Cochrane the Dauntless
Page 40
standing rigging That part of the rigging which supports the masts and spars and which is not moved when operating the vessel, as distinct from
running rigging. starboard The right side of a vessel facing forward.
studding sail A light sail set outboard of a square sail and used in light airs.
supernumerary A person borne on the ship’s books surplus to the established complement.
tack To change the direction of a sailing vessel’s course by turning her bows into the wind until the wind blows on her other side.
tender A vessel attending a larger vessel and used to supply stores or convey passengers.
three-decker The largest class of warship, with upwards of 90 guns on three gundecks.
top (as in foretop, maintop, mizzentop) A platform built at the head of the lower mast serving to spread the topmast rigging and provide a place for sailors working aloft.
topgallant, topgallant sail A square sail set on the topgallant mast which was usually the highest of a ship’s masts, and was set above the topmast and the lower or mainmast.
topmen The sailors who went aloft to raise or lower the sails.
topsail A sail set on the topmast.
transport (noun) A vessel for carrying troops, usually a hired merchant ship converted for the purpose.
two-decker A ship of the line having two complete gun-decks.
van The foremost or leading ships of a fleet.
warp (noun) A rope used in towing or warping.
warp (verb) In calms or contrary winds it was often necessary to warp a vessel in and out of harbour or along a river. This was done by taking a rope or ropes from the ship to a fixed point ashore, or to a heavy post or pile driven into the river bed alongside the channel, and then heaving in the rope to haul the ship along.
warrant officers These ranked below the commissioned officers (the captain and lieutenants) and included the master, purser, surgeon, gunner, boatswain, carpenter and cook.
wear (as in ‘to wear ship’) o change the direction of a sailing vessel’s course by turning her bows away from the wind until the wind blows on her other side (the opposite manoeuvre from tacking when the bows are turned into the wind).
weather (adjective) The side facing the wind. The weather column of a fleet is the column to windward or nearest the direction from which the wind is blowing.
weigh To pull up the anchor.
xebec A three-masted vessel with lateen sails found along the coasts of Spain, Portugal and the Barbary States.
yard A long spar suspended from the mast of a vessel to extend the sails.
yardarm Either end of a yard.
Bibliography
Cochrane has been the subject of a great number of books and articles. Under the list of published material I have included only those books which I found most useful. I have not included relevant articles in the Naval Chronicle, the Mariners Mirror or similar journals, nor have I included newspaper references. These will be found in the notes to the individual chapters. A useful list of publications relating to Cochrane and South America will be found in The Audacious Admiral Cochrane by Brian Vale.
UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL
The Dundonald papers in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh: GD.233. This is a vast archive which includes correspondence and printed papers concerning Cochrane’s naval career, the Gambier court martial, the Stock Exchange trial, his time in South America, his work on his autobiography, as well as family letters, maps, plans and newspaper cuttings. There is a summary index of these papers in the National Archives at Kew: NRA.8150.
The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, also has a number of letters to and from Cochrane, although most of this collection concerns other members of the family.
The papers of Captain Frederick Marryat in the National Maritime Museum, London, including letters, a private log with intermittent entries from 1806 to 1825, and a number of his drawings and watercolours: MRY/2, MRY/6, MRY/11 and 12.
The papers of Dr James Guthrie in the National Maritime Museum, London, including correspondence between Guthrie and Cochrane: JOD/55 and 56. The papers of Admiral Collingwood in the British Library, London: Add.MSS 14276; 14278; 14279; 14280.
Minutes of Evidence given before the House of Lords Committee of Privileges in 1861, 1862, 1863. British Library (Social Sciences Dept): BS.96/51.
The papers of Lord Auckland in the British Library: Add.MSS. 34,459.
In the National Archives at the Public Record Office, Kew, London: Cochrane’s letters to the Admiralty; the logs and muster books of Cochrane’s ships (except for the log of the Speedy, which is in the National Archives of Scotland) and other ships associated with his career in the British Navy; the transcripts of court martials; minutes of Admiralty Board meetings; etc.
