Samuel Greig
Scotsman Samuel Greig so impressed his superiors at the Admiralty in London that he was sent as an adviser to the Russian Imperial Navy.
1763-1788
King George II 1727-1760 to King George III 1760-1820
© Wolfgang Moroder, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.5.
The Admiralty Building in St Petersburg, Russia. The history of Russia’s Imperial Navy properly begins with Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725), who acquired a healthy respect for British maritime skills on his Grand Embassy to Amsterdam and London in 1698. He immediately recruited Cornelius Cruys from the Netherlands, at that time ruled by William III of England, and then Captain Thomas Gordon (?1658-1741) in 1717, who rose to the rank of Admiral ten years later and carried on Cruys’s work. Gordon’s great-grandson Thomas Mackenzie fought alongside Samuel Greig at Chesme, and later founded the city of Sevastopol.
Introduction
In 1698, Tsar Peter the Great visited England and gained such a healthy respect for the Royal Navy that in 1717 he brought Thomas Gordon, later Admiral Gordon, to St Petersburg. In 1763, when Empress Catherine wanted to accelerate the Imperial Navy’s growth, she too turned to London, and they sent her Samuel Greig.
ON November 20th, 1759, Sir Edward Hawke intercepted the French fleet at Cape Quiberon, and Samuel Greig, a young Scottish subaltern, ‘eminently distinguished himself’ in a famous victory that prevented a full scale invasion of England.* Greig’s reputation was enhanced in the West Indies against the Spanish, and in 1763 he was one of just five handpicked by the Admiralty to go to St Petersburg, and help Catherine, Empress of Russia, develop her inexperienced and under-strength navy.
By the time war broke out between Russia and Turkey in 1769, the Imperial fleet was strong enough to command the seas in the Baltic, battling Turkey’s allies Poland and Sweden, and also in the Mediterranean itself, where Greig, now a captain, joined fellow Scot John Elphinstone* and Thomas Mackenzie* in guiding Admiral Alexei Orlov’s* fleet to a rout of the far larger Ottoman forces at Chesme* on 7th July, 1770. Greig was rewarded with promotion to Rear Admiral under another British administrator, the newly-appointed Sir Charles Knowles.*
See The Seven Years’ War. Russia, which had backed the French in their designs on Britain’s empire in India and America, pulled out of the war in 1762.
John Elphinstone (1722-1785) left Russia in July 1771, after refusing, according to novelist and historian James Grant, to be party to Admiral Orlov’s kidnap of ‘Princess Elizabeth’ (see below); Greig also managed to wriggle out of it, but he did not declare his refusal before the Empress while ostentatiously wearing the uniform of the British Royal Navy, as Elphinstone did. Elphinstone’s son Samuel served in the Russian fleet as a captain.
Thomas Mackenzie (1740-1786) was born in Archangel to Rear Admiral Thomas Mackenzie, grandson of Captain (later Admiral) Thomas Gordon, whom Peter the Great brought to St Petersburg in 1717. After he was wounded at Chesme, Thomas Jr went to the almost uninhabited Akhtiar Bay in the Crimea, and there under his governance the city of Sevastopol was founded in 1783, and developed into a prosperous city with schools, churches and hospitals.
Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov (1737–1808), who in 1774, on Catherine’s orders, seduced and kidnapped, and then abandoned to die in prison, a young woman claiming to be a daughter of the late Empress Elizabeth. He fell from favour shortly afterwards, and raised chickens.
Çeşme, the ancient Kyssos, on the west coast of Turkey near Izmir (Smyrna), just across a narrow strait from the island of Chios. The Ottoman fleet was twice the strength of the Russian.
Admiral Sir Charles Knowles (1704-1777), veteran of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), and a former Governor of Jamaica.
