At this conjuncture, Lord Cochrane's name excited universal attention in England, and he was engaged by the Greek deputies, and some friends of the cause, to enter the Greek service. He received for his services £37,000 sterling, in cash; and an additional sum of £20,000 was paid into the hands of Sir Francis Burdett, to be given to Lord Cochrane whenever the independence of Greece should be secured.
This transaction happened in the month of August 1825; but in the month of March, a steam-vessel, called the Perseverance, of about four hundred tons, had already been ordered; and Hastings had been named to command her, and received authority to arm her with sixty-eight pounders, according to the plan he had submitted to the Greek government. When Lord Cochrane was appointed commander-in-chief of the Greek fleet, five more steam-vessels were ordered to be built; but it may be observed, that only two of these ever reached Greece. The equipment of the Perseverance was then kept back, in order that the whole squadron might sail together under the auspices of Lord Cochrane. The news of the taking of Missolonghi by the Turks at last threw the friends of Greece into such a state of alarm, and the outcry against the dilatory manner in which the steam-boat expedition in the Thames was fitting out, became so violent over all Europe, that the Perseverance was hastily completed, and allowed to sail alone.
After a series of difficulties and disappointments, which it required all the extraordinary perseverance and energy of Hastings to overcome, he was hurried away from Deptford on the twenty-sixth of May 1826, though the engine of the Perseverance was evidently in a very defective state. The boiler burst in the Mediterranean; and the ship was detained at Cagliari, reconstructing a boiler, until the twenty-eighth of August. She arrived in Greece too late to be of any use in the naval campaign of that year. The winter was spent in aiding the operations of the army, which was endeavouring to raise the siege of Athens.
The Karteria, which was the name of the Perseverance in the Greek navy, was armed on the principle which Hastings had laid down as necessary to place the Greeks with small vessels on some degree of equality with the line-of-battle ships and large frigates of the Turks: namely, that of using projectiles more destructive than the shot of the enemy. These projectiles were hot shot and shells, instead of the cold round-shot of the Turks. We have already mentioned that the Karteria was armed with sixty-eight pounders. Of these she mounted eight; four were carronades of the government pattern, and four were guns of a new form, cast after a model prepared by Hastings himself. These guns were seven feet four inches long in the bore, and weighed fifty-eight hundred-weight. They had the form of carronades in every thing but the addition of trunnions to mount them like long guns; these trunnions, however, were, contrary to the usual practice, placed so that their centre intersected a line through the centre of the bore of the gun. They were mounted on ten-inch howitzer carriages, which answered the purpose admirably. The shells used were generally strapped to wooden bottoms; but they were more than once employed without any precaution, except that of putting them in the gun with the fusees towards the muzzle. The hot shot were heated in the engine fires, and were brought on deck by two men in a machine resembling a double coal-box, which was easily tilted up at the muzzle of the gun to be loaded.
Hastings fired about eighteen thousand shells from the Karteria in the years 1826 and 1827, with a miscellaneous crew composed of Englishmen, Swedes, and Greeks, and never had a single accident from explosion. As a very small number of hot shot can be heated at once, and as an iron ball of eight inches diameter loses its spherical form if kept for any length of time red hot, this projectile could only be used in particular circumstances. It happened more than once on board the Karteria, that shot which had remained for some time in the engine fires, had so lost their form as not to enter the muzzle of the guns. With regard to the great danger which is supposed to attend the use of hot shot on board ships, Hastings thus states his opinion in a "Memoir on the use of Shells, Hot Shot, and Carcass Shells, from ship artillery:"[[11]] "I have continually used hot shot with perfect safety; my people having become so familiar with them, that they employ them with as little apprehension as if using cold shot."
We shall now give a regular account of the career of active service in which Hastings was engaged, as captain of the Greek steam-frigate Karteria, extracted in part from his own official reports and private letters, and drawn in part from the testimony of eyewitnesses of all his actions.
