Cochrane the Dauntless

by David Cordingly

  The recruiting poster issued by Cochrane at Plymouth in January 1805 to enlist men for his cruise to the Azores in the frigate Pallas.

  Meanwhile, the Pallas was ready to sail. Her masts, yards and rigging had been set up, the iron ballast had been stowed below, and on 1 January 1805 she had been towed from the Hamoaze through the Narrows to moorings in Stonehouse Pool. There the guns and the anchors had been lifted aboard, followed by barrels of gunpowder, and the stores of the gunner, boatswain and carpenter. On 21 January, the same day that the Mayor of Plymouth issued the warrant for Cochrane’s arrest, the Pallas weighed anchor and made sail. There was a light easterly breeze which died as they headed out into Plymouth Sound and they were forced to moor for the night. At seven o’clock the next morning they hoisted in the boats, sent the pilot ashore and headed out into the Channel.8 It was a cold, crisp January day with a fresh breeze stretching the new sails and blowing the occasional cloud of salt spray across the newly laid pine decks as the Pallas dipped her bows into the waves. For a while the slender column of Smeaton’s Eddystone lighthouse was clearly visible on their starboard beam and then the weather closed in and the lighthouse and the distant Cornish coast were hidden by showers of rain.

  They intercepted a merchant ship bound for Barbados and a British privateer heading for Madeira before coming across their first prize. She was a Spanish ship from Havana and they sighted her on 6 February. They fired a shot across her bows, forcing her to heave to, and sent the boats across to take possession of her. She was the Carolina, bound for Cadiz, and she was laden with logwood and sugar. The crew were taken on board the Pallas and replaced by a prize crew who sailed her back to Plymouth. A week later they boarded a second Spanish ship from Havana which, in addition to a valuable cargo, had a consignment of treasure in the form of gold and silver ingots. Again her crew were taken prisoner and the ship was sent to Plymouth. On 15 February they intercepted a Spanish ship, La Fortuna, which proved to be the richest prize of all. She was from Vera Cruz and had a cargo of mahogany and logwood as well as gold and silver coin to the value of $432,000. They spent some time ferrying the treasure from the ship to the Pallas and had no sooner hoisted in the boats then another sail was sighted on the horizon. They gave chase and within two hours had come up alongside another Spanish ship from Vera Cruz bound for Cadiz. She was the Sacra Familia, a fine looking privateer of 14 guns and she too had a rich consignment of dollars on board. For the next week they continued to cruise in the vicinity of the Azores with the two prizes accompanying them. No more Spanish ships passed their way but Cochrane intercepted every other vessel which hove in sight. American schooners and brigs, British merchantmen and privateers, a whaling ship, and even the Falmouth packet boat with mail for the Windward Islands were all stopped and boarded.

  Cochrane’s orders limited the time he was allowed to cruise in the vicinity of the Azores. ‘You are to continue on this service for one month after you shall arrive on your station, and then return to Plymouth, or sooner, if the number of prisoners you take shall make it necessary.’9 So in mid-March they headed for home. On 24 March they ran into strong gales with heavy rain squalls. They lowered the topsails and foresail and bent on the storm staysails. By dawn the next day the wind had moderated but there was still a heavy sea running. At five in the afternoon the lookout reported strange ships on the horizon. According to Cochrane’s autobiography he went aloft and identified them as three French line-of-battle ships in chase of the Pallas. The logbook simply records ‘2 strange sail in the NW supposed to be foreign line of battle ships’ and notes that the Pallas made sail and got up the topgallant masts. Cochrane provides a dramatic account of what happened next. Realising that the warships were gaining on them, he ordered all the hawsers in the ship to be got up to the mastheads and hove taut in order to take the strain as every possible stitch of sail was set. The French ships continued to draw closer so Cochrane decided on a bold move. He ordered his men to take in every sail, put the helm hard over and wore ship. ‘The Pallas, thus suddenly brought up, shook from stem to stern, in crossing the trough of the sea.’ The French ships were taken by surprise and shot past at full speed, running on for several miles before they were able to turn and resume the chase. That night, according to Cochrane’s account, he lowered a ballasted cask overboard with a lantern in the expectation that the French ships would follow the floating light rather than the Pallas. ‘The trick was successful… we saw nothing of them, and were all much relieved on finding our dollars and his Majesty’s ship once more in safety.’10 The logbook, however, makes no mention of any of this. Was he confusing the sighting of two strange warships out in the Atlantic with the chasing of the Speedy by the three French warships off Gibraltar?

