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Part 21: Perseverance on Troubled Tides
Part 21: Perseverance on Troubled Tides
As had been the case for much of the war, money remained the primary restraint for the many endeavors of the Greeks. The Greek Government had contracted a major loan with the city of London in 1824 to the tune of £420,000, and while it was incredibly helpful, it was very limited in terms of scope and scale. By the end of 1825 it had all been spent and it quickly became evident that a second loan would be needed. Unfortunately, the relation with their contacts in Britain had begun to sour soon after the agreement had been signed. The Secretary of the London Greek Committee, John Bowring, had used the first loan primarily to enrich himself, by buying the loan’s bonds at a discounted price only to sell them at a profit later on when the price had rebounded briefly.
When the Greek Deputies, Andreas Louriotis and Ioannis Orlandos protested the questionable actions of the loan’s handler, Bowring refused to meet with the pair, barring them from any further Committee hearings on the loan. This disagreement between Bowring and the Greek Deputies could not have come a worse time, as the Greek Government announced it sought to contract a second loan. Forced to look elsewhere, Orlandos and Louriotis arranged the terms of the second loan with the banking house, Jacob and Samson Ricardo. While they were effectively on their own in organizing the contract with Ricardo, they were provided with counsel by the more sympathetic members of the Committee such as Baron John Hobhouse and the MP Edward Ellice.
After some negotiation, the nominal amount of this second loan was set at £2,000,000, as opposed to the nominal value of £800,000 for the first loan. The bonds for the loan sold very well initially, jumping almost immediately to 63% of the nominal value for the first month. This was in fact based off exaggerated accounts by Lord Byron and Colonel Stanhope’s in their dispatches to the Committee. Soon, however, as news reached Britain of the infighting in Greece followed shortly by Ibrahim Pasha’s landing and conquests in the Morea, the rate dropped to 56% where it remained until the end of the Summer before increasing slightly to 59% with the return of Lord Byron to London in September. As a result, the actual value of the second loan came to about £1,150,000.
As had been the case with the first loan, however, chicanery and dishonest practices on the part of the financiers and bankers resulted in a large fraction of the loan being withheld from the Greeks themselves. £60,000 were paid out as commissions for Hobhouse, Ellice, Jacob and Samson Ricardo, and the two Greek Deputies Orlandos and Louriotis. Another £200,000 was withheld to pay for the first two years of interest on the loans and £20,000 were used as a 1 percent sinking fund. Lastly, nearly £250,000 was used to fulfill the deficiencies in the first loan by purchasing its stock, artificially inflating its value in the process. It did not end there however.
Because of the infighting in Greece between the Kolettists, the supporters of Ioannis Kolettis, and the Charalamvists, the supporters of Sotiris Charalamvis, it was agreed, generally without the consent of the Greek Deputies, that the £620,000 that remained of the second loan, would be dispensed largely at the discretion of the Committee and Ricardo. Together they deigned upon the Greeks the necessity of purchasing war supplies from Britain, such as ammunition, bayonets, rifles, ships, uniforms, and other commodities of war. Roughly £70,000 was spent securing 50 cases of Baker Rifles, 200 cases of Brown Bess Muskets, 4,000 bayonets, knifes, and swords, twenty 12 Pounders, ten 20 Pounders, and 100 reams of paper to make cartridges, 100 barrels of gunpowder, 60,000 musket balls and cartridges, 1,200 12 and 20-pound cannon balls and shells, along with thousands of pairs of shoes, boots, hats, coats, belts, and other war necessities.[2] The loan was also used to purchase the services of the British Admiral, Lord Thomas Cochrane.
Lord Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald
Cochrane had been an incredibly dashing and incredibly talented young officer in the British Navy during the later years of the Napoleonic Wars. However, his career was sidetracked due in large part to his frequent clashes with authority figures, namely his superior officer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Earl St. Vincent. More damning to his reputation was the court martial brought against him, of which he was acquitted, and a civil suit regarding fraud, of which he was found guilty. After four years at the King’s Bench Prison, Lord Cochrane found his way to Chile in 1818 where he aided the Chileans in their own War of Independence where he served with distinction winning several engagements against the Spanish Empire. For his efforts, Cochrane was proclaimed an honorary citizen of Chile and is considered a Chilean national hero to this day. When Brazil began its own war for independence in 1822, Cochrane left the Chilean Navy for Brazil after clashing with the Chilean leader Jose de San Martin over strategy and tactics. While in Brazil, Cochrane was appointed Commander in Chief of the Brazilian Military and promptly secured the independence of the entire North of Brazil from the Portuguese in little over a month. His success in Brazil was soon ruined by infighting over his lack of pay, and in a dastardly act Cochrane pillaged several Brazilian ships of their valuables before absconding to Britain.
