Battle of Navarino

The three great powers had sent a squadron to the Peloponnese to impose an armistice on a war they had no intention of fighting themselves. On 20 October 1827 Codrington sailed his ships into Navarino Bay and anchored among the Ottoman fleet as a show of pressure, close enough that the two lines were within pistol shot. A boat sent to ask an Ottoman fireship to move was fired on, someone answered, and within minutes the whole bay was a general action fought at anchor in confined water. In four hours roughly three quarters of the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet was destroyed. Greek independence, which had looked lost that summer, became a matter of time.

Navarino is the standard case study for an admiral outrunning his instructions, and the argument over whether Codrington exceeded them has never quite settled: his orders authorised force as a last resort, and he read anchoring inside the bay as pressure rather than provocation. British policy had wanted a weakened Ottoman Empire, not a destroyed fleet and a Russian advantage, which is why the victory was disowned within weeks even as it made a Greek state inevitable. The same bay was the scene of the Athenian success at Sphacteria in 425 BC, so two of the most consequential actions in Greek history happened within sight of each other twenty-two centuries apart. Underwater survey has located and mapped a number of the 1827 wrecks on the bay floor, several of which are now protected.