The combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet finally anchored in the Bay of Navarino on 7 September 1827, where Ibrahim was already based. Codrington was at Navplion when he heard the news and sailed immediately, taking up station outside the harbour on 12 September. He was joined there ten days later by de Rigny and his fleet, though the Russians were yet to arrive. Codrington found that an Ottoman squadron had already sailed out from Navarino, evidently en route to Hydra, but a firm letter from Codrington and a visit from de Rigny persuaded Ibrahim to recall his ships, and de Rigny arranged that he and Codrington should have a joint interview with Ibrahim a few days later on 25 September.
On that morning, the admirals were rowed ashore to Ibrahim’s tent, which was pitched on a little bank rising from the beach just north of the town of Pílos. The admirals were accompanied by some of their senior officers and by the eighteen-year-old Henry Codrington, a midshipman on his father’s ship, who left a lively description of the meeting. He describes Ibrahim as seated on his sofa, while Admiral Codrington sat beside him and de Rigny next, so that Codrington was in the centre. The allied officers were ranged in front of the sofa and the Turk and Egyptian leaders behind it, with the exception of Tahir the Turkish naval commander, who was said to be ill. As Henry Codrington described the scene, the tent was open ‘and from his sofa [Ibrahim] looked down over the whole harbour, and really the sight was beautiful, covered as it was by the ships, and boats of all sorts continually passing to and fro’. Ibrahim himself, he went on irreverently, ‘is not at all good-looking … and fat as a porpoise’.1 After lengthy introductions and an exchange of pleasantries, coffee was brought in with pipes for the three principals, the pipes being enormous and elaborate chibouques studded with precious stones and with stems ten feet long. The admirals thus found that they had been sent abroad to smoke for their countries, and dutifully did so.
Then business began. Admiral Codrington, according to his own account, told Ibrahim that as a consequence of the Treaty of London ‘it became [the admirals’] imperative duty to intercept every supply sent by sea of men, arms etc., destined against Greece’. Ibrahim then stated his own position, ‘that his orders were to attack Hydra, and that he must put them in execution’. Codrington expressed sympathy, ‘aware what must be the feelings of a brave man under such circumstances’. Nevertheless, if Ibrahim put to sea the allies would prevent him, and ‘if he resisted by force, the total destruction of his fleet must follow’. Ibrahim acknowledged what he had heard, and therefore undertook to remain at Navarino and ‘to suspend all operations of the land and sea forces forming the expedition from Alexandria till he received answers from Constantinople and Alexandria’ giving him new instructions.2
The formal business was now over, and was followed by what Henry Codrington called a ‘joking’ conversation, which was not all jokes. At one point Ibrahim was mocking the Greeks, saying that ‘there never was a Greek worth anything’, but Admiral Codrington brought him up short by answering ‘that his Highness ought to abstain from undervaluing those men whom he had been such a time attempting to conquer’.3
After three hours the conference ended and the admirals returned to their ships. It was expected to take till about 15 October for Ibrahim to receive his new instructions and Codrington believed Ibrahim had undertaken not to move during those twenty days. Codrington and de Rigny therefore sailed away to reprovision and to patrol other sectors of the coast, leaving only two ships, one from each nation, to watch Navarino. But Ibrahim and his colleagues had, or claimed to have, a different understanding of what had been agreed with the admirals. Ibrahim later recorded two extra points in his favour from the 25 September meeting, points which almost certainly had not been conceded: that the Greeks as well as the Turks should observe a temporary armistice until his new instructions arrived; and that he had permission from the admirals to take provisions to the Turkish garrison of Patras.
However, the Greeks were still fighting, on the ground that while they had accepted the Treaty of London, the Ottoman government had not. In the last days of September Church was leading a Greek force against Patras, and Hastings in the Kartería had destroyed a flotilla of seven Turkish ships at Itéa in the Gulf of Corinth. Ibrahim’s reaction was to bring forty-eight of his ships out of Navarino to head for Patras, far more of course than would be needed for an agreed supply drop. In the course of three days and nights of appalling weather Codrington’s much smaller fleet turned them back with the help of some shots across their bows, and they returned to Navarino.
If Ibrahim could not get away with provocative actions at sea, he could try on land where the admirals had no forces. After the failure of his Patras expedition he renewed his previous campaign of devastation of the Peloponnese. Hamilton of the Cambrian, Greece’s long-term friend and now part of Codrington’s fleet, reported on 15 October that the smoke of burning orchards could be seen from his station off Kalamáta. The three admirals, united at last by the arrival of Heiden and his Russian fleet a few days earlier, sent a joint letter to Ibrahim ordering him to desist, but were told that nobody knew where Ibrahim was and that nobody else could accept a message addressed to him.
