Byron’s War, by Roderick Beaton – review

On 16 July 1823 a round-bottomed, bluff-bowed, dull-sailing collier-built tub of 120 tons called the Hercules made its slow, log-like way out of the port of Genoa. Roderick Beaton writes:

Aboard were a British peer, who happened to be one of the most famous writers of the day, a Cornish adventurer, an Italian count, a Greek count, a doctor and a secretary (both Italian), half a dozen servants of several nationalities, five horses, two dogs and a prodigious amount of money in silver coin and bills of exchange.

The Hercules was not the most glamorous vessel to carry Lord Byron towards Greece and immortality, nor was the ship’s company the most bellicose to have sailed to a ‘seat of war’, but then little about Byron’s last days has ever corresponded with legend. In the years since the outbreak of the Greek revolution in 1821 there had been some desultory talk of volunteering, but the Byron who went aboard the Hercules in the summer of 1813 might just as easily have gone to Spain or a South Sea island as dedicate his fortune and life to a country, a people and a dream that he had invariably seen with a very un-Philhellenic clarity.