He is a mystery, but a mystery the people of Hav seem perfectly content to ignore. From almost anywhere on the waterfront you can see his fine white house above the harbour, radio aerials sprouting from the outbuildings behind, yet hardly anybody goes near the place, and it stands there apparently aloof to the life of the peninsula. It is a tantalizing relic of the brief and not very glorious Hav Britannica.
If in 1794 Nelson had obeyed his original instructions, and attacked the peninsula of Hav instead of sailing west to invest Corsica, he might never have had his eye shot out at Calvi. As it was, the British never did have to take Hav by force, for it fell into their hands peacefully under the treaty arrangements of 1815. They wanted it for strategic reasons. They were coming to see India as the true source and focus of their power, and were more and more concerned with the safety of the routes that led there. With Gibraltar already theirs, with Malta to control the central Mediterranean, the Ionians to command the Adriatic, and with Hav flying the flag away to the east, their lines of communication through the inner sea seemed to be secure.
In those days warships were small enough to make use of Hav’s poor harbour, and the British promptly established a garrison, built a Residency, an Admiralty House, an Anglican church and an ice-house, and made the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment a proper little tight-meshed outpost of their fast coalescing empire. Many well-known imperial figures had Hav connections at one time or another. Bold General C. J. Napier, conqueror of Baluchistan, spent some months in the city reorganizing the garrison, and wrote to his wife that it was ‘a dreadful hole — worse than Sind! I am sorry for the poor soldiers, but it is the price we pay for power’. The half-mad Lord Guilford, who established an Ionic university in Corfu, paid a brief spectacular visit to Hav, swathed in his usual flowing toga, to suggest a sister establishment here: it was to be called the Trojan Academy, but protests from the Sublime Porte direct to the Crown, so Guilford always claimed, put paid to the project. General Gordon was a more frequent visitor, sometimes in the course of his duties as a military engineer (he had a scheme for resuscitating the Spartan canal as a defence work), sometimes in the pursuit of Truth: just as he believed the Seychelles to be the true site of the Garden of Eden, so he was sure that Noah’s Ark had really grounded on the Escarpment, and he wrote many learned papers to prove it.
Then Kinglake came of course, the then British Resident Harry Stormont having been at Eton with him; and Edward Lear painted some agreeable pictures of the castle and the Medina; and from time to time parliamentary commissions descended upon the Protectorate, as they did upon all such petty possessions, were well fed at the Residency, watched a smart parade of the 53rd Foot, and went home expressing the view that Her Majesty’s interests on Hav were being diligently safeguarded. Frigates of the fleet put in sometimes. Garden parties were held on the Queen’s birthday. An undistinguished succession of Residents came and went; the best known was perhaps Sir Joshua Remington, who having just escaped bankruptcy by the fortunate chance of his appointment by Lord Palmerston to the office, was lampooned by Punch:
So for half a century the Protectorate lived the familiar life of a British overseas possession. It was not the happiest on the roster, for nearly everyone loathed it (the mosquitoes were terrible then, the drinking-water was often brackish and the food was described by Napier as being ‘fit only for monkeys — if for them’). Old pictures, nevertheless, make life for the imperialists look quite bearable. We see the officers in their shakos, the ladies beneath their parasols, parading the quayside outside the Fondaco, admiring the view through telescopes from Katourian’s Place, or enjoying fêtes-champêtres in the then empty western hills. Here in stilted sepia photographs Chinese women in wide coolie hats sell them silks and souvenirs (‘Buying keepsakes in the Protectorate’), and here a visiting cricket team, very stiff at the wicket, extremely alert in the field, plays the officers of the garrison on the green outside St George’s Church.
Cricket continued to be played in Hav long after the end of the Protectorate; some of the Russians took it up, and as late as 1912 we read of a match between Prince Bronsky’s XI and a team from Corfu. A few other British legacies died hard, too. The honorific ‘Dirleddy’ has been inherited, I take it, from the etiquette of the Victorian empire-builders. The version of ‘Chant de doleure pour li proz chevalers qui sunt morz’ played by Missakian nowadays was arranged by a garrison bandmaster. Not only the cows and mongooses, but all the Indians one sees in Hav are migrants of the Pax Britannica — they came originally as servants and camp-followers. A few places have kept their British names — China Bay, The Hook, Pyramid Rock, the triangular rock which rises out of the sea off little Yalta — and a few reactionaries still like to call the Balad ‘Blacktown’.
Most of the meagre monuments of British Hav may still be identified. Westminster never put much money into the place, so that the buildings were mostly ferry-built and second-rate, but still in one form or another they have survived, their origins generally long forgotten. The Residency thrives still as the Agency — the name was adopted by agreement with the Russians in 1875, and British consuls in Hav have called themselves Agents ever since. The Anglican church however, its steeple knocked off, is now used for the storage of oil drums by the Greek fishermen, while the open space in front of it, where they used to play cricket, is now one of the market truck parks (and I have found no trace of the tombstone, mentioned in several imperial memoirs, of the officer who, ‘having recently achieved his Captaincy in the Royal Engineers, Left this Station to Report to the Commander of a yet greater Corps…’).
If you look closely at the barrack block between the Palace and the old legations you will see that its southern wing was verandahed in the Anglo-Indian manner, until the Russians stripped it of its iron-work, and the former Admiralty House, at the southern end of the Lazaretto, is now the agreeable if decrepit restaurant of the pleasure-park. As for the ice-house which stood on the eastern quay, Count Kolchok turned it into a private retreat, in whose cool chambers, if we are to believe the gossip, he often enjoyed himself with the dancer Naratlova; but it was demolished when they built the promenade of New Hav.
And one British commercial concern, out of several which made their modest fortunes from the Hav connection, is active to this day. One morning I walked into the offices of Butterworth and Sons, World-Wide Preferential Shipping Tariffs, and asked if there was actually a Mr Butterworth. Certainly there was, they said, Mr Mitko Butterworth — would I care to meet him? And there he was, the last living representative, one might say, of the Protectorate of Hav and the Escarpment — a swarthy man in his thirties, shirtsleeved below his swirling electric fan, with large gold cuff-links and round wire spectacles. Yes, he said, he was the great-great-grandson, he thought, of the Oswald Butterworth who had, in 1823, followed the flag to Hav and set up his shipping agency in that very office within the Fondaco.