Arriving in London in November 1825, Lord Cochrane was soon approached by members of the London Greek Committee and the Greek deputies to hire his services for Greece. After some negotiations, Cochrane agreed to their venture albeit at a steep price. In return for £35,000 up front, and another £25,000 once the war was won, along with access to a private yacht and servants while in Greece, costing roughly £10,000, Cochrane agreed to travel to Greece, but only at the head of a fleet of steamships. Steamships were the latest innovations in nautical technology. Reliant solely, upon steam to rotate the massive waterwheels that provided their propulsion, steamships were freed from the fickleness of the wind enabling them greater mobility and speed in many cases. Cochrane was joined in his interest in steamships by the British Philhellene, Frank Abney Hastings.
Hastings, like Cochrane was a British nobleman who made his living as an officer in the Royal Navy. Like Cochrane, he proved to be incredibly talented sailor, but he also had a troubled relation with his commanding officer resulting in his resignation from the Royal Navy in 1820. After spending a year abroad in France, Hastings traveled to Greece in the Spring of 1822 to join the Greek Navy as a volunteer in their own war of independence. Despite initially being thought a spy for the British Government, Hastings was welcomed with open arms by the Greeks who adored the gauche nobleman from England as he was a valorous man. Serving for two long years without pay or any recompense, his talents as a naval man were on full display in his daring raids on Ottoman ships in the Gulf of Smyrna. Hastings would also prove to be an innovator of nautical warfare as well.
Captain Frank Abney Hastings
Recognizing the burgeoning prowess of the Ottoman Navy over the course of the war, Hastings realized the Greeks, who were still reliant upon the use of fireships and smaller vessels, would eventually be overwhelmed by stronger ships of the Ottoman fleet. His solution for the Greeks was not to transition to the larger, but slower Ships of the Line, but instead to use heated shot, a technique which had thus far only been used on land, as it would be more reliable than fireships and more destructive to enemy ships than the broadside of any ship the Greeks currently had. There was one major problem with this, this process required the use of a furnace to heat the shot and most ships lacked the means to do this. The only ships that could were the new steam powered vessels. Hastings found a prominent ally in Lord Byron who made the necessary introductions to the Greek leaders who were the most likely to hear out his proposal. As he had done with so many others, Hastings captivated the Greek officials with his knowledge of steamships and the potential that lay within them. With the support of the Greek Government, Hastings was permitted to receive a portion of the second loan, to the sum of £10,000 for the project. To that end, Hastings returned to London in February 1825 and immediately began efforts to construct his steamship, the Perseverance.
The hull of his ship was built in the Thames Shipyard by the Brent family, an established shipbuilding firm, renowned for the quality of their work, and by the end of the Summer the hull was complete. The ship was roughly the size of schooner with four moderately sized masts and two massive paddlewheels powered by two 42 horsepower engines. This machinery on each side of the ship limited the available room for cannons, so instead of the normal compliment of 12 guns at a lower caliber, Hastings opted for 8 larger guns, one 32-pounder in the bow, another in the stern, and two 68 pounders in the center for both sides of the ship, all paid for from Hastings own pocket.[3] The engines for the ship were ordered from the engineer Alexander Galloway who was widely renowned as the leading engineer in all of Britain. Despite his estimates that the ship’s engines would be complete by August, constant delays and malfunctions during testing held up the ship’s completion until the end of May 1826.
