Sketches From My Life: By The Late Admiral Hobart PashaHobart-Hampden, Augustus Charles
History
Sketches From My Life: By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha
Hobart-Hampden, Augustus Charles
Adventure and adventurers; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Blockades
'A thorough Englishman at heart, he was none the less a fervent
philo-Turk in politics and convictions, and latterly devoted his talents
and his life to the defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. As
ready with his pen as with his sword, he was a clear, trenchant,
vigorous writer, and could talk on paper as fluently and as cogently
about ironclads and torpedoes as about the wrongs of the natives of
Lazistan, the necessity of upholding the integrity of the Turkish
Empire, and of circumventing the dark and crooked wiles of Russian
diplomacy. Altogether Augustus Charles Hobart was a remarkable
man--bluff, bold, dashing, and somewhat dogged. There was in his
composition something of the mediæval "condottiere," and a good deal
more of that Dugald Dalgetty whom Scott drew. Gustavus Adolphus would
have made much of Hobart; the great Czarina, Catherine II., would have
appointed him Commander-in-Chief of her fleet, and covered him with
honours, even as she did her Scotch Admiral Gleig, and that other yet
more famous sea-dog, king of corsairs, Paul Jones. It would be unjust to
sneer at Hobart as a mercenary. His was no more a hired sword than were
the blades of Schomberg and Berwick, of Maurice de Saxe and Eugene of
Savoy. When there was fighting to be done Hobart liked to be in it--that
is all. Of the fearless, dashing, adventurous Englishman, ready to go
anywhere and do anything, Hobart was a brilliantly representative type.
Originally endowed with a most vigorous physique, his constitution
became sapped at last by long years of hardship and fatigue incident to
the vicissitudes of a daring, adventurous career. He left Constantinople
on leave of absence some months ago to recruit his shattered health, and
spent several weeks at the Riviera. But it would seem that he
experienced little relief from the delicious climate of the South of
France, and it was on his homeward journey to Constantinople that this
brave and upright British worthy breathed his last. The immediate cause
of his death was, it is stated, an affection of the heart, a term
covering a vast extent of unexplored ground. It would be nearer the
truth to say that the frame of Augustus Charles Hobart was literally
worn out by travel and exposure and hard work of every kind which had
been his lot, with but brief intervals of repose, ever since the day, in
the year 1836, when as a boy of thirteen he joined the Navy as a
midshipman.'
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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