Lieutenant Greig served in many other engagements during that successful war; and his bravery, activity, and skill as a seaman had so frequently elicited particular attention, that after the treaty of peace which was signed at Paris in February, 1763, under Lord Bute's administration, when the Court of St. Petersburg requested that a few British officers of distinguished ability might be sent to improve the Russian fleet, Greig was one of the five who were first selected, and his rank as lieutenant in the navy of Russia was confirmed by the Empress Catherine II., in 1764. The only stipulation he and the others made was, that they were to have the power of returning to the British service whenever they chose.
Russia, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, has ever been an excellent field for Scottish talent and valour. Thus Greig, by his superior skill in naval affairs, his intelligence and diligent discharge of the duties entrusted to him, soon attracted the special notice of the Imperial Government, and the Empress appointed him a captain in her fleet. He drew many other Scotsmen around him, and, with these, he was at incredible pains to teach the half-barbarous and wholly unlettered Russians the science of seamanship and the art of gunnery, in all of which they were very deficient, "and he rapidly raised the Russian naval service to a degree of respectability and importance which it never before had attained."
In 1769, when he was in his thirty-fourth year, a war broke out between Russia and Turkey, consequent on the civil strife which religious intolerance had kindled in Poland. The Czarina marched in her troops; and while pretending that her sole object was to rescue one body of Polish citizens from the tyranny of the other, she secretly sought to enslave them all, and render their country a province of the Russian empire.
The growing greatness of the latter had alarmed its old hereditary enemy, the Grand Seignior, who required Catherine immediately to withdraw her troops from the Polish republic. Evasions were given, and conflicts began between the Russian and Turkish outposts, on the borders of the Ottoman empire, until the sack of Balta, in Lesser Tartary, and a general massacre of its inhabitants, by the soldiers of the Czarina, procured the committal of her ambassador to the Castle of the Seven Towers, in October, 1769; and hostilities, which were only suspended by the rigour of the season, began early in the spring of the ensuing year.
Captain Greig was appointed commodore of the fleet which was to sail for the Mediterranean, under Alexis Count Orloff; and in that ample arena of service he had an opportunity of displaying his zeal and intrepidity in such a manner as led to his immediate promotion to the rank of flag-officer.
A partial breaking up of the ice in the Baltic enabled some of the fleet to sail; and so early as the 14th of January, 1770, one part of the armament, under the Scottish admiral Elphinstone, consisting of one 70-gun ship, two of sixty guns each, and five others, arrived at Spithead, en route for the Archipelago.
The other division, of twenty-two sail of the line, reached Port Mahon, in Minorca, so early as the 4th of January; and by the 6th of March appeared off Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian Isles, and, with a fair wind, bore away directly for the Morea. At Minorca they left some vessels to wait for Elphinstone, who left Spithead on the 14th of April, passed Gibraltar on the 4th of May, and before the end of July had twice defeated the Turkish fleet—on one occasion encountering three times his force, and destroying eight ships; on the second occasion, with nineteen ships, encountering Giafar Bey, with twenty-three. Giafar's largest ships were destroyed, and his fleet dispersed.
In the great battle of the 6th of July, Greig, Mackenzie, and other officers in the Russian fleet, had an opportunity of eminently rendering good and gallant service; and by their energy and skill the world now saw a naval force, which, as Cormick says, had issued from the foot of the Baltic, able "to shake the remotest parts of the Mediterranean, to intercept the trade of the Levant, to excite and support the insurrection of the Greek Christians, and to leave nothing of the vast empire of their enemies free from alarm and confusion."
The united squadron of the Admirals Count Orloff, Elphinstone, Spiritoff, and Commodore Greig, followed the Turkish fleet, which consisted of fifteen sail of the line, twelve frigates, &c., into the Channel of Scio, which divides the island from Anadoli, or the Lesser Asia; there the Turks were at anchor in a most advantageous position, at the foot of the Gulf of Liberno, where their rear and flanks were protected by rocks.
Early in the morning of the 5th, Commodore Greig was sent to reconnoitre the roads between Scio and the main; and in the afternoon he signalled the enemy in sight, consisting of thirty sail in all. Orloff, the admiral-general, held a council of war, at which Greig's opinion was specially asked, and his advice followed.