Ibrahim was clearly stretching his freedom of action to the limit, and deliberately putting himself out of reach of remonstrances from the admirals. Furthermore, he could anticipate very different answers to his requests for instructions from Constantinople and Alexandria. He could expect, rightly as it turned out, that the reply from Constantinople would be bellicose, on the lines of the Porte’s forthright rejection of the ambassadors’ attempts to mediate, while the reply from Alexandria would be pacific, based on Mehmed Ali’s concern not to lose his prized fleet. What was Ibrahim to say to the admirals when two such contradictory instructions reached him? It was better to stay out of their way.
Kolokotrónis intercepted Ibrahim’s orders to burn and destroy the trees – olive, fig and mulberry – of the Kalamáta region, and records the splendidly defiant reply he sent:
This action with which you would terrify us, threatening to cut down and burn up our fruit-bearing trees, is not warfare; the senseless trees cannot oppose themselves to any one … but we will not submit – no, not if you cut down every branch, not if you burn all our trees and houses, nor leave one stone upon another. And if you do cut down and burn up all our trees, you cannot dig up and carry off the earth which nourished them; that same earth will still remain ours, and will bear them again. If only one Greek shall be left, we will still go on fighting. Never hope that you will make our earth your own.4
It was this spirit which had animated the Greeks at their best throughout the war and the many difficulties, some self-imposed, that they had endured. They might now be dependent upon others for success, but it was their own tenacity which had kept the flame of freedom alight for six years until more powerful allies came to their aid.
The admirals, faced with the evasive and delaying tactics of Ibrahim and his breaches in their view of the 25 September agreement, had to decide what to do. A blockade of the harbour of Navarino would be impossible to maintain during the coming winter storms. Even if a blockade could prevent Ibrahim’s fleet leaving Navarino, it could not stop Ibrahim’s devastations on land. Privately the admirals were in no doubt that they must drive Ibrahim’s fleet out of the Peloponnese. On the evening of 14 October Codrington wrote to Stratford Canning stating that he would confer with de Rigny and Heiden ‘as to taking measures for forcing Ibrahim’s return to Egypt’.5 On the same day de Rigny wrote to his government that in his opinion the three squadrons should enter Navarino bay ‘and there, match in hand, tell the fleets to disperse and to return, one to Constantinople and the other to Alexandria, and, if they do not, attack them immediately’.6 Heiden agreed, and the three admirals recorded their intentions in the so-called Protocol of 18 October. It was a cautious document, implying that the allies would not use force, and was designed to forestall the later political criticism which they already anticipated. The protocol listed Ibrahim’s breaches of faith, declared a blockade to be impossible, stated their intention of entering the harbour to ‘renew propositions’ to Ibrahim, and recorded their unanimous agreement that this approach ‘may, without effusion of blood and without hostilities, but simply by the imposing presence of the squadrons, produce a determination leading to the desired object’.7 The admirals, in short, claimed that they were simply following the military maxim of the Romans: qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
There was a final step needed before the allied fleet went in: the French officers acting as advisers to the Egyptian squadron needed to be withdrawn. There were ten of them, of whom Letellier was the most senior. On 15 October de Rigny sent a letter to Letellier, pointing out that he and his fellow officers were at imminent risk of fighting against their own flag and calling on them to leave their posts. The Egyptian admiral Moharrem Bey understood their position, and even offered them transport to Alexandria. In the event all departed on an Austrian ship in the next few days except Letellier, who stayed on Moharrem Bey’s flagship and left only when it actually came under fire. Thus on 20 October the Turco-Egyptian fleet was not only without its overall commander Ibrahim but was also deprived of the services of its most experienced foreign advisers.
Letellier now performed one last service by arranging the disposition of the Turco-Egyptian fleet. The Bay of Navarino stretches a little over three miles north to south and two miles east to west. The west side is formed by the island of Sphaktiría, whose northern tip almost joins the mainland. The only entrance to the bay is therefore through the narrow gap at its southern end, which is partly blocked by some jagged needles of rock. There is a small island in the centre of the bay, to the north of which the bay deteriorates into shallow sandy lagoons. The fleets of October 1827 thus had to operate in the southern half of the bay, and it was there that under Letellier’s direction the Turkish and Egyptian ships were positioned at anchor in a triple line of horseshoe formation, presenting their broadsides to the centre, the Egyptians on the east side and the Turks on the west, with the small Tunisian contingent in the rear. The fireships were placed on either side of the entrance, which was also protected by batteries at the town of Pílos on the east and at the tip of Sphaktiría on the west. Letellier’s dispositions, which took three days to complete, were thus intimidating in the extreme, a sort of maritime version of the Maori haka.