In February 1827, Captain Hastings was ordered by the Greek government to co-operate with the troops under General Gordon, destined to relieve Athens. Captain Hastings, sailing from Egina, passed round the island of Salamis, and entering the western strait between it and Megara, arrived, unobserved by the Turks, in the bay where the battle of Salamis was fought—now called the port of Ambelaki. This was the first time the passage had ever been attempted by a modern man-of-war. During the presidency of Count Capo-d'Istrias, Sir Edmund Lyons carried H.M.S. Blonde through the same passage.
The troops under General Gordon were landed in the night, and they occupied and fortified the hill of Munychia without any loss of time. It was then resolved to drive the Turks from a monastery at the Piræus, in which they kept a garrison to command the port. The troops were ordered to attack the building on the land side, and Hastings entered the Piræus to bombard it from the sea. A practicable breach was soon made; but the Greek troops, though supported by the fire of a couple of field-pieces, were completely defeated in their feeble attempts to storm this monastery. The Turks, on the other hand, displayed the greatest activity; and the Seraskier Kutayhi Pasha, who commanded the army besieging Athens, soon arrived with a powerful escort of cavalry, and bringing with him two long five-inch howitzers with shells, boasting that with these he would sink the Karteria. As the object of the Greek attack had completely failed, and the troops had retired, the Karteria quitted the port just as the Turks opened their fire on her.
A few days after this, the Turks, having defeated a division of the Greek army destined to make a diversion from the plain of Eleusis, attempted to carry the camp of General Gordon by storm. Captain Hastings now entered the Piræus again, even at the risk of exposing the Karteria to the Turkish shells; as he saw that by his powerful fire of grape he could prevent the Turks from forming in any force to attack the most vulnerable part of the camp. The fire of the Karteria soon produced its effect; but it drew all the attention of the Pasha to the vessel, as he perceived it was vain to persist in attacking the troops until he compelled the steamer to quit the Piræus. Five guns directed their fire against her, and though three were either dismounted by her fire, or rendered useless by their carriages breaking, still two elongated five-inch howitzers being placed between the monastery and an adjoining tower, which covered them from the fire of the Karteria, contrived to keep up a well-supported fire. The effect produced by the shells from the Turkish guns was soon considerable, though several of those which struck the Karteria did not explode. One, however, fixed in the carriage of a long sixty-eight pounder, and exploded there, though fortunately without injuring either Captain Hane, the artillery-officer engaged in pointing the gun, or any of the men who were working it. Another exploded in the Karteria's counter, and tore out the planking of two streaks for a length of six feet, and started out the planking from the two adjacent streaks. As this shell struck the vessel on the water's edge, a ship built in the ordinary manner would have been sunk by this explosion of about nine ounces of powder; but the Karteria was in no danger, as she was built with her timbers close and caulked together. She was also constructed with two solid bulkheads enclosing the engine-room, caulked and lined, so as to be water-tight; consequently, any one of her compartments might have filled with water from a shot-hole without her sinking. The attack of the Turks on the Greek camp having been repulsed, nothing remained for Hastings but to retreat from his dangerous position in the Piræus as speedily as possible. This, however, he did not effect without loss; all his boats were shot through, and he had to encounter a severe fire of musketry from the Turks stationed on each side, as he moved through the pillars at the entrance of the port.
In the month of March an expedition was planned by General Heideck, who was afterwards one of the members of the unhappy regency which misgoverned Greece during the minority of King Otho. The object of this expedition was to destroy the magazines of provisions and stores which the Turks possessed at Oropos, and, by occupying their lines of communication with Negropont, to compel them to raise the siege of Athens. This was the only feasible method by which the Greeks could ever have hoped to defeat the Turks; but when the execution of it was proposed, it always met with some opposition. When it was at last undertaken by a foreigner, the operation was conducted in so weak and desultory a manner, as to end in complete disgrace.