  What is certain is that the first cruise of the Pallas made Cochrane’s fortune. There are widely differing accounts of the amount he received in prize money but it was likely to have been at least £40,000 (worth about £1 million today).11 This was a quarter of the total value of the four Spanish ships he had captured. He would have received three-eighths of the value if he had acquired his orders direct from the Admiralty but William Young, the port admiral at Plymouth, had cut himself in for an eighth share of the prize money by reissuing the Admiralty orders under his own name.12 Cochrane was deeply aggrieved by this but he could hardly complain at receiving such a windfall for a few weeks’ work. His uncle Alexander was well aware of his nephew’s lucky break and wrote to Lord Melville, ‘this beginning will I hope lay the foundation of his future fortune and I trust he will feel that he owes it freely to your Lordship’s kind attention’.13

  Prize money, which was such a dominating and motivating feature of Cochrane’s life, was regulated by a system which had been in force since the passing of the Convoys and Cruisers Act of 1708. This laid down that the entire value of a ship captured from the enemy should be divided among the officers and men who had taken part in her capture. Before the system was revised in 1808, three-eighths of the value went to the captain – unless he was under the orders of an admiral, in which case one of his eighths went to that admiral. One-eighth was divided among the captains of marines, sea lieutenants and masters; another eighth was divided among lieutenants of marines, and the other warrant officers; a further eighth went to midshipmen, surgeons’ mates and certain senior petty officers; and two-eighths was divided among the remainder of the crew and the marines.14 The system was manifestly unfair, particularly for the junior ranks and ordinary seamen who received a tiny proportion of the total sum agreed by the Admiralty Court or the various Vice-Admiralty Courts which were responsible for valuing the captured ship and her cargo. An admiral could accumulate thousands of pounds from ships operating under his command, without leaving his naval base in Antigua, Jamaica or Gibraltar. The captain of a ship of the line involved in blockading Brest or Cadiz had little opportunity for prize money whereas a frigate captain like Cochrane, operating independently of a fleet, could accumulate very large sums of prize money by the capture of merchant shipping.

  There are some spectacular examples of riches amassed by individuals during the wars of the eighteenth century. Rear-Admiral Warren accumulated £125,000 in prize money in the 1740s; Admiral Pocock received £122,697 following the fall of Havana in 1762; and Captain Saunders’ capture of a single ship in 1746 netted him nearly £40,000 in prize money.15 The wars against Revolutionary France produced similar examples: Captain Henry Digby, who had captured fifty vessels while in command of the frigate Aurora in 1797 and 1798, was one of the four captains present at the capture of the Spanish treasure ships El Tetys and Santa Brigida in 1799. The total value of the two prizes was £661,206. The admiral commanding the squadron of four frigates got £81,000; Digby and the other three captains £40,730 each and every seaman received just over £182 each – the equivalent of ten years’ pay.16 Such examples were unusual but most sailors had heard of them and the lure of prize money certainly helped recruitment and may have discouraged men from desertion.

/>   The Pallas entered Plymouth Sound on 5 April, and anchored in Cawsand Bay to await a pilot. The next day she made her way through the bustling activity of local boats and sailing barges and moored in Stonehouse Pool. The arrival of the Spanish prizes in Plymouth had already been reported in the local papers and Cochrane underlined the success of his voyage by lashing three very large golden candlesticks to the masts of the Pallas. This grandiose gesture was in the tradition of the Elizabethan privateers and was no doubt intended to impress the sailors on the waterfront and ensure that he never again had a problem with recruitment.