It would have taken more than a threatening posture to deter Codrington and his fellow admirals, and in the late morning of 20 October, in fine weather and under a light wind, the allied fleet began to move through the narrow entrance into the bay. The eleven ships of the English squadron led the way, headed by Codrington in his flagship the Asia. The Asia with the other two English line-of-battle ships, Genoa and Albion, took up position at anchor in roughly the centre of the enemy horseshoe while the smaller English vessels stayed on either side of the entrance to keep a watch on the fireships. The seven French ships, led by de Rigny in the Sirène, came in next, and were stationed on the east side facing the Egyptians, to ensure that any French officers still with the Egyptian fleet would have to leave on pain of fighting their own countrymen. The eight Russian ships came last, under Heiden in the Azov, and formed a group more compact than the English or French opposite the mainly Turkish vessels on the west side of the bay.
At 2 p.m., while most of the allied ships were still manoeuvring into position, a small boat was seen coming from the Egyptian flagship to the Asia. It brought a letter from Moharrem Bey to Codrington asking him not to persist in entering, to which Codrington immediately replied that he had come to give orders and not to receive them. The officer who had brought the letter then went directly ashore, where a red flag was raised and an unshotted gun fired, presumably to signal the failure of this final conciliatory move. More threatening was the sight of a small boat from the enemy fleet heading for one of their fireships. When this boat arrived the crew of the fireship started preparing it for attack.
The nearest allied ship was the English frigate Dartmouth, whose Captain Fellowes sent a pinnace with a few men under a lieutenant to request the fireship crew either to leave their ship or to tow it further inshore out of the Dartmouth’s way. Captain Fellowes’ last instruction to the lieutenant as the pinnace left was ‘Recollect, Sir, that no act of hostility is to be attempted by us on any account.’8 As the pinnace reached its destination a shot from the fireship killed the English coxswain, and in spite of the lieutenant’s continued signals to the Turkish captain that no violence was intended several other shots followed, killing and wounding others of the pinnace’s crew. The fireship crew now lit the fuse which would set it ablaze, and when another lieutenant in a second boat from the Dartmouth was sent to tow it away the lieutenant too was shot dead. Almost simultaneously a shot from an Egyptian corvette hit the Sirène, the flagship of de Rigny, and in his laconic words ‘L’engagement devint bientôt général.’ Before long the peace of the bay was shattered, the gentle creaking of ships’ timbers was drowned by the thunder of cannon fire, and a pall of smoke blocked out the autumn sunlight.
These shots which triggered the battle of Navarino were almost certainly not planned by the Ottoman commanders. They knew they were facing a superior even if numerically smaller force, and seem like the allied statesmen to have put their trust in a mere display of force, hoping that their intimidating crescent line would persuade the allied fleet to withdraw. However, if the shots were unplanned they were also virtually inevitable, given Tahir’s order of the day: ‘Admiral Tahir Pasha will never raise the signal for combat, but he lays down that in case of attack each ship should defend itself individually.’9 But what was to count as a case of attack? In this tense confrontation somebody somewhere in the extended Ottoman fleet was almost bound to interpret an allied move as an attack, and the conflict would begin.
Not only were the initial shots very probably unplanned, but it seems that the Turkish and Egyptian commanders, who had never trusted each other, had formed no joint plan of any kind about reacting to the allied fleet, as Codrington’s first encounter with his opponents showed. Codrington in the Asia was roughly midway between the Turkish flagship of Tahir Pasha and the Egyptian flagship of Moharrem Bey, the Guerrière, where Letellier, the last of the French officers, was still on board. Shots were seen coming from Tahir Pasha’s ship, but Moharrem Bey sent a message to the Asia to say that he did not intend to open fire, and Codrington replied that he would not fire first. Codrington destroyed Tahir’s ship, though Tahir survived, and then sent an officer with a Greek interpreter to Moharrem Bey’s Guerrière to confirm the truce. But the crew of the Guerrière either did not know of their admiral’s pacific intention or ignored it. As Codrington’s party approached the Guerrière a pistol shot killed the interpreter, and the Asia responded with a broadside which quickly drove the Guerrière ashore in flames. As the Guerrière joined the battle, Letellier finally went ashore, and Moharrem Bey, with no stomach for a fight which he had done all he could to avoid, went with him. Thus by an early stage of the battle the Ottoman fleet, from which Ibrahim and the French officers were already absent, was virtually without command: Tahir’s ship had been sunk, and Moharrem Bey had left.
