What happened at the Battle of Navarino in 1827?
On 20 October 1827 a British, French and Russian fleet under Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington sailed into the Bay of Navarino, in the southwestern Peloponnese, and anchored alongside the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet of Ibrahim Pasha. The allies had come to force an armistice on the Ottomans in the Greek War of Independence. A boat sent to move a Turkish fireship was fired on, the firing spread across the bay, and in about four hours most of the Ottoman and Egyptian ships were sunk, burned or wrecked, while not one allied ship was lost. It was the last fleet action fought under sail, and it opened the way to an independent Greece.7
Navarino was hardly a contest, in the words of the naval historian Andrew Lambert, and the Victorian historian George Finlay found it remarkable for nothing but hard fighting. Yet in four hours it destroyed most of Ibrahim Pasha's Ottoman and Egyptian fleet, and Lambert calls it the pivotal event of the Greek War of Independence. Its 200th anniversary falls on 20 October 2027.8
Why three powers sent their fleets
The Greeks rose against Ottoman rule in 1821. Short of a reliable army, Sultan Mahmud II asked for help from his powerful vassal Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt, who sent his son Ibrahim Pasha with a fleet and an army. Ibrahim landed in the Peloponnese in 1825 and turned the slow war in the sultan's favor. In April 1826 the Ottomans and Egyptians took Missolonghi after a siege of a year.9
On 6 July 1827 Britain, France and Russia signed the Treaty of London. It called on both sides to stop fighting and negotiate, and the three governments agreed to impose an armistice if need be. Each had its own reasons. The Foundation of the Hellenic World notes that Britain wanted a friendly Greek state as a check on Russia, and that France did not want to be left behind in the region, while Lambert stresses British worries about trade and the piracy the war had unleashed in the Aegean.10
The Greeks accepted the armistice. The Ottomans refused it. The British commander in the Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, was a veteran of Trafalgar, where he had commanded the Orion. The French squadron of Rear-Admiral Henri de Rigny joined him off Navarino on 21 or 22 September, and the Russian squadron of Rear-Admiral Count Heiden on 13 October.11
A truce that did not hold
By September 1827 the Egyptian fleet sent from Alexandria had joined the Ottoman ships in the Bay of Navarino. On 25 September Codrington and de Rigny met Ibrahim, who said he could decide nothing without orders from Constantinople. Until those orders came he gave his word, by mouth only, that his fleet would stay in the bay.12
The Greeks, who had accepted the armistice, kept fighting. At the end of September Captain Frank Hastings took the Greek steam warship Karteria into the Bay of Salona, on the Gulf of Corinth, and destroyed a Turkish squadron there with heated shot and shells. Ibrahim held himself freed from his promise and sent ships north toward Patras. Codrington met them at the beginning of October and forced them back to Navarino.13
Ibrahim then took his revenge on land. His troops burned olive groves and fig trees in Messenia, and British officers could watch the smoke from their ships. With winter coming, a blockade of the coast would soon be impossible to keep up. The three admirals sent Ibrahim an ultimatum, but his officers answered that he was away in the interior and could not be reached.14
The horseshoe in the bay
The Bay of Navarino is about three miles long and two wide. The island of Sphacteria, where Athenians and Spartans fought in the Peloponnesian War (see Sparta vs Athens), shelters it from the west, and the only entrance for ships, at the southwestern end, is about three-quarters of a mile wide by Finlay's and Phillips's measure, or half a mile by Clowes's.15
The Ottoman and Egyptian ships were moored in a horseshoe facing the entrance, with its ends covered by the fortress of Navarino and the batteries on Sphacteria. They lay in three lines, so that the ships behind could fire through the gaps of the first line, with fireships posted at each end. Clowes writes that the arrangement was suggested by French officers serving with the Egyptians, and the Dictionary of National Biography also reports that a French sympathizer was said to have directed the mooring.16
No two sources count the fleet the same way. Clowes gives 65 warships by the count of the Capitan Bey's secretary and 89 by Codrington's, Finlay and Phillips put 82 in the battle line, and Lambert counts three battleships, nineteen frigates and some forty smaller warships, besides transports. All agree that it had only three ships of the line. The allies brought 26 or 27 ships with about 1,270 guns. They had fewer guns than the Ottomans, perhaps 2,000 or more, but many more heavy ships.17
On 18 October the admirals decided to sail into the bay and anchor among the Ottoman ships. Codrington gave each ship its station and closed his orders with Nelson's words that no captain can do very wrong who places his ship alongside that of an enemy.18
20 October: into the bay
Early afternoon. At about half past one by Finlay's and Phillips's accounts, or about two by the British ambassador's in 2016, Codrington led the allied fleet into the bay in his flagship, the Asia. On the hills around the bay, some 20,000 of Ibrahim's soldiers watched. A boat came out with a message that Ibrahim had not given the allies permission to enter and that they should leave. Codrington refused. Clowes gives his answer as: "I am come not to receive orders, but to give them." The British ambassador quoted it at Pylos in 2016 as "I have come to give orders and not receive them."19
