Britons on the Bosphorus
By Mark Smalley
‘I saw Lord Byron in a state of nudity, rubbing himself over with oil, and taking to the water like a duck... This was his first attempt at imitating Leander, of which he has made some remarks… on crossing the Hellespont.’
—Frederick Chamier, The Life of a Sailor (1832)
I. May 1810, Dardanelles Strait, Ottoman Turkey
Make way, we’re coming through,
Lieutenant Ekenhead and I,
latterday Achilles and Alexanders,
if you will, transpontine kings
straddling Europa and the Orient,
blazoned more with goose fat than bronze,
while the timeless throng, they part
like Marmaran waves, obediently, for us,
degenerate modern wretches.
Lured by lover’s lamplight,
it is a rare bridgehead that spans
the Hellespont, built stroke
by stroke, forging like lovesick Leander,
a passage between shores
(and two vast piles of antique rubble)
that is stronger than woven flax,
plaited papyrus or plated steel
pipeline, chasing while escaping,
winning by appearing to lose, hauling through.
Well, he failed on his first attempt too.
The tide was not in their favour; on the contrary,
it swam both ways at once, hazardous
at surface and depth, everyday imperialism
being, ideally, a tightrope logic of control,
free of the responsibilities of occupation,
a civilising mission free, even,
of orders from Whitehall.
II. April 1924, the first Byron centenary celebrations, Missolonghi, Greece
It is a post-Ottoman free-for-all
in the British Levantine, while we,
naturally, masters of myth
and the main chance, fresh from the
metropolis, peg our noses and,
disdaining the great unwashed,
cross the Turkish Straits with
new maps, might and main,
better than Xerxes with all his men.
We too think we’ve done a feat these days
slipping the thin red line through Crimea,
even Gallipoli, the Dardanelles and Anzac Cove
by dint of Sykes-Picot, conjuring Arab lands
from level sands and shock, no more able to stand
alone than can an empty sack, enemies to allies
via Anglo-Persian Oil, carving up the Middle East
for good, washed to victory on a wave of crude.
Inspiration behind the poem:
The bicentenary of Byron's death has given me an opportunity to revisit the poet's epic 1810 swim when he crossed the Hellespont from Europe to Asia. He framed this in characteristically mythological and self-mythologising terms, referencing the ill-fated Leander who’s said to’ve swum the same stretch to reach his lover, Hero. These layers of myth-making helped me think about the impact of some of Britain’s varied interventions in the Middle East in the 200+ years since Byron’s swim, many of them focused on the dash for influence and oil.
Mark Smalley is a radio producer and creative writing facilitator, with a particular focus on encouraging a better understanding of and responses to the climate and nature crises. For a long time, Mark was a producer of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Poetry Please’, presented by Roger McGough, when he loved working with actors to lift the poems off the page. Now as a freelancer he makes podcasts and programmes that, among other things, explore deep geological time while responding to people’s love of rocks. His first poetry pamphlet, ‘Touchstone’, is in preparation.