Never again was a naval battle fought between fleets all under sail, but never before had a naval battle been fought between fleets at anchor, exchanging broadsides at close quarters. The allies were able to swing their ships by the anchor cables in order to bring their broadsides to bear in different directions. These broadsides were enormously heavy: it was later estimated that the three English line-of-battle ships alone had fired over 120 tons of shot. This exceptional figure was partly due to overshotting, that is loading not just the regulation one or two cannon balls but several extra balls and sometimes a canister of grapeshot as well, a practice disapproved of because it could smash the gun but enthusiastically used for its dramatic effects. This weight of shot required a lot of powder, about a ton for every ten tons of shot. There was constant danger of accidental fire on board from ignited powder dust, and not only as a result of enemy shot; the lanterns in the powder store were naked flames behind glass panels which could easily be smashed during a battle, and even the spark from a snapped flintlock could start a blaze.
The more obvious danger of a conflagration in the allied fleet was from the Turkish fireships. The Dartmouth escaped the fireship which had started the battle, but another nearly destroyed the French ship of the line Scipion. This fireship was firmly attached to the bow of the Scipion and brave efforts by the crew to push it off failed. ‘It really seemed as if it were drawn to us by a magnetic force,’ wrote the Scipion’s captain.10 The Scipion had its head to the wind which was blowing the flames down the length of the ship, so the captain began to attempt a turn to divert the blaze. When all seemed lost a small boat from another French ship managed to haul the fireship away with the help of tow ropes from three of the English ships, one of many examples of allied co-operation that afternoon. This fireship was finally sunk by gunfire, and not one Turkish fireship attack was successful during the whole battle.
Smoke from the cannon fire soon shrouded the bay, and visibility was down to a few yards. Signals could not be seen, and Codrington had to shout orders to the neighbouring ship through a loudhailer. The noise was literally deafening, and some of the men did not recover their hearing for two days. Flying fragments, usually of wood, were as common a danger as a direct hit, and the quarter-deck of the Genoa was described as ‘so bestrewed with splinters of wood that it presented the appearance of a carpenter’s shop’.11 A flying splinter could break an arm, or cause a horrible wound if it penetrated. Young Henry Codrington was wounded in the leg by a fragment of iron railing, then in the same leg by a musket ball, and had his collarbone badly bruised, though not broken, by a splinter of wood. In a letter to his brother he described going down to the Asia’s sick bay:
I found myself almost in the dark and in an atmosphere which was as hot, though not so pure, as many an oven. On the chests, etc. the men’s mess tables had been laid, and over them beds; on these lay the wounded, some too bad to speak, others groaning and crying out with the agony they were in. Some (generally the least hurt) calling out lustily for the doctor. I managed to feel my way to an unoccupied berth amidships, alongside a poor fellow who had been severely wounded, and I think we made a pretty quiet pair, except occasional, nay frequent, calls for water, of which, owing to my excessive thirst, I must have drunk a great deal, besides what I poured on the bandage which had just been put on my wound which felt as if it were on fire and devilish uncomfortable.12
Henry Codrington’s wounds were more serious than he admitted, and he came close to having the leg amputated. The jaunty bravado of his letter was no doubt to spare his family anxiety and showed less than the harsh reality. In the Genoa sick bay, as a crew member described it, ‘The stifled groans, the figures of the surgeon and his mates, their bare arms and faces smeared with blood, the dead and dying all round, some in the last agonies of death, and others screaming under the amputating knife, formed a horrid scene of misery, and made a hideous contrast to the “pomp, pride, and circumstance of glorious war”.’13 Medical treatment, however rough, was at least fairly quickly available at sea, so that the sailor was better off than the soldier who in that era would too often be left to die where he fell on the battlefield.
By six o’clock, after nearly four hours of intense fighting, the battle was over. Amazingly not a single allied ship had been sunk, and casualties were relatively light: 174 killed and 475 wounded. But the Ottoman fleet had lost sixty of its eighty-nine fighting ships, with appalling losses of men: by Codrington’s estimate, some 6,000 killed and 4,000 wounded. Turkish honour required that no ship should strike its flag in surrender, and none did. Honour also required that Turkish ships damaged beyond repair should be blown up, sometimes with men still on board. Codrington tried next day to get Tahir Pasha to desist from this, but without success. The few surviving ships of the Ottoman fleet limped back to their home ports.