David J. Cubitt, Lord Cochrane and the Chilean Navy (Edinburgh University, PhD thesis, 1974).
John Sugden, Lord Cochrane, Naval Commander, Radical, Inventor: a study of his early career, 1775–1818 (University of Sheffield, PhD thesis, 1981).
PUBLISHED MATERIAL
Atlay, J. B., The Trial of Lord Cochrane before Lord Ellenborough (London, 1897)
Bamford, Samuel, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Passages in the Life of a Radical, edited by W. H. Chaloner (London, 1841; edition cited, 1967)
Blake, Nicholas and Lawrence, Richard, The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy (London, 1999)
Bonner-Smith, David, ed., Letters of Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of St Vincent, 1801–1804 (Navy Records Society, volumes 55 and 61, 1922–7)
Campbell, Lord John, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England (London, 1858)
Cecil, Henry, A Matter of Speculation: the Case of Lord Cochrane (London, 1965)
Chatterton, Lady Georgiana, ed., Memorials Personal and Historical of Admiral Lord Gambier (London, 1861)
Cochrane, Alexander, The Fighting Cochranes: a Scottish Clan over six hundred years of naval and military history (London, 1983)
Cochrane, Archibald, 9th Earl of Dundonald, Description of the Estate and Abbey of Culross (Edinburgh, 1793)
Cochrane, Thomas, 10th Earl of Dundonald, The Autobiography of a Seaman (first published as two volumes in 1860. The edition cited was published by Chatham Publishing in 2000 with an introduction by Richard Woodman)
Cochrane, Thomas, 10th Earl of Dundonald, Observations on Naval Affairs… Including Instances of Injustice experienced by the author (London, 1847)
Cochrane, Thomas, 10th Earl of Dundonald, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination (London, 1859)
Cochrane, Thomas Barnes, 11th Earl of Dundonald and Bourne, H. R. Fox, The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald (London, 1869)
Congreve, Major-General Sir W., A Treatise on the general principles, powers and facility of application of the Congreve Rocket System (London, 1827)
Dale, Richard, ‘Napoleon is dead’: Lord Cochrane and the great Stock Exchange scandal (Stroud, Glos., 2006)
Ellenborough, Lord, The Guilt of Lord Cochrane in 1814: a Criticism (London, 1914)
Finlay, George, History of the Greek Revolution (London, 1861)
Gardiner, Robert, Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars (London, 2000)
—The First Frigates: Nine-pounder and twelve-pounder frigates 1748–1815 (London, 1992)
Graham, Maria, (Lady Callcott)
Journal of a Residence in Chile during the year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London, 1824)
—Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and residence there during the years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London, 1824)
Grimble, Ian, The Sea Wolf: the life of Admiral Cochrane (London, 1978; edition cited, 2000)
Gurney, W. B., Minutes of a Court Martial… on the Trial of the Right Honourable James Lord Gambier (Portsmouth, 1809)
—The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, commonly called Lord Cochrane… for a Conspiracy in the Court of King
’s Bench, Guildhall on Wednesday 8th and Thursday 9th June 1814 (London, 1814)
Hall, Basil, Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821 and 1822 (Edinburgh, 1824)
Hill, Richard, The Prizes of War: the naval prize system in the Napoleonic Wars 1793–1815 (Stroud, Glos., 1998)
Hughes, Edward, ed., The private correspondence of Admiral Lord Collingwood (Navy Records Society, volume 98, 1957)
Ingrams, Richard, The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (London, 2005)
James, William, The Naval History of Great Britain (London, 6 volumes, 1878 edition)
Knight, Roger, The Pursuit of Victory: the Life and Achievements of Horatio Nelson (London, 2005)
Lambert, Andrew, compiler of the entry on Cochrane in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
Lavery, Brian, Nelson’s Navy: the Ships, Men and Organisation, 1793–1815 (London, 1989)
—The Arming and Fitting of English Ships of War, 1600–1815 (London, 1987)
Lloyd, Christopher, Lord Cochrane: Seaman, Radical, Liberator (London, 1947)
