By Ken Ringle,
who is a former Post reporter and veteran tall ship sailor
Monday, October 15, 2007

COCHRANE

The Real Master and Commander

By David Cordingly

Bloomsbury. 420 pp. $32.50

Though far from humble about his creative talents, novelist Patrick O'Brian always stressed that the real-life Royal Navy exploits on which he based his 20-book Aubrey/Maturin saga far outstripped anything he could imagine. He also noted repeatedly that his swashbuckling scourge of the Napoleonic navy, "Lucky Jack" Aubrey, was grounded in the life and adventures of a genuine naval hero named Thomas Cochrane, about whom too little is remembered today.

Now comes British writer and historian David Cordingly, a former curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, to bring us up to date on Cochrane. If his biography is not quite a banquet for the reader, it is still most intriguing and satisfying fare. Within his nearly 85 years, Cochrane packed enough drama and history to shame both Horatio Nelson and Sir Francis Drake.

Not only was he an audaciously brave, sword-waving warrior, boarding hundreds of enemy ships amid cannon smoke and wreaking assorted havoc with shoreside raiding parties and ship-stealing "cutting out" expeditions, he was also a reformist gadfly in Parliament, a tireless tinkerer and inventor of everything from poison gas and tunneling techniques to electrical insulation, an author and pamphleteer, a pioneering advocate of both rocket bombardment and a steam-powered navy, and, just for good measure, a major on-the-scene player in the liberation of Chile and Peru from the Spanish, Brazil from the Portuguese and Greece from the Turks. He was the perfect romantic hero for the romantic age. Wrote Lord Byron: "There is no man I envy so much as Lord Cochrane."

O'Brian fans will find great satisfaction in smoking out similarities and differences between Cochrane and Aubrey. Like O'Brian's hero, Cochrane overwhelmed and captured a crowded 32-gun Spanish xebec (shouldn't every enemy sailing ship be as sinister-looking and -sounding as a lateen-rigged xebec?) while skippering a tiny, undermanned 14-gun brig, whose four-pound cannon balls were so small, Cochrane joked, that he could carry a broadside's worth in his pockets.

Like Aubrey, Cochrane excelled in ruses de guerre and reinforced his topmasts with huge anchor lines so he could set more sail while pursuing prey. Like Aubrey, he was imprisoned and cashiered from the navy (and later reinstated) in connection with a stock market swindle. Like Aubrey, he had a surgeon friend who followed him from ship to ship and a favorite fellow officer named Heneage Dundas.

But he was far more interested in money than the fictional Aubrey, far less outwardly exuberant and more politically outspoken; a radical instead of a Tory, a bitter self-justifier after the stock market debacle instead of a wounded stoic. Unlike Aubrey, he apparently never played the violin. And though, like Aubrey, he rarely flogged his sailors, he once let one drown rather than risk lowering a boat to save him. Aubrey would have dived in himself and hauled him out.

But Cochrane's achievements leave those of his fictional counterpart in the dust. In less than 15 months as commander of the little (78-foot) 14-gun brig Speedy, for example, he captured more than 50 vessels, 122 guns and 534 prisoners. And that was his first independent command. So cramped was his 6-by-4-foot captain's cabin on the Speedy that Cochrane shaved standing with his head through the skylight, lathering up with his razor, soap and brush on the deck outside.

The stops and starts and shifting alliances of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), including, in a larger sense, our own War of 1812 with Britain, tend to blur the memory of even passionate history buffs, and one of the strengths of Cordingly's narrative is how well he places the naval battles, which the British could never seem to lose, against those on land, where they could hardly seem to win. He also excels at describing the world of the age of sail (keeping nautical jargon to a merciful minimum) and the socio-political arcana of early-19th-century Britain, with its "rotten boroughs" and "pocket boroughs" and Dickensian brutality.

But his signal achievement is in bringing to life both the conflicted genius of Cochrane and the remarkable cultural context in which he lived. Novelist Frederick Marryat was one of his officers. Artist J.M.W. Turner painted his ships. A young Queen Victoria oversaw his restoration to the Order of the Bath. Liberators Jos¿ de San Mart¿n and Bernardo O'Higgins were Chilean allies. To author Anthony Trollope, he would always be "that indefatigable old hero."

Cochrane was buried, like Nelson, in Westminster Abbey, but unlike his hero, he receives little if any notice today, even in British history books. It's an omission, Cordingly convinces us, as curious as it is unjust.