Guest Post from Antoine Vanner -- author of Britannia's Wolf
, one of my favorite maritime historical thrillers.
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A key role is played in Britannia's Wolf by Hobart Pasha, the Englishman who commanded the Ottoman Navy during
the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. It is he who is responsible for
bringing Nicholas Dawlish to Turkey and for assigning him his missions.
Several readers have contacted me to ask if Hobart was indeed a real-life character. Not only is the answer "Yes - he was!" but he indeed had one of the most remarkable - and spectacular careers - of any naval officer in the mid-nineteenth century.
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When Hobart died in 1886 London's Daily Telegraph newspaper described him thus in his obituary:
“Of the fearless, dashing, adventurous Englishman, ready to
go anywhere and do anything, Hobart was a brilliantly representative
type.”
He was the antithesis of the image we have of rigid and staid Victorians and his autobiography is full of often racy humour.
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And here is his story, taken from Antoine Vanner's marvelous website, THE DAWLISH CHRONICLES
Hobart Pasha: A Forgotten Victorian Hero
“Of the fearless, dashing, adventurous Englishman, ready to go
anywhere and do anything, Hobart was a brilliantly representative type.”
Thus, on his death in 1886, the Daily Telegraph’s obituary described
Hobart Pasha, head of the Ottoman Navy, to whom Nicholas Dawlish found
himself reporting in late 1877, as recounted in
Britannia’s Wolf.
Hobart’s service in Turkey was however only one episode in a career
that was as colourful and as unlikely as that of Cochrane, the naval
hero to whom he bears most resemblance. It was to prove an inspiration
to Dawlish himself.
Hobart is largely – and undeservedly – forgotten today. The following
is a short account of his life and exploits. It draws on Hobart’s own
lively
“Sketches from My Life.”
EARLY LIFE - AND A BRUTAL INITIATION
Born in 1822, Charles Augustus Hobart-Hampden was of aristocratic
parentage – his father was the Earl of Buckinghamshire. He was however a
third son and as such, like other younger sons of his class, was
expected to make his own way in the world. Having shown little aptitude
for schoolwork, his family decided that he should enter the Royal Navy.
He was thirteen years old.
He joined by a well established route – the patronage of a relative.
“A
young cousin of mine who had been advanced to the rank of captain, more
through the influence of his high connections than by any merit of his
own, condescended to give me a nomination in a ship he has just
commissioned,” Hobart wrote fifty years later. The ties of kinship
brought him thus far, and no further. Joining a tradition-dominated
sailing navy that was practically unchanged since Nelson’s death, and
which still basked in his reflected glory, Hobart found himself exposed
as a midshipman to a regime of petty – and not so petty – tyranny which
he could only write about with bitterness in later life. Some of the
instances he quoted still horrify:
“I have seen a captain order his steward to be flogged, almost to death, because his pea-soup was not hot.”
“On one occasion the captain of whom I have been writing invited a
friend to breakfast with him and there being, I suppose, a slight
monotony in the conversation, he asked his friend whether he would like,
for his diversion, to see a man flogged. The amusement was accepted,
and the man was flogged.”
Hobart himself was not immune from what he described as
“most shameful treatment” during the three years spent on his cousin’s ship.
“I had become …so utterly hardened to it that I seemed to feel quite indifferent,” he wrote.
“I
had learnt many a lesson of use to me in after life, the most important
of all being to sympathise with other people’s miseries and to make
allowances for the faults and shortcomings of humanity.”
Much of this period was spent off South America and Hobart survived,
stronger and more confident.
Another trait was however already obvious:
“Experience
is a hard taskmaster and it taught me to be somewhat insubordinate in
my notions. I fear that this spirit of insubordination has never left
me.”
By his sixteenth birthday, though committed to a naval career, Hobart had decided to play, when needed, by his own rules.
First Blood
It was in Spain, during the First Carlist War (1832-39), that Hobart
first saw action, being attached to a Naval Brigade sent to assist the
forces of Queen Christina against those of her cousin Don Carlos. During
the defence of San Sebastian Hobart found himself standing next to his
commander, Lord John Hay,
“when a shell dropped right in the middle of us, and was, I thought, going to burst, as it did.” Not
unreasonably, Hobart threw himself down only to receive what he
described as a severe kick from his commander who had remained standing
and who said
“Get up, you cowardly rascal; are you not ashamed of yourself?”