Mackesy, Piers, The war in the Mediterranean, 1803–1810 (London, 1957)
Markham, Sir Clements, ed., Selections from the Letters of Admiral John Markham (Navy Records Society, volume 28, 1904)
Marryat, Captain Frederick, Frank Mildmay, or the Naval Officer (London, 1829)
—Peter Simple (London, 1834)
—Mr Midshipman Easy (London, 1839)
Marryat, Florence, Life and Letters of Captain Marryat (London, 1872)
Miers, John, Travels in Chile and La Plata (London, 1826)
John Miller, ed., Memoirs of General Miller in the service of the Republic of Peru (London, 1829)
Mitford, Mary Russell, Recollections of a Literary Life, or Books, Places and People, (London, 1852)
Newnham Collingwood, G.L., A Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Lord Collingwood (London, 1829)
Oman, Carola, A History of the Peninsular War (London, 1902)
Patterson, M. W., Sir Francis Burdett and his Times (London, 1931)
Pocock, Tom, Captain Marryat, Seaman, Writer and Adventurer (London, 2000)
Raikes, Henry, ed., Memoir of Vice-Admiral Sir Jahleel Brenton (London, 1855)
Redding, Cyrus, Fifty Years Recollections, Literary and Personal (London, 1858)
Richardson, William, A Mariner of England (London, 1908)
Rodger, N. A. M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815, (London, 2004)
Smyth, W. H., The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver (London, 1829)
Spater, George, William Cobbett: the Poor Man’s Friend (Cambridge, 1982)
Stephenson, Charles, The Admiral’s secret weapon: Lord Dundonald and the origins of chemical warfare (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2006)
Stevenson, W.B., A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years Residence in South America (London, 1825)
Thomas, Donald, Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf (London, 1978)
Twitchett, E.G., Life of a Seaman: Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald (London, 1931)
Vale, Brian, The Audacious Admiral Cochrane: the true life of a naval legend (London, 2004)
Woodman, Richard, The Victory of Seapower: Winning the Napoleonic War 1806–1814 (London, 1998)
—The Sea Warriors: Fighting Captains and Frigate Warfare in the Age of Nelson (London, 2001)
Acknowledgements
This book is based to a large extent on the Admiralty collections in the National Archives at Kew, and on the Dundonald papers in the National Archives of Scotland. I am grateful to Douglas, Earl of Dundonald, for granting me access to the family papers, for the loan of colour transparencies of many of the family pictures, and for helpful discussions about his famous ancestor whose turbulent life he views with a keen but notably impartial interest. I am also indebted to some of the earlier biographies of Cochrane, particularly those by Christopher Lloyd, Ian Grimble and Donald Thomas. Grimble helped the fourteenth earl to catalogue the family papers and his book is a valuable source of quotations which he patiently extracted from the mass of often scarcely legible letters.
My greatest debt is to two more recent biographers. I am most grateful to John Sugden for his help and advice and for his masterly Ph.D. thesis, which covers Cochrane’s life up to 1818 and is a model of detailed research and sober analysis. I have also been heavily reliant on Brian Vale’s pioneering publications on Cochrane’s activities in South America and would like to thank him for sharing his thoughts and for lending me some of his unpublished material. I am also indebted to the Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony Evans, former Lord Justice of Appeal, who has examined the papers relating to the Stock Exchange fraud of 1814 and has given me the benefit of his legal opinion on the controversial trial which caused such a stir at the time and has continued to provoke dissenting opinions to this day. My thanks to him and his wife Caroline for their kindness and hospitality on many occasions. Thanks also to my friend John English, who invited me to sail with him two summers ago and with whom I spent an enjoyable week sailing from Majorca around the island of Minorca to the great harbour of Port Mahon – the starting point for Cochrane’s (and Jack Aubrey’s) first cruise as master and commander.