It soon became apparent why they were delayed. Correspondence between Ibrahim Pasha and his father had been captured during the final days of the Fourth Siege of Missolonghi by Andreas Miaoulis during his last effort to save the city in early April. In these dispatches, it was revealed that Galloway’s son, Thomas had been hired by Mahammad Ali of Egypt to be his chief engineer. The conflict of interest was clear, if Galloway developed ships that helped defeat the Egyptians, then he would be placing his own son at risk and so the father sought to sabotage his own work to benefit his son. While it may have been a selfless act of love by a father for his son, it was clearly a dastardly act of malpractice that nearly ruined the entire batch of steamships ordered by Cochrane and Hastings.[4]
Fortunately, Hastings had been present for much of Galloway’s work on his steamship, the Perseverance, saving it from the worst attempts at sabotage and by the 18th of May 1826, the ship finally set sail for Greece. The remaining ships similarly had their hulls constructed by Brent and were initially started by Galloway that Spring, only to be finished by the engineer Aaron Manby and a team of his workers once the ships were removed from the former’s custody in the Fall of 1826. Despite their best efforts to repair Galloway’s damage, Manby and his team could not save the second and third ships which were too far gone to be repaired and were ultimately sold at a massive loss due to the extensive costs needed to fix the other three, and while the fourth, fifth, and sixth steamships were finished, they would suffer from some minor mechanical issues for the entire length of their service. Only the last steamship, the Hope, renamed the Elpida, operated as originally intended, but by the time of its arrival in Greece in 1828, the war was largely over.
The ships had only been removed from Galloway’s care and sent to Manby following an extended period of public outcry against the engineer which was in large part due to the efforts of Lord Byron. Byron upon his return to Britain in the fall of 1825 took an interest in the venture, as Hastings had thoroughly convinced him of their great potential during their short time together in Greece and soon he too had become smitten with the endeavor. When word arrived in June 1826 from Greece of the captured Egyptian dispatches, Byron immediately went to work against Galloway. His poem “Steam” released in July 1826, was little more than a diatribe against the engineer that would be praised with ending the man’s career in later years. The outcry was so great that even Cochrane who had been largely cordial with Galloway was forced to turn against him and moved the ships to Manby’s firm. Still, the damage was done, thousands of pounds had been wasted on the venture, at over £30,000 per ship, and three of the four ships that were sent to Greece were plagued with mishaps and malfunctions.
The Greek Deputies, had also been interested initially in purchasing two new American made frigates in addition to the fleet of steamships they had just bought.[5] Their allies in Britain, namely Hobhouse, and later Cochrane when he returned, instead proposed the purchase of two Third Rates which had recently been reduced (razeed) into Fourth Rate ships. Eventually they were persuaded of the need to commission new ships as fast as possible and because they lacked even the slightest knowledge about ship building, conceding the point to their British sponsors. London Greek Committee purchased two razeed Third Rate Ships of the Line, the HMS Elephant and the HMS Saturn.[6] Both ships were launched as 74 gun Third Rate Ships of the line in 1786 before being razeed into Fourth Rates with 54 guns each in 1818 and 1813 respectively. The frigate, HMS Leander was also purchased for the price of £25,000. Unfortunately, both the HMS Saturn and the HMS Leander, having spent the past few years as training vessels, would require some additional work to restock their complement of guns and adjust their rigging for ocean travel.
The HMS Elephant in Battle at Copenhagen
Of the £480,000 that remained from the second English loan, after paying Cochrane his exorbitant costs, over £280,000 had been spent on ships, leaving less than £200,000 for the Greek Government to pay its bills. Of those ships, one warship, the HMS Elephant, renamed the Hellas, traveled to Greece in 1825 where it arrived in late December. The HMS Saturn, renamed the Kronos, and the HMS Leander, which kept the name Leander, would arrive in early February 1826 after being refitted with new guns and rigging. They were followed several months later by Hastings’ steamship Perseverance, renamed Karteria which arrived in early September. The Enterprise (Epichirisis), Mercury (Hermes), and Hope (Elpida) would arrive in April 1827, November 1827, and February 1828 respectively. It is fortunate then that Captain Hastings returned to Greece when he did, as the Karteria would soon receive its trial by fire off the coast of Nafpaktos.
Next Time: Fabvier and the Fighting Fiends of Nafpaktos
[1] Karteria is Greek for Perseverance.
[2] Unfortunately, I do not have any sources detailing the exact numbers or what specifically was sent, only that £67,000 were spent on war supplies for Greece, which likely means guns and munitions among other things. As a result, these numbers are mostly guesses, albeit educated guesses on my part using the cost of various munitions, weapons and commodities from the period as well as the general makeup of their prior requisitions.
[3] The 32 Pounders were eventually replaced with 68 Pound carronades, bringing its total to 8 carronades in total.
