The fire of the Earl of Buckinghamshire's son was always alight, and he became, during the great Civil War in America the boldest of blockade-runners.

When the Confederacy collapsed Hobart, by this time a Post-Captain, received overtures of employment from the Turkish Government, and in 1868 he was appointed, as Admiral Slade had been before him, to a high command in the Ottoman Navy.

It was a curious illustration of the various turns of fate here below to find in 1869 the Sultan, the Commander of the Faithful, sending the Giaour Hobart Pasha, the erst Secesh blockade-runner, to the island of Crete to put down blockade-running on the part of the intensely patriotic but occasionally troublesome Greeks.
Hobart was entrusted with unlimited powers, and he accomplished his mission with so much vigour and with so much skill as to insure the good graces of the Porte, and he soon rose to be Inspector-General of the Imperial Ottoman Navy.

Although his name was necessarily erased from the list of the Royal Navy when he definitely threw in his lot with the Sultan on the breaking out of the Turko-Russian war, all English admirers of pluck and daring were glad to learn at a comparatively recent period that the Honourable Augustus Charles Hobart Hampden had been reinstated by Royal command in his rank in the British Navy.
'It was the good fortune of the distinguished maritime commander just deceased, to win golden opinions from all sorts of peoples, and his name and prowess will be as cordially remembered in his native land, and in the Southern States of America, as on the shores of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn.
'A thorough Englishman at heart, he was none the less a fervent philo-Turk in politics and convictions, and latterly devoted his talents and his life to the defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

As ready with his pen as with his sword, he was a clear, trenchant, vigorous writer, and could talk on paper as fluently and as cogently about ironclads and torpedoes as about the wrongs of the natives of Lazistan, the necessity of upholding the integrity of the Turkish Empire, and of circumventing the dark and crooked wiles of Russian diplomacy.