It was clear immediately that Navarino had ensured the ultimate independence of Greece, the cause which had seemed almost lost when Athens surrendered to the Turks only a few months earlier. As Howe wrote when he learnt of the battle twelve days later, ‘This day has been to me one of the happiest of my existence, and to all Greece one of joy and exultation. For it has brought the confirmation of the news of the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino, and for ever puts at rest the question of the reconquest of Greece by Turkey.’14 The Russian and French courts were also delighted, and in England the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of Clarence, on his own initiative awarded Codrington the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. But then Codrington’s troubles began.
After Canning’s death in August he had been succeeded as prime minister by the ineffectual Lord Goderich, described as ‘firm as a bullrush’, while Dudley, no more than a fair-weather friend of Codrington’s, remained foreign secretary. A month after the battle it was Dudley who forwarded to Codrington a list of ten queries about his conduct, all clearly designed to show that Codrington had exceeded his instructions. To any unprejudiced eye Codrington’s answers were wholly convincing. Then in January 1828 the Goderich administration collapsed and was replaced by a cabinet of ultra Tories under the Duke of Wellington, men who thought it wrong to have destroyed the fleet of a country with which England was not at war in a cause, Greek independence, for which they had little sympathy. The King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament at the end of January reflected their views: it described the battle as ‘a collision, wholly unexpected by His Majesty’, went on to say that ‘His Majesty laments that this conflict should have occurred with the naval force of an ancient ally’, and characterised Navarino as ‘this untoward event’.15 The King was reported as saying privately of Codrington’s Order of the Bath, ‘I send him the ribbon but he deserves the rope.’16
Dudley’s queries had tried unsuccessfully to show that Codrington had done too much. Codrington’s enemies now accused him of doing too little. When the last of Ibrahim’s ships left Navarino in December they carried, as Codrington himself reported, ‘about 600 unfortunate Greek women and children’ to be sold as slaves in Alexandria. This may not have been quite right; there is evidence that many were servants of the Turks who chose to go to Egypt. But the accusation smacked of the alleged barbarisation project, and provided another charge against Codrington, that he had carelessly or callously allowed this traffic. Codrington pointed out that he had no orders to intercept or search Egyptian ships returning to Alexandria, and that to do so would have provoked just those hostilities which he had been ordered to avoid. Nevertheless, Codrington’s enemies would not let the accusation die, and it rumbled on, with an ever larger number of captives being suggested, until a debate in Parliament in 1830 when both sides had their say but neither it seems convinced the other.
On 21 June 1828 Wellington’s cabinet relieved Codrington of his command on the ground that he had misinterpreted his instructions. After his return to England in September Codrington tackled the Duke of Wellington himself, and records that he was told he had been recalled ‘Because you seemed to understand your orders differently from myself and my colleagues and I felt that we could not go on.’ When Codrington pressed the Duke on what the points of difference were, the Duke, ‘with a repelling wave of the hand’, only said, ‘You must excuse me.’ Codrington bowed low and retired, obviously furious, and the Duke followed him, trying to calm matters by saying, ‘When you come to town again I shall always be glad to see you.’ Codrington, unappeased, replied, ‘If Your Grace cannot answer me the only question I ask you, I have no wish to come and see Your Grace again.’17 Very few people had the nerve to stand up to the Iron Duke like that.
Codrington’s last battle was not over his own reputation but about justice for his officers and men. Within weeks of the battle he applied for compensation for their losses of clothing and equipment, which officers and seamen alike had to provide at their own expense. After repeated submissions over the next two and a half years his request was finally refused in May 1830 on the ground that there was no precedent for compensation unless war had been declared. Armed with exactly such precedents Codrington took his campaign to the House of Commons, which he entered as member for Devonport in 1831. In the summer of 1834 he introduced another debate on Navarino, as a result of which the Admiralty at last granted £60,000 as compensation for the men who had served under Codrington. They expressed their gratitude by presenting him with a splendidly elaborate silver bowl which replicated the bows of his flagship the Asia, and which is still used by his descendants on festive family occasions.
Codrington emerged with honour from the controversies surrounding the high point of his career. It is regrettably not uncommon for politicians to will the end without willing, or even thinking through, the means. Consequently it also often happens, especially when no formal war has been declared, that commanders are given vague and contradictory instructions. Codrington suffered in both these ways, and his story was unusual only in that such a conscientious servant of his country received from his country’s government such deplorably shabby treatment.