of fortresses on the Peloponnese coast, and the destruction, by his Egyptian colleague Ismael Gibraltar, of the inadequately defended merchant port of Galaxídhi. Whether it was deserved or otherwise, Kara Ali was not to enjoy his new status for long: in the following summer off Chios he lost his flagship and his life in an attack by the Greeks’ primary weapon, a fireship.
Why did the Turkish fleet not make a direct attack on the three main naval islands, and so gain for itself freedom of action at sea? Although Hydra was well defended – ‘every peak was bristling with a battery,’9 wrote a visitor in 1825 – Spétses according to Gordon was ‘incapable of defence’ and Psará was very far from help from the other naval islands or the Greek mainland. Hydra and Spétses were never directly attacked, and Psará only in the fourth year of the war. One might also ask why the Turks did not pour in troops by sea to the Peloponnese fortresses they held, as Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt did in 1825 with devastating results. The Turks were better placed than the Egyptians to carry out such an operation: Ibrahim’s voyage from Alexandria, with a stop at Crete, was across over 600 miles of open sea, while the distance from the mouth of the Dardanelles to the southern Peloponnese was less than half that, about 250 miles.
The answer to both questions seems to be simply that, as contemporaries often remarked, the Turks were no sailors. When the Athenians of Pericles’ day had been building alliances among the islands of the Aegean and sending naval expeditions as far as Sicily, the Turks had been fighting from horseback on the steppes of Asia. Their subsequent empire was land based. Their furthest advance westward had been overland to the gates of Vienna, and they were used to defending land frontiers on their eastern borders in today’s Iran, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The Turks were also faced with the threat of the extensive use of fireships, as terrifying as the advent of the torpedo a century later. It is easy to see that the Turks at sea lacked the individual and collective confidence to attempt the bold maritime moves which might quickly have extinguished the Greek revolt.