l on board, by means of a fire-vessel. His
fleet was unmanageable, and he had to abandon the enterprise and to
leave the unfortunate Chiots to endure further punishment for offences
that were not their own. This punishment was so terrible that, in six
months, the population of Chios was reduced from one hundred thousand
to thirty thousand. Twenty thousand managed to escape. Fifty thousand
were either put to death or sold as slaves in Asia Minor.

That failure of the Greeks at Chios, quickly followed by their
defeat on land at Petta, greatly disheartened the revolutionists.
Mavrocordatos virtually resigned his presidentship, and there was
anarchy in Greece till 1828. Athens, captured from the Turks in June,
1822, became the centre of jealous rivalry and visionary scheming,
mismanagement, and government that was worse than no government at
all. Odysseus, the vilest of the vile men whom the Revolution brought
to the surface, was its master for some time; and, when he played
traitor to the Turks, he was succeeded by others hardly better than
himself.

In spite of some heavy disasters, however, the Greeks were so far
successful during 1822 that in 1823 they were able to hold their
newly-acquired territory and to wrest some more fortresses from their
enemies. The real heroism that they had displayed, moreover--the foul
cruelties of which they were guilty and the selfish courses which they
pursued being hardly reported to their friends, and, when reported,
hardly believed--awakened keen sympathy on their behalf. Shelley and
Byron, and many others of less note, had sung their virtues and their
sufferings in noble verse and enlarged upon them in eloquent prose,
and in England and France, in Switzerland, Germany, and the united
States, a strong party of Philhellenes was organized to collect money
and send recruits for their assistance.

The two Philhellenes of greatest note who served in Greece during the
earlier years of the Revolution were Thomas Gordon and Frank Abney
Hastings. Gordon, who attained the rank of general in the army of
independence, had the advantage of a long previous and thorough
acquaintance with the character of both Turks and Greeks and with the
languages that they spoke. He watched all the revolutionary movements
from the beginning, and took part in many of them. In the "History
of the Greek Revolution," which he published in 1832, he gave such
a vivid and, in the main, so accurate an account of them tha