Page:Decisive Battles Since Waterloo.djvu/67

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BATTLE OF NAVARINO.
37

pirates, gave the Turks a great deal of trouble. Its first operation was to destroy a Turkish seventy-four-gun ship that had run aground in the Bay of Adramyti, together with eight hundred men of her crew. The Turkish admiral was so alarmed at the disaster that he retired with the rest of his fleet to the Dardanelles, leaving the command of the archipelago and the coast of Greece to the Greek cruisers.

On the land, battle followed battle in different parts of the country, and the narration of the events of the insurrection would fill a bulky volume. It is not our purpose to present a history of the Greek revolution; we will give briefly, a summary of the events between the opening of the struggle and the battle of Navarino, which was practically the end of the war for independence.

During the latter part of 1821, the advantages to the Greeks were sufficient to encourage them to proclaim their independence, which was done in January, 1822. In the same month the Turks besieged Corinth, and in the following April they besieged and captured Chios (Scio), ending the capture with the slaughter of forty thousand inhabitants, the most horrible massacre of modern times. In July, the Greeks were victorious at Thermopylæ; in the same month Corinth fell, with great slaughter of the defenders. In April, 1823, the Greeks held a national congress at Argos; the victories of Marco Bozzaris occurred in the following June, and in August he was killed in a night attack upon the Turkish camp; in August, too, Lord Byron landed at Athens to take part in the cause of Greece, which was attracting the attention of the whole civilized world. The first Greek loan was issued in England in February, 1824; Lord Byron died at Missolonghi in the following April; in August the Capitan Pasha was defeated at Samos with heavy loss; in October, the provisional government of Greece was set up; and the fighting became almost continuous in the mountain dis-