I would also like to thank John Batchelor for his excellent cutaway drawing of the Imperieuse, Norman Swales for drawing up the lines of the Speedy so beautifully, John Gilkes for his fine maps, and all those people who have answered my queries and supplied me with information or whose books I have plundered for information, especially Ian Cashmore, Robert Gardiner, Brian Lavery, Pieter van der Merwe, Roger Knight and Richard Woodman, as well as the staff of the British Library, the Essex Record Office, the Guildhall Library, the London Library, the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, the National Maritime Museum and the Newspaper Library at Colindale. I am most grateful to Nicholas Blake for painstakingly checking my draft text for historical and maritime errors but would stress that I am responsible for any errors that remain.
The staff of Bloomsbury, my publishers, have been unfailingly helpful and a pleasure to work with: I am particularly grateful to Bill Swainson for his constant support and wise advice but would also like to thank Emily Sweet and Polly Napper, both of whom have contributed to producing a book which, in my view at least, is an extremely handsome production. Above all my thanks go to my wife Shirley, who has helped me sort out my thoughts on numerous occasions, has once again put other things on hold while the writing was in progress, and has accompanied me on travels which have taken us from Edinburgh and Hampshire to Chile and Brazil in the tracks of Lord Cochrane.
And finally two notes on unrelated matters. Previous biographers have persisted in calling Cochrane’s wife Kitty. I have been unable to find any evidence for this and the current earl believes that it was a later member of the family who was called Kitty and not the woman that Cochrane himself invariably called Kate. Lastly I must acknowledge my debt to G. A. Henty, that once popular author of patriotic stories for boys. Fans of Henty will note that I have borrowed part of the title of one of his historical novels for the title of this book.
D.C.
Brighton, Sussex. April 2007
List of Illustrations
First colour plates
William Cochrane, the first Earl of Dundonald. (Courtesy of the Earl of Dundonald)
Thomas Cochrane’s father Archibald, the ninth Earl of Dundonald. (Courtesy of the Earl of Dundonald)
Thomas Cochrane as a boy. (Courtesy of the Earl of Dundonald)
The confluence of the Thames and Medway, 1808, by J.M.W. Turner. (© Tate, London, 2007)
The harbour and town of Lerwick, by J. C. Schetky. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
A British squadron off Valetta during the blockade of Malta, by Rev. Cooper Willyams. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
Lord St Vincent as First Lord of the Admiralty. (�
� National Maritime Museum, London)
A portrait of Admiral Lord Keith by William Owen. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
The Rock of Gibraltar viewed from the ruins of Fort St Philip. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
The capture of the Spanish El Gamo by the British sloop Speedy, 6 May 1801, by Clarkson Stanfield. (V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum)
A detail from a panoramic view of the royal dockyard at Plymouth, by Nicholas Pocock. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
A watercolour by J.M.W. Turner of Plymouth, looking across the shipping in the Cattewater towards the Citadel. (V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum)
Black and white plates
The boarding and taking of the Spanish xebec frigate El Gamo by His Majesty’s sloop Speedy. Engraving after the picture by Nicholas Pocock. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
Boats being launched from the Thames during the action off Gibraltar on 12 July 1801, by Pierre Ozanne. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
A portrait of Cochrane’s uncle, Admiral the Hon. Sir Alexander Cochrane, by Sir William Beechey. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
A portrait of the gallant Captain Jahleel Brenton. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
A multiple launching of warships at Plymouth on 17 November 1804. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
The Right Hon. Lord Collingwood, Vice-Admiral of the Red, by Bowyer. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
Admiral Sir Edward Thornborough, by Samuel Lane. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
An aquatint after Nicholas Pocock showing the closing stages of the action on 14 May 1806, with the Pallas attacking the Minerve. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
Aquatint after the picture by Robert Dodd described as ‘The attack on the Enemy’s Fleet by Fire Ships on the Night of the 11th April 1809’. (© National Maritime Museum, London)
Cochrane’s Imperieuse, followed by other British frigates, advances to attack the grounded French ships on the morning of 12 April 1809. (© National Maritime Museum, London)