LIVA. D. 1812THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE
WhenLieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of warSpeedy, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her cannon-balls in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy boat alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and three hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down into his decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-guns. Leaving only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard, got more than he bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but that a detachment of his sailors dressed to resemble black demons, charged down from the forecastle head. The Spaniards were so shocked that they surrendered.
For thirteen months theSpeedyromped about, capturing in all fifty ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners. Then she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and met with a dreadful end.
In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate mechanic, was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with explosives—with which he attackeda French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.
And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged, red-haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring. At war he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon, restless, fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing schoolboy jokes on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be happy without making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies waited their chance.
In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings that the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The messenger’s progress became a triumphal procession, and amid public rejoicings he entered London to deliver his papers at the admiralty. Bells pealed, cannon thundered, the stock exchange went mad with the rise of prices, while the messenger—a Mr. Berenger—sneaked to the lodgings of an acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and borrowed civilian clothes.
His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the whole blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for the mere lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the pillory, a year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He was struck from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of commons, his banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown from the doors of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he was driven to disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.
Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed from Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his mother, a son of his—Tom Cochrane, junior—aged five, contrived to sail with the admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with the blood and brains of a marine.
“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went below for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the middy went to sleep and the ship was cast away.
Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went off with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns. Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets behind, wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them straight at the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city. So he found some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for his next attack on Callao.
He had a fancy for the frigate,Esmeralda, which lay in Callao—thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased theminds of the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels, but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and forty strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely surprised theEsmeralda. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with the butt end of a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously hurt, in addition to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he took possession of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened fire, but El Diablo noticed that two neutral ships protected themselves with a display of lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please don’t hit me.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Cochrane and copied those lights which protected the neutrals. When the bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they promptly attacked the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.
Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the Spaniards, the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and rewards. Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a limited income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was misunderstood, and left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of Brazil from the Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the Brazilians proved to be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the Brazilian government that all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder, spars and sails, were alike rotten, and all their men an encumbrance, he dismantled a squadron to find equipment for a single ship, thePedro Primeiro. This he manned with British and Yankee adventurers. He had two other small but fairlyeffective ships when he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen Portuguese war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship with their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where Cochrane grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear of that fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to spare for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved her water casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run before the wind back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard. He captured seventy odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure, fought and out-maneuvered the war fleet so that he could not be caught, and only let thirteen wretched vessels escape to Lisbon. Such a deed of war has never been matched in the world’s annals, and Cochrane followed it by forcing the whole of Northern Brazil to an abject surrender.
Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully rewarded their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he turned to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that even the Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the Greek patriots, and the heart-sick man went home.
England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave back his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of a British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in HenryVII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man went to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was among the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets and homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy; made a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the reduction of Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of the siege. Yet even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and terrify all official persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the Abbey, Lord Brougham pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he exclaimed at the grave side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state to grace this great man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of the poor old hero.