Gale Force 10

The Life and Times of Admiral Beaufort

By Nicholas Courtney

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Beaufort’s Hunt
This is an excerpt from Nicholas Courtney’s article in Cornucopia 27

Nearing the end of his survey of the southern coast of Asia Minor, in mid-June 1812, Francis Beaufort wrote to his father, Daniel Augustus Beaufort, rector of Collon, to the north of Dublin: “Had I but known that you were rebuilding your church, I could have brought you any number of marble columns, of every order and size as you might possibly need.” Only a matter of days later, this epic survey, begun at Bodrum the year before, would end disastrously, in the Bay of Iskenderun.

Captain Beaufort, in command of HMS Frederickssteen, a fifth-rate frigate captured from the Danes, had initially been appointed Senior Naval Officer, Smyrna, under the direct orders of Stratford Canning, the brilliant twenty-four-year-old minister plenipotentiary at the British embassy to the Sublime Porte. It was a delicate time. Canning was in Istanbul to foster relations between England and Turkey at the expense of France following the new Anglo­Turkish treaty, and, through the naval squadron, “to instil on the Porte an understanding of maritime law”.

On a personal level, Canning, starved of company, was delighted to welcome Beaufort. His last English guest had been Lord Byron, whom he had previously played against in the Eton and Harrow cricket match.

Beaufort was chosen for this important appointment as a result of the collusion of Sir John Barrow, second secretary at the Admiralty, who admired him as a surveyor, and William Hamilton, under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, whom Beaufort had first met twelve years before while serving on HMS Phaeton. The frigate had taken Lord Elgin, the British ambassador, to Constantinople, along with Hamilton as his private secretary. Hamilton was a passionate antiquarian ­ while serving in Egypt he was responsible for securing the Rosetta Stone for the British Museum ­ and was patron of the Dilettante Society.

Although he was ostensibly there to show the British flag in Turkish waters, Beaufort’s real brief was twofold: Barrow needed a survey of the southern coast of Turkey; and Hamilton wished to have the classical sites along the coast accurately recorded for later identification.

After six months and two relatively fruitless cruises in the Aegean, Beaufort received orders to begin his survey. He was in his element, doing something he both excelled at and enjoyed. “Everyone has his hobby or his insanity,” he once wrote in his journal. “Mine I believe is taking bearings for charts and plans.” For the survey of Karamania (the Ottoman name for the south coast of Asia Minor), Beaufort used a series of running surveys, in which the headlands were fixed by back and forward bearings from known positions of his ship, while the details on the shore were fixed from a team of boats led by Beaufort himself. Under his leadership, his crew of two lieutenants, master, sundry midshipmen and the ship’s doctor ­ whom Beaufort considered “a better surveyor than ship’s surgeon” ­ worked well together. It was a punishing regime, Beaufort breakfasting “often by candlelight, always by 5” and working until sunset or later if the “evening sea breeze did not lull until 8 or 9”.

When the Frederickssteen reached the ancient city of Patara, however, the tenor of the operation changed. Anchoring in a deep bay at the mouth of the River Xanthos, Beaufort and his officers went ashore beneath “a tranquil sky without a cloud or a breeze”. They spent the day clambering over the ruins like excited small boys, Beaufort recording his findings, making accomplished pen-and-ink sketches ­ particularly of the Great Gate ­ in his journal, and measuring the theatre. By the time they returned to their “floating house”, tired and hungry, Beaufort admitted, he and his officers had all become “committed antiquarians”. From this point on he was obsessed with identifying every ancient site, point, river and feature from the classical geographers, mostly Strabo and Pliny, as well as by their subsequent appellations. Kastellórizon, he worked out, was drawn from the Frankish name of Castel Rosso, after the red veins in the limestone cliffs of the island; Kekova (Strabo’s Dolchiste) was named after the Mycenaean word for partridge, “truly well named for such flocks abound”; the islands known as Chelidoniæ, between the bays of Finike and Antalya, were named after the swallows that lighted there on their migration north.

The survey was going well. After exploring and identifying Olympus, they were intrigued by “a small but steady light among the hills”. The next day the local “agha” (Beaufort described aghas as fulfilling the duty of “magistrate or governor”) supplied horses for ten of the ship’s company, who set off into the hills and found, in the corner of a ruined building, the yanar ­ a small “vivid flame belching from a hole like the mouth of an oven”. Beaufort, who later identified this as Pliny’s Mount Chimæra, tried to throw a stone into the flame but was beaten back by the heat. He was amazed to find no soot, “nor smoke, nor noxious vapours, nothing but a brilliant perpetual flame, that no water could quench”. Shepherds cooked their food on the flame, their guide informed them, but it would not cook meat that was stolen.

A little further north, there was another delight for the crew of the Frederickssteen ­ the ancient city of Phaselis, with its three ports. Aware that they were the first Europeans to land there for centuries, Beaufort and his by now “antiquarian-minded” crew sauntered down the “straight avenue flagged with marble” to the theatre, which they found to be in a fair state of decay, and the Temple of Minerva, reputed to have held Achilles’ spear, and on as far as the aqueduct. Again he sketched and recorded, measured and copied inscriptions.

Beaufort had planned to set up a little observatory on the “Island of Rashat” for the “occulation of a star and a lunar eclipse”, in order to fix Adalia (the modern Antalya), the “principal city of the whole coast”. When nearly there, he received news of an uprising in the city, led by the Pasha’s brother, who was soon overthrown and the rebels put to flight. Beaufort hoped to remain “unperceived and undisturbed”, but the next day a party of the fugitives appeared on the beach, and begged him for protection. Having no wish to interfere in their dispute, Beaufort initially refused, but gave them some bread and allowed the ship’s surgeon to patch up the wounded. When the Pasha’s cavalry appeared, however, Beaufort “could not stand by and see them butchered in cold blood”. He took them aboard ­ and in so doing was forced to abandon his survey for that year.

On the way back to Smyrna, Beaufort put into Bodrum, where he requested to see the fine marbles in the Crusader castle of St Paul. Despite the gift of “the King’s own [gun] Powder”, the governor demurred. Greatly irritated, Beaufort sailed off, recalling the French captain who had a firman (or letter of authority) from the Porte to let him in ­ which naturally had to be obeyed ­ but which, as the governor pointed out, contained “no directions about coming out”É

This article is based on Nicholas Courtney’s book ‘Gale Force 10: The Life and Legacy of Admiral Beaufort’ (Hodder Headline).