[4] Whether Galloway intentionally sabotaged the Steamships or not, the facts speak for themselves. Only three of the six steamships ever reached Greece and only Hastings’ ship, the Karteria, ever operated in an effective manner and that probably had more to do with Hastings’ skill and tenacity than the engine’s quality. Both the Epichirisis and the Hermes suffered from terrible maladies that rendered them nearly inoperable and worse still, they arrived over two years late, with the Enterprise arriving in the Summer of 1827 and the Mercury arriving in 1828. Of the three ships that didn’t go for Greece, one blew up during testing and the other two were left as empty shells that rotted away in the Thames. So, in short, the Greeks spent roughly 200,000 Pounds buying six ships and got 1 ship that worked relatively well and two that were utter garbage. But wait there’s more.
[5] The story regarding the American Frigates is laughably bad. Orlandos and Louriotis sent the French Philhellene Charles Lallemand to New York in March 1825 to purchase two Frigates. Unfortunately, none were available for sail so he placed an order to construct two new frigates. Right off the bat, the price for the frigates were estimated at around 100,000 Pounds each. To “lower” the costs, Lallemand, who had no knowledge what so ever regarding ship building, agreed to build the ships through day’s work, a process that slowed their construction to a crawl. In October 1825, Bayard and Howland the firm constructing the Frigates, told Lallemand that the price for the ships had returned to their original price of 100,000 Pounds per ship despite using the day’s work. A month later, the price rose again to 185,000 Pounds per frigate, and the month after that it had risen again, at which point the Ricardo’s, who were paying for the ships, refused to pay out anymore. Work instantly halted and only restarted when the Chian merchant Alexander Kondostavlos traveled to New York to negotiate a resolution. Eventually, the American Government agreed to purchase one ship to pay for the other’s completion, which was finally completed in May 1826. One last problem occurred on the journey to Greece, the American crew transporting the ship attempted to mutiny and sell the frigate to Columbia and then again to Ibrahim Pasha. Eventually, the Americans were contained by Andreas Miaoulis and a crew of Greeks who promptly took control of the frigate for Greece in November of 1826.
[6] The Elephant briefly served as Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship during the battle of Copenhagen in 1801.
As had been the case for much of the war, money remained the primary restraint for the many endeavors of the Greeks. The Greek Government had contracted a major loan with the city of London in 1824 to the tune of £420,000, and while it was incredibly helpful, it was very limited in terms of scope and scale. By the end of 1825 it had all been spent and it quickly became evident that a second loan would be needed. Unfortunately, the relation with their contacts in Britain had begun to sour soon after the agreement had been signed. The Secretary of the London Greek Committee, John Bowring, had used the first loan primarily to enrich himself, by buying the loan’s bonds at a discounted price only to sell them at a profit later on when the price had rebounded briefly.
When the Greek Deputies, Andreas Louriotis and Ioannis Orlandos protested the questionable actions of the loan’s handler, Bowring refused to meet with the pair, barring them from any further Committee hearings on the loan. This disagreement between Bowring and the Greek Deputies could not have come a worse time, as the Greek Government announced it sought to contract a second loan. Forced to look elsewhere, Orlandos and Louriotis arranged the terms of the second loan with the banking house, Jacob and Samson Ricardo. While they were effectively on their own in organizing the contract with Ricardo, they were provided with counsel by the more sympathetic members of the Committee such as Baron John Hobhouse and the MP Edward Ellice.
After some negotiation, the nominal amount of this second loan was set at £2,000,000, as opposed to the nominal value of £800,000 for the first loan. The bonds for the loan sold very well initially, jumping almost immediately to 63% of the nominal value for the first month. This was in fact based off exaggerated accounts by Lord Byron and Colonel Stanhope’s in their dispatches to the Committee. Soon, however, as news reached Britain of the infighting in Greece followed shortly by Ibrahim Pasha’s landing and conquests in the Morea, the rate dropped to 56% where it remained until the end of the Summer before increasing slightly to 59% with the return of Lord Byron to London in September. As a result, the actual value of the second loan came to about £1,150,000.