  Three weeks after her triumphant arrival in Plymouth the Pallas set sail for the Solent. The next assignment for Cochrane and his crew was to escort a convoy of merchantmen across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia and Quebec, an unglamorous task with little chance of action or prize money. They spent a week at the fleet anchorage at Spithead, another week anchored in St Helens Roads in the lee of the Isle of Wight and then headed down the Channel in the company of fourteen merchant ships. They were accompanied by the Harpy, a brig sloop similar to the Speedy and built by the same yard at Dover. They passed the Eddystone lighthouse on 29 April and sailed westwards at the speed of the slowest merchantman. While they were trailing across the grey waters of the North Atlantic a British fleet led by Nelson was racing across the warmer waters of the mid-Atlantic to the West Indies in search of Villeneuve and the French fleet which had escaped from the blockading force at Toulon. On learning that Nelson was after him Villeneuve headed back to Cadiz, missing Nelson by a matter of days. In a few months they would meet off Cape Trafalgar.

  A watercolour by Nicholas Pocock showing a frigate similar to the Pallas assembling a convoy in St Helens Roads off the Isle of Wight.

  The Pallas and her convoy sailed into the harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 30 June after a notably uneventful voyage. It had taken them two months compared with the twenty-four days it had taken Nelson and his line-of-battle ships to cover the greater distance from Spain to the Windward Islands. The Pallas spent a profitless summer cruising back and forth from Halifax to Cape Breton Island and King Edward Island before taking on a pilot and heading up the St Lawrence River. On 10 October the ship’s log noted, ‘Came to with the best bower in 27 fathoms, off the City of Quebec. Moor’d ship a cable each way.’ Quebec, built on the rocky heights above the river, had been captured from the French fifty years before in an assault led by General Wolfe who had died on the field of battle. His death had been commemorated in heroic paintings and prints which would soon be eclipsed by the outpouring of national grief which greeted the news of the death of Nelson. On 21 October, while the Pallas lay at anchor in the shadow of Quebec, the combined fleets of France and Spain joined battle with the British fleet in the seas off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson was hit by a musket ball while pacing the quarterdeck of the Victory with Captain Hardy. He was carried below to the orlop deck where he died around 4.30 p.m., having learnt from Hardy that the British had won a great victory.

  The return voyage of the Pallas was marked by storms. They sailed from Quebec on 29 October with another convoy and as they headed out into the Atlantic they encountered a gale which was accompanied by gusts of driving snow. The crew of one of the merchantmen had to abandon ship and were rescued by a boat from the Pallas. Later, as the convoy approached the English coast, they were hit by another gale which split the mainsail of the Pallas and then carried away her mizen topsail yard. The weather moderated as they sailed up the Channel and they had an easy run past Beachy Head and Dungeness. They anchored off Sheerness on 10 December. The foreman of the dockyard came on board to examine the state of the ship. It was evident that a major refit was required. The foremast had to be replaced as well as much of the running rigging. The planking needed attention from the caulkers, two of the ship’s boats needed repairs and condemned stores had to be removed and replaced. To facilitate the work the ship’s company were moved out of the ship for several days and took up residence in one of the hulks moored off the dockyard.

  The log of the Pallas records that on 24 December, while the men were moving their gear into the hulk, ‘passed by HMS Victory with the body of Lord Nelson’. In fact Nelson’s body was no longer on board the ship on which he had died. On 22 December Nelson’s secretary, John Tyson, had arrived at Sheerness with the coffin made from the mast of L’Orient, the French flagship which had blown up at the Battle of the Nile. Tyson had secured permission to fetch the coffin from the undertakers and he arranged for it to be loaded on to the Chatham, the dockyard yacht at Sheerness and taken out to the Victory which was lying at anchor at the mouth of the Thames estuary waiting for a favourable wind to proceed up the river.17 Early on the morning of 24 December the Chatham set off for Greenwich bearing Nelson’s body. As the yacht proceeded up the Thames her progress was marked by the firing of minute guns from the forts at Tilbury and Gravesend and by the tolling of bells from the churches along the river. Later that day the Victory passed Sheerness dockyard and headed up the Medway to Chatham.