Hobart wrote that he did get up, and was ashamed of himself, but that
“My pride helped me out of the difficulty and I flinched no more.” Touchingly, Lord John called him over afterwards and
“after
apologising in the most courteous manner for the kick, he gave me his
hand (poor fellow! He had already lost one arm fighting for his country)
and said 'Don’t be discouraged youngster!' … and so I was happy.”
The First Carlist War 1833-39 - a savage conflict now largely forgotten
Soon afterwards Hobart found himself appointed to another ship – this
time a happy one - and headed once more for South America. He was to
spend several years off Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina and penetrated to
the interior as far as Paraguay, participating in a desperate forcing of
a boom across the Paraguay River when the government there tried to bar
access to British trading interests. Hobart recorded matter-of-factly
in his memoirs that
“the vessel I belonged to had 107 shots in her hull, and thirty-five out of seventy men killed and wounded.”
Most of Hobart’s service in these years was involved with suppression
of the slave-trade, though he found time to get involved in an impromptu
duel in Rio de Janeiro in which a brother officer killed a Brazilian
who had spat on him during a ball. Hobart noted that
“such a terrible row was made about the affair … that I was not allowed to land for many months”.
Slave Trade Suppression
Though the Slave Trade was banned by international agreement, slavery
itself remained legal in Brazil until 1888. The demand for slaves there
was enough to make running of new slaves across from Angola a
profitable, but risky enterprise, since the Royal Navy operated patrols
to intercept them. Hobart served on this duty for 1841 to 1845. His view
of Brazilian slavery is a disturbing one for the modern reader. He had
first-hand experience of the horrors of the transportation but was by no
means convinced that the lot of the slaves was worse on the
plantations, when they reached them, than they would have had in Africa.
Liberated slaves were sent to the British colony of Demerara – now
Guyana – where they were “apprenticed” for seven years, a condition
Hobart considered as slavery under another name.
British Anti-Slavery vessels cruising off the Brazilian coast sent their open boats on
“detached service” to
establish a patrol line, keeping contact only every two or three days.
Not yet twenty, Hobart typically found himself in command of a ten-oared
cutter, two four-oared whalers and a total force, including himself, of
twenty well-armed men. He intercepted numerous slavers, typically brigs
or schooners of less than 500 tons.
On one typical occasion a single ship contained 460 captives and had been eight-five days at sea.
“They were short of water and provisions,” Hobart wrote. “
Small-pox,
ophthalmia and diarrhoea in its worst form had broken out…On opening
the hold we saw a mass of arms, legs and bodies all crushed together.
Many of the bodies to whom these limbs belonged were dead or dying….
Water! Water! Was the cry. Many of them as soon as they were free jumped
into the sea, partly because they had been told that, if taken by the
English they would be tortured and eaten.”
There was worse.
“Just after I got on board and unfortunate
creature was delivered of a child close to where I was standing, and
jumped into the sea, baby and all... she was saved with much
difficulty.”
On another occasion Hobart captured a ship carrying some 600 slaves. He consoled the captain for his loss –
“as he really seemed half a gentleman” - but ophthalmia had already blinded many of the captives and Hobart himself caught it so that
“for several days I could not see a yard.”
Hobart was to be seriously wounded during another boarding operation: “
As
I was making a jump on board I saw the white of the eye of a great
black man turned on me; he brandished a huge axe, which I had a sort of
presentiment was intended for me. I sprang as it were straight at my
destiny, for as I grasped the gunnel down came the axe, and I received
the full edge of the beastly thing across the back of my hand. I fell
into the water, but was picked up by my sailors.” Hobart gave the credit for saving his hand to a young surgeon
“who bound the wound in a most scientific manner” and he carried the scar to his grave.
A Brush with a Murder Charge
In his memoirs Hobart hints at a number of love affairs in Brazil but
his attentions to the daughter of the Governor of Demerara, led to a
duel with another suitor who insulted him during a game of whist. Hobart
called him out
“and next morning put a bullet into his ankle, which prevented his dancing for a long time to come.” The
governor, outraged as much by Hobart’s lack of means as by his pursuit
of his daughter demanded that he leave the colony, only to be told that
Hobart would please himself and was not under his orders. This response
“made things worse. I thought the old boy would have a fit.”