The shore batteries held their fire while the leading British and French ships dropped anchor alongside the Ottoman line. The Russian squadron, slowed when the breeze dropped, took an hour or more to come in. Phillips writes that it still reached its stations before the fighting began, but Clowes that the firing had gone on for twenty to thirty minutes before the first Russian ship anchored, and Lambert that the French and then the Russian ships came in under fire from the shore batteries.20
Then the frigate Dartmouth sent a boat to ask that a Turkish fireship be moved away from the allied ships. The Turks answered with musket fire and killed an officer and several seamen. The Dartmouth and the French flagship returned fire, in Clowes's account an Egyptian ship then fired a round shot at the French flagship, and the action spread across the bay. By the British ambassador's account in 2016, it was general by about half past two.21
Four hours at anchor
There was no room in the bay for maneuver. The ships fought at anchor and at close range, and Phillips calls it a mere question of hard pounding, won by discipline and gunnery. Finlay found the allied fire steady and the Ottoman and Egyptian fire badly aimed but kept up with great perseverance, and Clowes credits the Turks with the utmost bravery.22
The Asia lay between the flagships of the Capitan Bey and of Moharrem Bey, the Egyptian admiral. After about two hours both flagships cut their cables and drifted away as wrecks. Finlay writes that the Russian squadron then decided the day by engaging the ships of Tahir Pasha on the other wing of the Ottoman line. The Russian flagship Azov, commanded by Mikhail Lazarev, distinguished herself and was awarded the flag of St George, the first Russian ship so honored according to the Central Naval Museum in St Petersburg.23
As each Ottoman ship was disabled, her crew set her on fire and abandoned her. The burning ships blew up one after another, and the allied crews spent the whole night saving their own ships from the wrecks drifting in the dark. When day came, Finlay and Phillips write, only 29 of the 82 Ottoman ships in the battle line were still afloat.24
Counting the cost
The battle lasted about four hours, and Royal Museums Greenwich, Lambert and the Hellenic Navy all describe it as the last fleet battle fought under sail. The allies did not lose a single ship. Their losses were 172 killed and 470 wounded in Finlay's count, 174 killed and 475 wounded in Lambert's, a total of 650 in the Dictionary of National Biography and no more than 540 in Phillips, while the Hellenic Navy gives a range of 200 to 654 men, depending on the source. In 2016 the British ambassador at Pylos named 75 British, 40 French and 59 Russian dead, and Daly's figures for the Russian squadron are 59 killed and 139 wounded.25
Ottoman and Egyptian losses were never accurately known. Lambert writes of at least 4,000 men and Clowes of probably 4,000, Phillips of about 6,000 dead, the Hellenic Navy of about 6,000 men lost, and Daly of 7,000 sailors. Codrington's general order after the battle claimed that only one frigate and fifteen smaller vessels were left fit for sea, but Clowes shows that he overstated the destruction: when the British Pelican looked into the bay on 17 November, she found 29 vessels there.26
Among the allied wounded was the admiral's son, Henry Codrington, the signal midshipman of the Asia, who was severely hurt. He lived to become an admiral of the fleet.27
An untoward event
Royal Museums Greenwich writes that the victory made Codrington a popular hero, but not with the British government, which felt he had gone beyond his instructions, and Tory newspapers and a large body of opinion in England condemned him. The ministers feared that destroying the Ottoman fleet would only make Russia stronger. In the King's Speech at the opening of Parliament in 1828 the battle was called an "untoward event", and Codrington was recalled from the Mediterranean in 1828. He was nonetheless made a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath.28
Ibrahim refused to leave the Peloponnese. The damaged British and Russian ships went to Malta to refit and the French to Toulon. Ibrahim used his surviving ships to send his sick and wounded to Alexandria, and with them Greek captives, some 2,000 in Finlay's account and several thousand in Phillips's, for the slave markets of Egypt. Codrington was blamed for letting them sail.29
From Navarino to a Greek state
Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1828. In August, Codrington signed a convention with Muhammad Ali at Alexandria for the evacuation of the Peloponnese, and on 30 August a French army of 14,000 men under General Maison landed at Petalidi, in the Gulf of Coron. Ibrahim sailed away with the last of his troops early in October.30
In September 1829, beaten by Russia, the Ottoman Empire accepted the decisions of the three powers on Greece. A protocol signed in London on 3 February 1830 made Greece an independent state, and the Treaty of London of May 1832 completed the settlement. For the Ottoman side of the story see the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire, where Navarino ranks eighth, and for the great sea fights of other eras, the greatest naval battles in history.31
