I enjoy the seafaring fiction of writers like CS Forester, creator of Horatio Hornblower, the Jack Aubrey stories of Patrick O’Brien and similar fare. Over the years of reading such books, I realised of course that much of this fiction was based on the real characters who fought in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic war. There are number of them worth mentioning, such as Edward Pellew, the brilliant west countryman; William Sydney Smith, Philip Broke, and many more. And of course there is Lord Nelson himself, a man who has been much written about, with a fresh flurry of books written in 2005 to mark the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and his destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet off Cadiz.
If there is one character, however, who comes close to being the main inspiration for the fiction writers, it has to be Thomas Cochrane. Neglected as a biographical subject for many years, he has become a talking-point again, and Robert Harvey’s biography of the man, written a few years ago, is a cracking read. I have finally found the time to read it and have rarely been so enthralled by the brilliance, bravery and sheer daring of a real-life character. The son of a hard-up Scottish aristocrat, Cochrane went to sea at what was then the relatively late age of 17 (it was common for young boys to join much earlier). Within a few years, his promise became apparent and he was promoted. By his early 20s, Cochrane was a commander of flair, commanding his little ship, Speedy, in a series of engagements, frequently taking on much larger vessels and using his skill and trickery to beat them.
A few years after Trafalgar – in which he did not take part – Cochrane, who was not a popular man with his jealous and pompous Admiralty governors, led a fireship raid on the west coast of France. Although the raid was a general success, several ships that could and should have been destroyed were left intact because the admiral in overall charge of the operation, Lord Gambier, was over-cautious to the point, arguably, of cowardice. Cochrane later made harsh comments about Gambier and the whole affair ended up in a very unpleasant courts martial. Cochrane’s public career went into freefall; he was framed in a fraud case and sent to jail. He had a political career as a radical MP; and later, in an astonishing revival of his naval career, Cochrane went south to help form the Chilean navy, and played a full part in the overthrow of the old Spanish empire. He lived to a ripe and contented old age.
If Cochrane had his weaknesses to balance his many good points – he was a humane leader and loathed the barbaric naval practice of flogging – they were a large measure of vanity, a hot temper and inability to suffer fools gladly. Harvey’s biography of Cochrane very fairly draws out these points, but at no point does Harvey succumb to the tedious modern mania for showing that any extraordinary person has feet of clay. Cochrane was treated appallingly by many people, who were frequently ungrateful and uncomprehending of the skills needed to guide sailing ships in conditions of war. (One of his trademarks was sailing raids at night, often in treacherous condtions without modern navigation aids like radar).
When, back in 2005, I walked about HMS Victory at Portsmouth, and imagined what it must have been like to sail such wooden ships into battle, with all the discomforts, brutal discipline and harshness of such life, it made me feel very humble indeed. The naval men of Nelson and Cochrane’s age were a remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again.
As recent events have borne out… that generation is well and truly gone.
If you haven’t read the Patrick O’Brian novels, I thinkg they track Cochrane’s story pretty closely (and they are totally addictive)
If you haven’t read the Patrick O’Brian novels, I thinkg they track Cochrane’s story pretty closely (and they are totally addictive)
Is there a comparable figure in the Royal Navy from WW2? Who might some more recent equivalents be?
Captain F.J. Walker
Cheers
I politely disagree with your concluding thought. Every age has its real heroes, including our own – not just the bogus made-by-TV “everyman is a hero” types, or the politically acceptable iconic varieties either. It’s just that they’ve gone spectacularly unrecognized in our time, because heroes and heroism have gone out of fashion (except as fictional characters for our entertainment). When everyone knows a spoiled heiress is going to jail, but just a handful have ever heard of Norman Borlaug or John Boyd, the problem is with our sources of information, not humanity in general.
With regard to your observation of the “remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again”, I had to smile, because O’Brian had one of his minor characters, a Royal Marine, comment to Dr. Maturin that in their own degenerate times, their “deserts were less” than the warriors of the Bronze Age, honored in song and story. O’Brian knew well the tendency of men to disparage their own era in favor of bygone days. 😀
Since when is the inability to suffer fools gladly a character flaw or weakness?
Since people with that flaw had the tendency to classify anyone who disagrees with them as a fool; that is, for ever. “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” is a euphemism for “He’s overbearing, inflexible and selfrighteous.”
Jonathan,
Remember that conditions in The Victory were luxury compared with those in the small frigates, brigs and schooners in which Cochrane, Bligh, Cook operated.