Calculating however that his income of £120 a year could not keep a
wife, Hobart decided to forget the daughter and soon afterwards learned
that she had married the wounded suitor.
Royal Navy Anti-Slavery Patrol; HMS Brisk engaging slave Emanuela
Shortly afterwards a Portuguese vessel bound for Africa, and obviously
equipped for slaving, was captured off Parnambuco. Hobart’s commanding
officer instructed him to take the ship, with a prize crew of six
besides himself, to Cape Town. Also on board, for trial on arrival, were
the slaver’s master and three of his crew. The master insinuated
himself into Hobart’s good graces to such an extent that
“we worked our daily navigation together, played at cards together, in fact were quite chums” and
the other slaver crew were allowed considerable liberty, though
confined at night. Because of the heat Hobart slept on deck, luckily
with a pistol under his pillow. One night, after a
“pleasant chatty evening” with his prisoner, Hobart woke to find this same prisoner attacking him with a knife.
“To draw my pistol from under my pillow was the work of a second,” Hobart wrote.
“To fire it into the body of the man who was trying to stab me, that of another”. He sprang to his feet, hearing noises from forward, and hurried there leaving his assailant
“dead as a door nail.” At the forecastle
“I
saw one of the prisoners in the act of falling overboard, and another
extended full length on the deck, while my stalwart quarter-master was
flourishing a handspike with which he had knocked one of his assailants
overboard and floored the other.” Hobart suspected that the seaman
at the wheel, who claimed to have seen nothing, was complicit. He as
clapped in irons and he indeed confessed soon after that he had been
bribed to participate in taking over the ship.
Hobart’s handling of the aftermath was brisk.
“I buried the captain
at sea without further ceremony; the man who fell overboard I suppose
was drowned (I did not try to pick him up); the man knocked down was put
in irons and all went smoothly for the rest of the voyage.” There was trouble at the Cape however.
“When
I arrived without the captain the lawyers wanted to make out that I had
murdered him, and I was very nearly sent to prison on the charge of
murder.”
But on this, as so many other occasions, Hobart escaped. It was the end
of his Anti-Slavery patrol work but the experience he has gained in
stopping blockade-runners would be put to good use in the future – and
then he would be doing the running.
Royal and Papal Encounters
Hobart’s next appointment, in 1845, could not have been a greater
contrast with what had gone before for, possibly through family
connections, he was appointed to the Queen’s yacht, the
Victoria and Albert.
Royal Yacht HMY "Victoria and Albert"
This service involved a number of foreign trips, including a voyage up
the Rhine to Stolzenfels to visit the King of Prussia. Hobart saw a side
of her husband that the Queen may have been unaware of, as she
disapproved of smoking and it was only
“through the kind consideration of the Prince Consort that we were allowed to indulge in an occasional cigar in the cow-house.” Albert himself was
“always ready to join us in a cigar and its accompanying friendly conversation.” The
cows referred to, two Alderneys, were kept for supplying the Queen with
fresh milk and butter and Hobart once again found himself in hot water
when he painted the noses and horns of these animals
“a pretty light blue”. It took Albert himself to extricate him from this scrape.
Now
a lieutenant, Hobart was now posted to the Mediterranean where the
alarums and excursions associated with Italian unification were in full
swing. The Papal States were under attack by Garibaldi’s forces, making
the Pope, Pius IX, a virtual prisoner in the Vatican. A French force had
been sent to intervene on the Pope’s behalf. Britain’s Lord Palmerston
played somewhat of an honest-broker role and Hobart found himself
appointed to carry despatches to the Pope, to Garibaldi and the French
General Oudinot. On his first visit the Pope gave Hobart
“his hand to kiss and congratulated me on having been so firm in obeying orders in relation to my despatches.” Hobart thereafter found himself galloping back and forth between the French and Garibaldian camps with further messages
“having on my arm a red scarf for a sign that I was not a belligerent” but being fired on anyway.
The conclusion of the episode was the escape of the Pope,
“enveloped in the large cloak of an English coachman”, on a French warship. Hobart, if nobody else, seems to have enjoyed the entire episode hugely.