  The repairs and provisioning of the Pallas were completed in a little over three weeks and on 14 January 1806 she weighed anchor and sailed for the Downs. They spent a week among the warships and merchantmen lying in the anchorage and while they were there Cochrane spent some of his prize money on the purchase of a galley from the boat builders of Deal. The Deal galleys were long, narrow, clinker-built boats famous for their speed under oar and sail. They were launched off the steep shingle beach at Deal and were used to race pilots out to waiting ships and to rescue ships in distress on the Goodwin Sands. Cochrane’s boat ‘rowed double-banked, and required eighteen hands at the oars and this together with her beautiful build rendered her perhaps the fastest boat afloat’.18 This may not have been an exaggeration. The galley later played a key role in Cochrane’s boat actions off enemy coasts and her design so impressed the Admiralty that they ordered drawings to be made of her lines.19

  Given the restricted space available for storing boats on the smaller types of frigate it seems likely that the galley replaced one of the existing boats of the Pallas rather than added to their number. At this period it was usual for frigates to be issued with four or five boats: a launch, a barge or pinnace, one or two cutters and a jolly boat.20 The largest of the boats were stored in the waist of the ship (the space on deck between the foremast and the mainmast). To lift heavy boats over the side and into the water took some time and involved complicated tackle and a lot of men heaving on ropes. The smaller and lighter boats were hung from quarter davits on either side of the stern and could be launched rapidly in the event of an emergency, such as a man overboard. All the ship’s boats could be sailed as well as rowed, and it was usual for the large launch to be fitted with a carronade in her bows. Cochrane later fitted carronades into most of his boats when he carried out his raids on the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain.

  Cochrane now received orders to cruise off the French coast at Boulogne and then to join Vice-Admiral Edward Thornborough’s squadron at Plymouth. On 15 February 1806, after two weeks of raiding the Normandy coast, she headed down the Channel to Plymouth Sound. Lying at anchor in Cawsand Bay was Thornborough’s squadron: his flagship the Prince of Wales, four ships of the line and a cutter. Within a day of the Pallas joining the squadron they sailed for France, and for a month Cochrane kept company with the warships. They proceeded south past Ushant and Brest, past Lorient and Belle Ile towards Basque Roads. During the cruise Cochrane made a series of raids on coastal shipping: off the Ile Dieu his boats captured seven fishing boats; he took a lugger loaded with wine and shifted twelve hogsheads on board the Pallas; and as they sailed by the coastal town of Les Sables d’Olonne a brig and several other vessels were seen at anchor in the bay. Cochrane sent the boats inshore and they successfully boarded and captured the brig. Another brig was so alarmed by the shots fired at her by the Pallas that her crew ran her ashore.

  On 29 March they rejoined the squadron which was sailing in the
vicinity of Basque Roads. Cochrane went aboard the flagship of Admiral Thornborough and received orders to cruise independently and to continue to harass enemy commerce and shipping. He now embarked on one of the more perilous undertakings of his life as a frigate captain. He had received information that some French corvettes were lying at anchor in the estuary of the Garonne, the river which joins the Dordogne near Bordeaux. One of the corvettes was acting as a guardship and Cochrane decided to make a night attack on this vessel and cut her out (the naval term for capturing an anchored ship by sending armed men in boats to overcome her crew and sail her away). The great estuary of the Garonne, known as Le Gironde, is nearly nine miles wide at its mouth. The nautical almanac warns the mariner ‘the outer approaches can be dangerous due to Atlantic swell, very strong tidal streams and currents, extensive shoals and shifting sand banks’, and points out that strong westerly winds and an ebb tide can produce breaking seas some five metres high.21 In addition to the navigational hazards there were gun batteries defending the stretch of river where the guardship was anchored.

  At 8.25 on the evening of 5 April, Cochrane anchored the Pallas near the Cordovan Shoal which lies at the entrance of the Gironde. All the boats were launched, and under the command of the first lieutenant, John Haswell, nearly 180 men proceeded upstream. The conditions were favourable for a night attack. There was only a moderate southerly wind, and clouds obscured the moon and stars so that the boats were able to cover the twenty miles to the target unobserved. At 3.00 a.m. the boats came alongside the corvette which proved to be the Tapageuse, a French warship armed with fourteen 12-pounder guns. Her crew of ninety-five were taken unawares and though they put up some resistance they were easily overcome. However, the firing of pistols and muskets during the attack alerted the crews of the other vessels moored upstream. Lieutenant Haswell and his men managed to weigh anchor and get the Tapageuse under way when they were attacked by a vessel which is described in Cochrane’s report as a sloop-of-war, and in the logbook as a gun brig. They managed to beat off the attacker, causing as much damage to her hull as the Tapageuse suffered in the rigging.