Kanaris

The revenge came ten weeks later, and it was one of the most spectacular naval actions of the nineteenth century.

The revolutionary Greek navy's decisive weapon was the fireship — pyrpolikó — and it was a weapon of a particular kind: cheap, expendable, terrifying, and requiring of its crew a nerve that is difficult to imagine. A small vessel, usually an old brig no longer worth repairing, was packed with combustibles — tar, sulphur, resin, powder — with channels cut through her to draw the fire, and with grappling hooks rigged on her yards. She was then sailed, generally at night, directly into the side of an enemy warship at anchor, hooked fast to her rigging, set alight, and abandoned by a crew who went over the stern into a small boat and rowed for their lives with a burning ship and an exploding magazine behind them.

Against the great Ottoman ships of the line — slow to get under way, densely crewed, wooden, and full of powder — it was devastating. And the sailors of Psara and Hydra had made it a specialism.

Constantine Kanaris of Psara was its master. Psara lies about twenty kilometres west of Chios; its people had watched the smoke over the island through April and May, and a good many Chian refugees had reached them across that water and told them what they had seen.

On the night of 6–7 June 1822 by the old calendar — 18–19 June by the new — Kanaris took two fireships toward the Ottoman fleet lying at anchor off Chios town. Andreas Pipinos commanded the second.

The date was chosen with precision. It was the night of Bayram, the celebration marking the end of Ramadan. Kara Ali's flagship was illuminated from stem to stern, crowded with guests, with the senior officers of the fleet aboard and the crew at their festivities. From the water, in the dark, she was the easiest target in the Aegean, and she was lit up like a lantern.

Kanaris brought his fireship in under her bows, grappled her, fired her, and pulled away.

The flames took the head-rigging and ran up into the sails, and then the fire reached the magazine. The ship — a first-rate of eighty-four guns — was destroyed with, by contemporary estimates, some two thousand men aboard. Pipinos attacked a second vessel with less complete success. The Ottoman fleet, in the dark and in confusion, cut its cables and stood out to sea.

Kara Ali himself was struck by falling burning timber as he tried to get clear, and died in the boat that was carrying him ashore.

The act made Kanaris a European celebrity almost overnight, and he lived up to it for the next fifty years: further fireship attacks at Tenedos and in the Dardanelles, a career as an admiral, and eventually five separate terms as Prime Minister of Greece, the last of which he was serving when he died in 1877 at the age of about eighty-two. Of all the heroes of the Greek Revolution he is among the very few whose reputation has never been seriously revised downward.

Strategically, the fireship attack changed nothing. Chios was not recovered; the dead were not restored; the enslaved were not brought home. What it changed was how Europe felt.