War with Russia
Though the Crimean War was the only major war that Britain fought with a
European power in Hobart’s lifetime he says very little about it in his
memoirs, despite having distinguished himself. This reflects his
reluctance to do more than hint at the general inefficiency and lack of
drive associated with British naval operations in both the Baltic and
the Black Sea.
“A finer fleet never sailed or steamed from Spithead than that destined for the Baltic in 1854,” Hobart wrote, and it was under the command of Sir Charles Napier, known as “’Fighting Old Charley’. Hobart remarked however that
“it was not long before we discovered that there was not much fight left in him.”
Departure of the Baltic Expedition from Spithead 1854
Hobart was convinced that the Russian base of Kronstadt could have been
captured immediately but effort was focussed instead on the
insignificant fort of Bomarsund in the Aland Islands. Though Hobart was
mentioned in despatches for his role in this he appears to have
“given my opinion too freely, as I was left out in the cold” when promotions were given in the aftermath. When he challenged Napier on this he was told
“Don’t ye come crying to me, Sir; you are a lord’s son; I’ll have nothing to do wi’ ye!”
Thirty years later Hobart was to deliver the devastating judgement that
“if
ever open mutiny was displayed – not by the crews of the ships, but by
many of the captains, men who had attained the highest rank in their
profession – it was during the cruise in the Baltic in 1854.” A new
commander was appointed for the theatre the following year and Hobart
was given command of a squadron of mortar-boats for shore attack, but
Kronstadt had been so heavily reinforced by now by the Russians that its
capture was not attempted.
Bombardment of Bomasund 1854
Now promoted to Commander, Hobart was awarded his own ship and sent to
join the fleet off Sebastopol – his first experience of the Black Sea
which was to play such a prominent role in his later career. The Crimean
War ended soon after his arrival. A period of peace-time Mediterranean
service followed, giving Hobart ample opportunity to indulge in his
passion for shooting birds and game, and activity that absorbs almost as
much space in his memoirs as his other adventures.
Blockade-Running for the Confederacy
When the American Civil War broke out in 1861 Hobart had attained the rank of Post-Captain. He found himself
“shelved”,
in his own expression, and expected to wait up some four years before
he could expect an appropriate command. Unwilling to remain idle, Hobart
and three other officers in the same position
“looked about for
some enterprise, as something to do … the upshot of it was that we
thought of trying if we could not conceive of some plan for breaking
through the much-talked of blockade of the Southern States of America” by
the Union Government. Like many in Britain, Hobart’s sympathies were
strongly with the Confederacy, but he was not averse to earning
something in the process of assisting it.
In his memoirs Hobart breezily skates over the problem of commissioned
officers in the Royal Navy assisting a rebellion against a nation with
which Great Britain had peaceful, if not necessarily cordial, relations.
“We lent our minds, if not our bodies, to certain alter egos, whom
we inspired, if we did not personally control, as to their line of
conduct,” he wrote.
“My man I will call Roberts, whose
adventures I now give, and in whose name I now write. There are people
who insist that I was Captain Roberts; all that such people have to do
is to prove that I was that ‘miscreant,’ whoever he may have been.” Hobart’s memoirs then continue in the first-person.
The most heavily blockaded Confederate ports were Charleston, Savannah
and Wilmington, the difficulty of approach compounded by forts occupied
by Union forces. The blockade was a close one, Union cruisers patrolling
right up to the shore line. The nearby British possessions of Bermuda
and the Bahamas offered bases however for blockade-runners who could not
be pursued into, or boarded in, what amounted to British territorial
waters.
A Union vessel in chase of a Confederate blockade runner
Hobart offers few details in his memoirs of the financing of his
operations but he took command initially of a twin-screw, 400 ton, 250
horsepower, 180 foot steamer,
“as handy a little craft was ever floated.” The
crew consisted of himself, three officers, three engineers, ten seamen
and eighteen stokers, the number of the latter emphasising the need for
speed at all times. All were British, so highly paid that
“men-of-war on the Wet India station found it a difficult mater to prevent their crews from deserting.”
Hobart prepared his vessel by lowering the masts and funnel and by
hiding the boats to reduce her profile, by painting her a dull grey, and
by arranging to blow off steam underwater to minimise noise. The
furnaces were stoked only with best anthracite to minimise smoke. His
measures went so far as to carry no roosters in the hen-coop lest they
crow at an inopportune moment.
