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Updated: June 1, 2025
This is due largely to the Dardanelles enterprise and because in some instances older craft were assigned to many dangerous undertakings where the newer ships were held in reserve. In every engagement of any consequence that took place during the first two years of war, with the single exception of the fight off Chile, Britain won and Germany lost.
And in refusing to sacrifice the lives of his subjects the military judgment of Constantine has been vindicated. He was willing to attack Turkey through Kavalla and Thrace, because by that route he presented an armed front to Bulgaria. But, as he pointed out, if he sent his army to the Dardanelles, he left Kavalla at the mercy of his enemy.
We drove down to the sea and along the beach road through Maidos bombarded several weeks before, cross-country from the Aegean, and nothing now but bare, burnt walls on to Kilid Bahr, jammed with camels and ox-carts and soldiers, and then on toward the end of the peninsula. We were now beyond the Narrows and the Dardanelles.
The Germans realizing that these great ships, moving as they did slowly and deliberately while they fired on the land forts, would be good targets for torpedoes, sent some of their newest submarines from the bases in the North Sea, down along the coasts of France and Spain, through the passage at Gibraltar and to the Dardanelles.
It is due from me to the honour of the Turkish Government to declare, that the Sublime Porte not only attached no condition at all to my liberation, but explicitly and officially intimated to me, that having once decided to set us free, it was unwilling to do things by halves; we had therefore full and unrestricted liberty, on leaving Turkey, to go and to stay where we pleased to take such a course as we chose, and that to that purpose, an American and an English vessel would be ready at the Dardanelles, and it would depend on our choice, on board of which we embarked.
But the hostile attitude taken by all Europe on the invasion of the principalities, and by Austria in particular, was too great an obstacle for even the Czar of all the Russias to disregard, especially when he learned that the fleets of France and England were ordered to the Dardanelles, and that his fleet would be pent up in an inland basin of the Black Sea.
After we had everything aboard ship it was an even bet among the crowd as to whether we were going to France, the Dardanelles or Mesopotamia. There were other ships there, loading just as we were, some of which were known to be destined for the eastern theater; so how could we know? As a matter of fact, our officers did not know any more about it than the men.
Faced with the problem, the Admiralty sent an inquiry to Admiral Carden, in command on the scene, as to the practicability of forcing the Dardanelles by the use of ships alone, assuming that old ships would be employed, and "that the importance of the results would justify severe loss."
He got a variety of names that ranged all the way from "Bush Robespierre" to the "Australian Abraham Lincoln." The Great War found Hughes the Strong Man of Australia, soon to be bound up in the larger Destiny of the Empire. Even before the Mother Country sent her call for help to the Children beyond the seas, Hughes had offered the gallant contingent that made history at the Dardanelles.
Here he was attacked by the Greek fire-ships, commanded by Canaris, and his fleet were obliged to cut their cables and sail back to the Dardanelles, with the loss of their largest ships. The conqueror was crowned with laurel at Ipsara by his grateful countrymen, and the campaign of 1822 closed, leaving the Greeks masters of the sea and of nearly the whole of their territory.
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