As had been the case with the first loan, however, chicanery and dishonest practices on the part of the financiers and bankers resulted in a large fraction of the loan being withheld from the Greeks themselves. £60,000 were paid out as commissions for Hobhouse, Ellice, Jacob and Samson Ricardo, and the two Greek Deputies Orlandos and Louriotis. Another £200,000 was withheld to pay for the first two years of interest on the loans and £20,000 were used as a 1 percent sinking fund. Lastly, nearly £250,000 was used to fulfill the deficiencies in the first loan by purchasing its stock, artificially inflating its value in the process. It did not end there however.
Because of the infighting in Greece between the Kolettists, the supporters of Ioannis Kolettis, and the Charalamvists, the supporters of Sotiris Charalamvis, it was agreed, generally without the consent of the Greek Deputies, that the £620,000 that remained of the second loan, would be dispensed largely at the discretion of the Committee and Ricardo. Together they deigned upon the Greeks the necessity of purchasing war supplies from Britain, such as ammunition, bayonets, rifles, ships, uniforms, and other commodities of war. Roughly £70,000 was spent securing 50 cases of Baker Rifles, 200 cases of Brown Bess Muskets, 4,000 bayonets, knifes, and swords, twenty 12 Pounders, ten 20 Pounders, and 100 reams of paper to make cartridges, 100 barrels of gunpowder, 60,000 musket balls and cartridges, 1,200 12 and 20-pound cannon balls and shells, along with thousands of pairs of shoes, boots, hats, coats, belts, and other war necessities.[2] The loan was also used to purchase the services of the British Admiral, Lord Thomas Cochrane.
Lord Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald
Cochrane had been an incredibly dashing and incredibly talented young officer in the British Navy during the later years of the Napoleonic Wars. However, his career was sidetracked due in large part to his frequent clashes with authority figures, namely his superior officer, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Earl St. Vincent. More damning to his reputation was the court martial brought against him, of which he was acquitted, and a civil suit regarding fraud, of which he was found guilty. After four years at the King’s Bench Prison, Lord Cochrane found his way to Chile in 1818 where he aided the Chileans in their own War of Independence where he served with distinction winning several engagements against the Spanish Empire. For his efforts, Cochrane was proclaimed an honorary citizen of Chile and is considered a Chilean national hero to this day. When Brazil began its own war for independence in 1822, Cochrane left the Chilean Navy for Brazil after clashing with the Chilean leader Jose de San Martin over strategy and tactics. While in Brazil, Cochrane was appointed Commander in Chief of the Brazilian Military and promptly secured the independence of the entire North of Brazil from the Portuguese in little over a month. His success in Brazil was soon ruined by infighting over his lack of pay, and in a dastardly act Cochrane pillaged several Brazilian ships of their valuables before absconding to Britain.
Arriving in London in November 1825, Lord Cochrane was soon approached by members of the London Greek Committee and the Greek deputies to hire his services for Greece. After some negotiations, Cochrane agreed to their venture albeit at a steep price. In return for £35,000 up front, and another £25,000 once the war was won, along with access to a private yacht and servants while in Greece, costing roughly £10,000, Cochrane agreed to travel to Greece, but only at the head of a fleet of steamships. Steamships were the latest innovations in nautical technology. Reliant solely, upon steam to rotate the massive waterwheels that provided their propulsion, steamships were freed from the fickleness of the wind enabling them greater mobility and speed in many cases. Cochrane was joined in his interest in steamships by the British Philhellene, Frank Abney Hastings.
Hastings, like Cochrane was a British nobleman who made his living as an officer in the Royal Navy. Like Cochrane, he proved to be incredibly talented sailor, but he also had a troubled relation with his commanding officer resulting in his resignation from the Royal Navy in 1820. After spending a year abroad in France, Hastings traveled to Greece in the Spring of 1822 to join the Greek Navy as a volunteer in their own war of independence. Despite initially being thought a spy for the British Government, Hastings was welcomed with open arms by the Greeks who adored the gauche nobleman from England as he was a valorous man. Serving for two long years without pay or any recompense, his talents as a naval man were on full display in his daring raids on Ottoman ships in the Gulf of Smyrna. Hastings would also prove to be an innovator of nautical warfare as well.