In his memoirs Hobart details several hair-raising trips into
Charleston and Wilmington, as well as a failed attempt to reach
Savannah, making maximum use of darkness, mist and bad weather. On more
than one occasion he passed unseen within yards of a Union gunboat and
he made light of
“a broadside from a savage little gun-boat” on
his second trip, whose shot passed over his vessel. In another
encounter he took another over-high broadside at fifty yards range that
resulted only in damage to the funnel.
“The marines on board of her
kept up a heavy fire of musketry…but only wounded one of our men.
Rockets were then throw up as signals to her consorts, two of which came
down on us, but luckily made a bad guess at our position and closed
with us on our quarter instead of our bow. They also opened fire, but
did us no injury. At the moment there was no vessel in sight ahead; and
as we were going at a splendid pace, were soon reduced our dangerous
companions to three or four shadowy forms struggling astern without a
hope of catching us.”
Confederate blockade-runner "Ella and Annie"
The cargoes Hobart carried inwards through the blockade included blankets, shoes and
“some
mysterious cases marked ‘hardware’, about which no one asked any
questions, but which the military authorities took possession of.” Hobart also traded on his own account and
“before
leaving England I had met a Southern lady, who, on my inquiring what
was most needed by her compatriots in the beleaguered States replied
curtly; ‘Corsages, sir, I reckon.’” Before leaving Glasgow on his first trip Hobar
t
“visited an emporium that seemed to contain everything in the world;
and I astonished the young fellow behind the counter by asking for a
thousand pairs of stays.” Hobart was to dispose of these vital
articles of every respectable lady’s underwear at a profit of nearly
eleven hundred percent.
On the return trip Hobart carried bales of cotton, packed not just into
the hold but piled closely on deck so as to leave only access to the
cabins, engine-room and forecastle. When finally landed in Liverpool the
cotton would fetch ten to fifteen times what it has been purchased for
in the Confederacy.
Hobart’s memoirs give a fascinating outsider’s view of the privations
of life in the Confederacy in its later years. His reputation brought
him into easy contact with senior military and political figures,
including Judah Benjamin, Jefferson Davis (
“a stern-looking man who never smiled…and gave one the idea of a perfect gentleman”) and Robert E. Lee, who impressed Hobart as an
“excellent man and good soldier” as he did all who ever met him. Hobart remarked that Lee
“was the only man I met during my travels who took a somewhat gloomy view of the military prospects of the country” and he noted that most others remained confident of victory even in the very last days of the Confederacy.
Apart from running the naval blockade Hobart decided to run what he termed
“the land blockade”
and find his ways from Richmond to Washington and New York, from where
he could return to the Bahamas by regular passenger steamer. His
motivation for this potentially suicidal journey is not explained in his
memoirs and he was fully aware that
“it was always a difficult
matter to avoid the pickets of either party … and anyone they suspected
of being a spy in those days had a short shrift and a long rope applied
before he knew where he was.” The journey proved a difficult one
through swamps and across rivers and involved hiding up in daytime while
being devoured by sand flies, but Washington was at last reached
safely. The rest of the journey back to the Bahamas appears to be
uneventful. This incident is the only one in Hobart’s memoirs that is
wholly inexplicable and one wonders if some unofficial diplomatic
element was involved. He mentioned that he was carrying a packet of
despatches for the correspondent of the London Times, but there may have
been more to it than that.
Hobart’s last blockade-running venture ended in disaster. He had run
into Wilmington twice on a new ship but as he came out in the second
occasion yellow fever broke out on board – a disease usually fatal at
the time. Hobart headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia, to
“inhale purer air”, losing men on the way and going down with the disease himself. He survived but
“the game was fast drawing to a close” as the Confederacy was now collapsing and he decided to bring
“Captain Roberts’s” career to a close.
