HERITAGE WILDLIFE


The Lord of chaos


A legend and a rogue, the swashbuckling Admiral Thomas Cochrane remains arguably the most audacious and impressive of all Scottish warriors


WORDS STUART KELLY


explaining his son. Under Thomas’s father the estate became financially straitened, so, like a good Enlightenment man, Archibald Cochrane took to invention. And his invention worked: coal tar, produced on an industrial scale to his patent, could caulk boats. An experiment with a buoy, half-coated and half-uncoated was a success, but the shipyards applied enough pres- sure to ensure the procedure was held up long enough for the patent to expire, allowing the Navy to use the method gratis. Unfortunately, the estates of the Cochranes


‘Cochrane’s life is more suited to swashbuckling novels than footnoted monographs’


Above: Ioan Gruffudd as Horatio Hornblower, the CS Forester hero based on Cochrane. Opposite page: Peter Edward Stroehling’s painting of Cochrane in 1807 captured him at the height of his powers before scandal struck.


M


ost people nowadays know of Admiral Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald and 1st Marquess


of Maranhão, through novels. His exploits and adventures inspired both C S Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey. The naval novelist Captain Frederic Marryat, author of Mr Midshipman Easy, served under Cochrane, and he makes an appearance in Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Devil. In a way, it is wholly fitting that this larger than life charac- ter should be commemorated in fiction rather than dry history: his life is more suited to swash- buckling novels than footnoted monographs. The Cochranes rose to the peerage back in


1647 when the first Earl started a pattern of expedience trumping ideology. Made a knight by Charles I, he apparently, towards the end of his life, had a chaplain praying for the defeat of the Covenanters, while Thomas Cochrane’s father, the 9th Earl, had a strange relationship with the Navy, which goes some way towards


84 WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK


had been the collateral for the experiment. Young Thomas, born in 1775, grew up in Hamilton and Culross with a title, a pedigree, the remnants of an estate, no cash and limited prospects. In a nifty scam – and there would be more – Thomas was enrolled as a sailor at the age of five, an illegal process called ‘false muster’, so that when he came of age he would be deemed to have served sufficient years to be promoted. His uncle enrolled him; his father preferred that he should be in the army and pulled the same trick. When Cochrane finally went


to sea, aged


17 aboard the HMS Hind and then the HMS Thetis, the Royal Navy was changing. It was the crux between the days of Drake, when the Navy was effectively a legitimated pirate force, and the professionalisation undertaken by Admiral Jacky Fisher in the later Victorian period. By 1798, having toured Norway and North America, and having become a lieu- tenant, Cochrane was court-martialled for disrespect aboard the HMS Barfleur. Although he was found innocent he was reprimanded for flippancy – a pattern of anti-authoritarian behaviour had begun.


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