Captain Frank Abney Hastings
Recognizing the burgeoning prowess of the Ottoman Navy over the course of the war, Hastings realized the Greeks, who were still reliant upon the use of fireships and smaller vessels, would eventually be overwhelmed by stronger ships of the Ottoman fleet. His solution for the Greeks was not to transition to the larger, but slower Ships of the Line, but instead to use heated shot, a technique which had thus far only been used on land, as it would be more reliable than fireships and more destructive to enemy ships than the broadside of any ship the Greeks currently had. There was one major problem with this, this process required the use of a furnace to heat the shot and most ships lacked the means to do this. The only ships that could were the new steam powered vessels. Hastings found a prominent ally in Lord Byron who made the necessary introductions to the Greek leaders who were the most likely to hear out his proposal. As he had done with so many others, Hastings captivated the Greek officials with his knowledge of steamships and the potential that lay within them. With the support of the Greek Government, Hastings was permitted to receive a portion of the second loan, to the sum of £10,000 for the project. To that end, Hastings returned to London in February 1825 and immediately began efforts to construct his steamship, the Perseverance.
The hull of his ship was built in the Thames Shipyard by the Brent family, an established shipbuilding firm, renowned for the quality of their work, and by the end of the Summer the hull was complete. The ship was roughly the size of schooner with four moderately sized masts and two massive paddlewheels powered by two 42 horsepower engines. This machinery on each side of the ship limited the available room for cannons, so instead of the normal compliment of 12 guns at a lower caliber, Hastings opted for 8 larger guns, one 32-pounder in the bow, another in the stern, and two 68 pounders in the center for both sides of the ship, all paid for from Hastings own pocket.[3] The engines for the ship were ordered from the engineer Alexander Galloway who was widely renowned as the leading engineer in all of Britain. Despite his estimates that the ship’s engines would be complete by August, constant delays and malfunctions during testing held up the ship’s completion until the end of May 1826.
It soon became apparent why they were delayed. Correspondence between Ibrahim Pasha and his father had been captured during the final days of the Fourth Siege of Missolonghi by Andreas Miaoulis during his last effort to save the city in early April. In these dispatches, it was revealed that Galloway’s son, Thomas had been hired by Mahammad Ali of Egypt to be his chief engineer. The conflict of interest was clear, if Galloway developed ships that helped defeat the Egyptians, then he would be placing his own son at risk and so the father sought to sabotage his own work to benefit his son. While it may have been a selfless act of love by a father for his son, it was clearly a dastardly act of malpractice that nearly ruined the entire batch of steamships ordered by Cochrane and Hastings.[4]
Fortunately, Hastings had been present for much of Galloway’s work on his steamship, the Perseverance, saving it from the worst attempts at sabotage and by the 18th of May 1826, the ship finally set sail for Greece. The remaining ships similarly had their hulls constructed by Brent and were initially started by Galloway that Spring, only to be finished by the engineer Aaron Manby and a team of his workers once the ships were removed from the former’s custody in the Fall of 1826. Despite their best efforts to repair Galloway’s damage, Manby and his team could not save the second and third ships which were too far gone to be repaired and were ultimately sold at a massive loss due to the extensive costs needed to fix the other three, and while the fourth, fifth, and sixth steamships were finished, they would suffer from some minor mechanical issues for the entire length of their service. Only the last steamship, the Hope, renamed the Elpida, operated as originally intended, but by the time of its arrival in Greece in 1828, the war was largely over.
The ships had only been removed from Galloway’s care and sent to Manby following an extended period of public outcry against the engineer which was in large part due to the efforts of Lord Byron. Byron upon his return to Britain in the fall of 1825 took an interest in the venture, as Hastings had thoroughly convinced him of their great potential during their short time together in Greece and soon he too had become smitten with the endeavor. When word arrived in June 1826 from Greece of the captured Egyptian dispatches, Byron immediately went to work against Galloway. His poem “Steam” released in July 1826, was little more than a diatribe against the engineer that would be praised with ending the man’s career in later years. The outcry was so great that even Cochrane who had been largely cordial with Galloway was forced to turn against him and moved the ships to Manby’s firm. Still, the damage was done, thousands of pounds had been wasted on the venture, at over £30,000 per ship, and three of the four ships that were sent to Greece were plagued with mishaps and malfunctions.
