The angry phrases make the adventurer’s motives clear and perfectly comprehensible, yet leave the abandonment of the poet a matter for controversy. Byron had called Tre to his side, Tre had accepted with alacrity; there was no solemn engagement, no cant about duties and so on; Trelawny was free to do as he pleased. A meticulous sense of honor might have detained him, but then the finer shades of honor never plagued Trelawny.
Crossing from the island of Cephalonia to the mainland, the free-lance now made his way through the grey mountains and the ravaged country side to the camp of Odysseus, chieftain of Eastern Greece. Tre thought him a man after his own heart, and wrote enthusiastically of his new friend. Of all the feudal leaders of rebellious Greece, this was the man! The adventurer’s life began to be worth living, there were ambuscades, descents on villages, attacks on Turkish cavalry, and looting expeditions. He was fighting for liberty, as Shelley would have wished him, but he had no illusions about those “pallid slaves,” the newly liberated Greeks. He quite agreed with Colonel Napier’s famous remark, “My dear Mr. Trelawny, no one should assume any direction in Greek affairs ... without the help of a portable gallows.”
Meanwhile in the mud and malaria of Missolonghi, lived the man whom every feudal chieftain hoped to coax into his hands, the noble Lord Byron, agent in chief of the Greek committee. At Odysseus’ suggestion, Trelawny set out for Missolonghi to plead the chieftain’s cause. He arrived there in the rain, and met dejected stragglers riding away,—the English milord was dead. The fretful, bewildered satirist had perished like a bird caught in a net of dirty twine.
On receipt of this news, Tre gathered together the wreckage of Byron’s entourage of adventurers who had drifted in to fight for the Greeks, and led those who were worth leading to Odysseus. He had now married Tarsitza Kamenou, the chieftain’s sister, and had thus become a member of the family. Presently Odysseus made a kind of truce with the Turks, and Trelawny retired to hold the chieftain’s stronghold, a romantic cave high in the crags of Mount Parnassus. It was while he was in this cave that an English adventurer whom he had befriended tried to assassinate him. Trelawny was dangerously wounded. “Two musket balls,” he wrote, “fired at the distance of two paces, struck me and passed through my frame work and damn near finished me.” With truest chivalry, Tre spared his cowardly assailant, and rescued him from his Greek associates, who wished to do unpleasant things.
Events moved fast. Odysseus, falling into the hands of the Greek loyalists, was adjudged a traitor, and thrown from the Acropolis. Tarsitza bore a daughter, and, this accomplished, disappeared from the scene; some say into a convent. With the help of friends in the British Navy, Tre then escaped from Parnassus to a refuge in the Ionian Isles, and lingered there two or three years watching events. “I do not wish to visit England in my present state of poverty,” he wrote.
Then came the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Navarino in ’27, and a breathing spell of success for the Greeks. In the July of the following year, the adventurer reached Southampton with his little half-Greek daughter in his arms.
V
With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end, the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the world calls a “character.”
The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without success; the lady was not exactly a person to be an incident in anybody’s life. The pirate, now a man of forty, then translated his affections to Claire (Jane) Clairmont whom he had met at Lerici in the romantic days. This love affair by letter lasted for long years. Tre was still Tre the corsair and Byronic lover. “Yes, Jane,” he wrote, in a letter full of rhetoric and misspelling,—“much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures.”...
This friendship had one unfortunate result; the lady hated Byron and his memory with an all consuming hate, and this poison spread to Trelawny’s mind, making him cruelly hostile to a man he had never understood.