Into the Sultan’s Service
Hobart
was still a Royal Navy post-captain, and still awaiting a ship, when
the American Civil War ended. One can but wonder how the late
“Captain Roberts” was viewed at the Admiralty, and Hobart might have had similar concerns, for
“more by accident than design” he
visited Constantinople and presented himself to Fuad Pasha, Grand
Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The island of Crete was still an Ottoman
possession but its Greek inhabitants were in revolt against their
overlords, their insurrection supported by blockade-runners from the
independent Kingdom of Greece. Identifying himself as a fox turned
gamekeeper, Hobart presented himself as the best man to eliminate the
Greek blockade-runners. He was immediately offered the position of Naval
Adviser to the Ottoman Government, in succession to a British officer,
Sir Adolphus Slade, who had just retired after twenty yeas service. By
accepting the position Hobart seems to have caused considerable offence
at the Admiralty in London, which considered the post as its own to
award.
“Even the frowns of the English Ambassador did not affect me a bit,” Hobart wrote.
“I
believe they called me ‘adventurer,’ ‘artful dodger,’ etc. but I was in
every way as much entitled to this position as the Admiralty ‘pet,’
whoever he may have been.”
The Ottoman-Turkish Navy was equipped with expensive modern ships and weapons
On taking the position Hobart immediately equipped a small squadron,
including a couple of fast despatch boats and a steam corvette. He
established his patrols, not off Crete, but off the Greek port of Syra,
from which the blockade-runners were being seen off “with flags flying,
bands playing and the hurrahs of the entire population”, but staying
carefully outside Greek territorial waters. Within weeks Hobart had cut
off supplies to the Cretan insurgents and the revolt collapsed.
Hobart’s reward was to be removed, or
“scratched”, from the Royal Navy list (he wrote to the Admiralty Board
“You may scratch and be d-d!”) but was appointed a Full Admiral and Chief of Staff of the Imperial Ottoman Navy.
In his memoirs, written in the last months of his life, Hobart reveals little of his Ottoman service
“because such anecdotes strike nearer home” and he was determined to be
“offensive to no one.”
The Ottoman Navy was expanded during his tenure and by the mid-1870s
was rated the third most powerful in Europe, a fact aided by the Treaty
of Paris of 1856, which brought the Crimean War to an end, prevented the
Russian Empire from building significant naval forces in the Black Sea.
Turkey also had significant Mediterranean, Adriatic and Red Sea
commitments as well. War with Greece, no less than with Russia, was
always a possibility. New ironclads and other vessels were purchased in
Western Europe, mainly in Great Britain, Hobart’s greatest challenge was
to build up the organisations, procedures, discipline and support
structures to man them effectively. Financing of this force was a major
drain on a corrupt and mismanaged administration.
As the
“Sick Man of Europe”
the Ottoman Empire was dependent on overseas loans that could only be
serviced by ever-greater taxation of oppressed populations from the
Balkans to Basra, from the deserts of Libya and Arabia to the foothills
of the Caucuses.
Though a formal treaty was never entered into, it was
an article of British foreign policy in this period that the Ottoman
Empire must be shored up so as to counter Russian ambitions to control
the Eastern Mediterranean and to menace British communications with
India. These concerns had in them the seeds of a major European War,
possibly even a World War.
Given the overwhelming naval forces at his disposal, Hobart felt
considerable bitterness that considerably more could have been achieved
against Russia when the Russo-Turkish War erupted in 1877. Incompetent
Ottoman Army commanders were as little interested in cooperation with
the Navy as they were with each other and Hobart commented that
“it
was hard on the gallant Turks, hard on the Sultan and his government,
and hard on me, to see such magnificent chances thrown away.” He advocated more active use of naval forces in the Danube to prevent the crossing of the main Russian Army and
“I
was simply told to mind my own business and rejoin my ships, which were
at that moment lying at the Sulina mouth of the Danube.”
Hobart’s objective was to dominate the Black Sea. This included
blockading Odessa and Sevastopol and intercepting small fast Russian
raiders that might sally from them; holding the Danube mouths and Batumi
as forward bases. He also oversaw safe transportation of large bodies
of troops by sea. This last included shifting forty-thousand troops from
Albania to Salonika in just twelve days. An evacuation of a Turkish
army from the Caucasian coast at Sukhumi, and of the local Muslim
population, a total of over 50,000 people, was executed without loss.
Wars however, as Churchill remarked, are not won by evacuations.