The Greek Deputies, had also been interested initially in purchasing two new American made frigates in addition to the fleet of steamships they had just bought.[5] Their allies in Britain, namely Hobhouse, and later Cochrane when he returned, instead proposed the purchase of two Third Rates which had recently been reduced (razeed) into Fourth Rate ships. Eventually they were persuaded of the need to commission new ships as fast as possible and because they lacked even the slightest knowledge about ship building, conceding the point to their British sponsors. London Greek Committee purchased two razeed Third Rate Ships of the Line, the HMS Elephant and the HMS Saturn.[6] Both ships were launched as 74 gun Third Rate Ships of the line in 1786 before being razeed into Fourth Rates with 54 guns each in 1818 and 1813 respectively. The frigate, HMS Leander was also purchased for the price of £25,000. Unfortunately, both the HMS Saturn and the HMS Leander, having spent the past few years as training vessels, would require some additional work to restock their complement of guns and adjust their rigging for ocean travel.
The HMS Elephant in Battle at Copenhagen
Of the £480,000 that remained from the second English loan, after paying Cochrane his exorbitant costs, over £280,000 had been spent on ships, leaving less than £200,000 for the Greek Government to pay its bills. Of those ships, one warship, the HMS Elephant, renamed the Hellas, traveled to Greece in 1825 where it arrived in late December. The HMS Saturn, renamed the Kronos, and the HMS Leander, which kept the name Leander, would arrive in early February 1826 after being refitted with new guns and rigging. They were followed several months later by Hastings’ steamship Perseverance, renamed Karteria which arrived in early September. The Enterprise (Epichirisis), Mercury (Hermes), and Hope (Elpida) would arrive in April 1827, November 1827, and February 1828 respectively. It is fortunate then that Captain Hastings returned to Greece when he did, as the Karteria would soon receive its trial by fire off the coast of Nafpaktos.
Next Time: Fabvier and the Fighting Fiends of Nafpaktos
[1] Karteria is Greek for Perseverance.
[2] Unfortunately, I do not have any sources detailing the exact numbers or what specifically was sent, only that £67,000 were spent on war supplies for Greece, which likely means guns and munitions among other things. As a result, these numbers are mostly guesses, albeit educated guesses on my part using the cost of various munitions, weapons and commodities from the period as well as the general makeup of their prior requisitions.
[3] The 32 Pounders were eventually replaced with 68 Pound carronades, bringing its total to 8 carronades in total.
[4] Whether Galloway intentionally sabotaged the Steamships or not, the facts speak for themselves. Only three of the six steamships ever reached Greece and only Hastings’ ship, the Karteria, ever operated in an effective manner and that probably had more to do with Hastings’ skill and tenacity than the engine’s quality. Both the Epichirisis and the Hermes suffered from terrible maladies that rendered them nearly inoperable and worse still, they arrived over two years late, with the Enterprise arriving in the Summer of 1827 and the Mercury arriving in 1828. Of the three ships that didn’t go for Greece, one blew up during testing and the other two were left as empty shells that rotted away in the Thames. So, in short, the Greeks spent roughly 200,000 Pounds buying six ships and got 1 ship that worked relatively well and two that were utter garbage. But wait there’s more.
[5] The story regarding the American Frigates is laughably bad. Orlandos and Louriotis sent the French Philhellene Charles Lallemand to New York in March 1825 to purchase two Frigates. Unfortunately, none were available for sail so he placed an order to construct two new frigates. Right off the bat, the price for the frigates were estimated at around 100,000 Pounds each. To “lower” the costs, Lallemand, who had no knowledge what so ever regarding ship building, agreed to build the ships through day’s work, a process that slowed their construction to a crawl. In October 1825, Bayard and Howland the firm constructing the Frigates, told Lallemand that the price for the ships had returned to their original price of 100,000 Pounds per ship despite using the day’s work. A month later, the price rose again to 185,000 Pounds per frigate, and the month after that it had risen again, at which point the Ricardo’s, who were paying for the ships, refused to pay out anymore. Work instantly halted and only restarted when the Chian merchant Alexander Kondostavlos traveled to New York to negotiate a resolution. Eventually, the American Government agreed to purchase one ship to pay for the other’s completion, which was finally completed in May 1826. One last problem occurred on the journey to Greece, the American crew transporting the ship attempted to mutiny and sell the frigate to Columbia and then again to Ibrahim Pasha. Eventually, the Americans were contained by Andreas Miaoulis and a crew of Greeks who promptly took control of the frigate for Greece in November of 1826.
[6] The Elephant briefly served as Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship during the battle of Copenhagen in 1801.
- Earl Marshal
- Word Count: 3.1k