Though Ottoman defeat on land was total, Hobart took pride that
“the
fleet kept the command of the Black Sea during the whole of that
disastrous war, cruising at times in the most fearful weather I have
ever experienced, for twelve months in a sea almost without ports of
refuge.” An increasing hazard in the last weeks of the war was the Russian use of self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes,
“carrier vessels” being
used to bring small attack craft within reach of the base of Batumi.
These operations were masterminded by the future Admiral Makaroff, whose
death off Port Arthur in 1904 probably removed the last hope of a
Russian victory over the Japanese.
Last Years
Hobart remained another eight years in Turkey after the end of the
Russo-Turkish War and appears to have enjoyed himself hugely as regards
his favourite sport of shooting. He was less enamoured of international
society at Constantinople and was scathing about the diplomatic corps
and what he referred to as
“the sacred circle” and
“the swells”. The sixty-year old Admiral still had the same spirit of insubordination as the young midshipman.
Hobart's resentment of Istanbul's expartiate community may have had to
do with its attitude to his second marriage - an undertaking that was
wholly characteriytic of this independent-spirited man. An entry in the
New York World after his death summarises what happened:
The news by cable of the death of the late Hobart Pasha was the '
finis' to as romantic a career as ever farmed the subject of a story,
and not the least romantic chanter of it was the Pasha's second marriage
in 1874. It sounds like the plot of an English novel, and the third
volume still lives to mourn the loss of the hero. Hobart Pasha, as the
papers told, when the story of his death came across the wires, was the
fourth son of the Duke of Buckingham and a distinguished naval officer
before he entered the Sultan's service and rose to Mahommedan honours
and dignities that no Christian had ever before obtained. During the
early part of his career, while he was still in the English service, a
brother officer of his was so severely wounded that the surgeon
announced to him the mortal nature of his injury. The dying man sent for
the future Pasha to whom he was greatly attached and confided to him a
secret. He had married a girl who was of rather humble parentage, and
because of his family's opposition the marriage had been kept concealed,
and the girl rested under a stigma. A child had been born to them just
before he left England. Now that he had been told he was about to die he
was anxious that it and its mother should be righted in the eyes of the
world. Complications as to its proof had arisen by the death of
witnesses, but he trusted to his friend Hobart to repair his fault " If
you will pledge your honour for the truth of the marriage," he said,
'the world will believe you, and you will relieve me when I swear to you
that it is so.' When Hobart, now become a Turkish officer, returned to
England, he under took to comply with the request of his dead friend,
but the young mother under the weight of her grief and the equivocal
position she occupied had followed her husband, and the dead man's
relatives, when he at last discovered the child, refused to acknowledge
it. Nothing was left to him but to take care of the little orphan
himself, so he accepted the charge with what grace he could muster, and
when he left England, as he did soon after, he placed her at a famous
school for girls in the Isle of Wight, where so many English women of
rank have gotten their training and education. Then he went back to his
duties and thought no more about her except to send an occasional letter
full of good advice, with boxes of Turkish sweetmeats and trinkets.
When she was seventeen years old he got a letter from her full of
passionate misery and stained with tears. Some girl enemy had discovered
the mystery about her birth and taunted her with it, and she wanted him
to come and take her somewhere, anywhere, away from girls who were
cruel. So the tender hearted old sailor put himself aboard the next
steamer for home and got his little protégé, though what he was to do
with her he did not quite know. She was young; she was pretty; she clung
to him with tenderest gratitude and love, and the hearts of even
bronzed, gray-mustached old warriors are not proof against that, and so,
as that, after all, seemed the quickest and simplest solution of the
trouble, and they both wished it, they were married. And now at die age
of twenty-nine she is left to mourn the loss of one of the most
brilliant and daring commanders England ever produced.
“Originally endowed with a most vigorous physique,” according to the Daily Telegraph, Hobart’s health collapsed in 1886,
“sapped at last by long years of hardship and fatigue.” He
retired to the Riviera and occupied himself with his too-brief but
vastly entertaining memoirs. He died shortly afterwards. His body was
returned to Constantinople, and was buried on the Asian side, in the
British Cemetery at Scutari, close to the troops had died at
Nightingale’s hospital during the Crimean War.
Hobart’s life – and his daring, swashbuckling, rebellious, generous and
fundamentally decent character – is proof that many heroes of naval
fiction may be but pale reflections of the reality of the ages of sail,
steam and empire.