The naval men of Nelson and Cochrane’s age were a remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again.
I think people still have it in them, the ability to rise to the challenge, etc. Though these days it sometimes seems the best you can expect is people heroically enduring being deprived of their iPod.
Not so many get the chance (Chinese curse – May you live in ‘interesting’ times) when they are hemmed in with Nanny State-ism “wrap everyone in cotton wool from cradle to grave and lets have some ‘counselling’” philosophy.
Imagine Nelson trying to fight off the French saddled with all that, or beating Hitler for that matter.
Guy, they were REAL MEN (and real boys) in those days- not only did they have cramped decks to work on, but they had to work 25 hours a day, 8 days a week, 53 weeks a year. They were allowed to sleep-walk, but not to sleep, and were given only rum to drink. You try explaining all that to the weak-wristed satan worshippers in today’s RN, and they don’t believe a word you say! I don’t know what’s wrong with today’s generation, I really don’t!!
Note that I used the word “probably”, not “never”. There have been individual acts of heroism and skill even in the current campaigns in the ME, but nothing on the sustained scale and duration of what I wrote about. Recent events concerning the navy vs Iran sadly bear this out.
Indeed.
We still have heroes. I saw an interview a coupla years back of a Russian bloke (and his spade). Why the spade? Well, he’d killed 60 Germans with it working as a sapper in Stalingrad. If your spade was the instrument by which you’d won a Hero of the Soviet Union medal you’d be bloody pleased with it. Now this bloke was spry as hell (I could’ve done without the impromptu re-enactment of exactly how he spaded the Germans, mind). This is well within living memory. There were heroes then, why not now?
JP, you hi-light the fact that Cochrane didn’t like the brutality of the navy. He was absolutely right. It doesn’t make for greater military efficiency. The officer pilots of the RAF had a rather pampered life during the 30s but it didn’t stop them being heroes in 1940.
Combat stress is bit tricky. So here’s something I think is an interesting question. Which would you prefer, the constant (relatively) low-level nagging fear of being a grunt or the calm of being a combat pilot interrupted by sorties of utter terror?
Anyhow, Johnson Beharry is a hero isn’t he? And he’s younger than me!
Cochrane’s own autobiography is a great read, if you can find a copy. I sat down and read it cover-to-cover in the Greenwich Maritime Museum library a few of years ago.
The gauzy lens of history tends to impart a character to the past which it did not have. We imagine the heroes, poets, artists, leaders, etc. of the past to be greater and purer than they were, and we imagine them to be of drastically different character than modern men. But this is misleading.
Perhaps we can argue about the relative abundance and merits of remarkable men of different eras, but it would be blind to contend that such men have been absent in our modern age. Consider the example of the Strategic Air Command. A handful of men crammed into an airplane packed with fuel and nuclear explosives and saddled with the responsibility of providing a deterrent force to protect the entirety of the free world from destruction and subjugation by the Communist empire. Worse yet, saddled with the burden that should they called to fulfill their duty, the successful completion of their bombing mission would mean the deaths of millions and very probably themselves as well. I would put those SAC crew members up for measure against any man from Cochrane’s or Nelson’s ships. Or, for more recent examples, consider the actions of Shughart and Gordon in Somalia or Beamer and cohorts in the skies above Pennsylvania or Jason Dunham and Paul Smith in Iraq.
It is more that we do not appreciate the fullness of character of such men in our own times (as, indeed, even Cochrane was not fully appreciated in his) than that such men have ceased to exist.
If a hero falls outside the historian’s ken, does he make a sound?
It was reported that during the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, a group of soldiers from Central America were ambushed and eventually ran out of bullets. They pulled out their knives and charged the Baathists — who turned & ran. The story was worth a line or two at the time on the inside pages of small town newspapers.
Ordinary people today remain as capable of immense bravery as their ancestors. It is the modern singers of songs & tellers of tales who are not in the same league as their forebearers. But then, we all knew that already. Didn’t we?
Nick M:
The hours and hours of boredom puntuated by brief moments of terror isn’t all that bad a way to do it. Well, not if you have some help with the brief moments anyway. My experience with the other kind is, well, if I call it comparable to what an infantryman in Iraq experiences outside the wire, every infantryman who’s ever been to Iraq will laugh at me and rightfully so.
And yes, Johnson Beharry is IMHO quite clearly a hero, as are the Royal Marines who tied themselves to the outside of gunship helicopters to rescue comrades on the ground, along with God only knows how many other servicemen from your country and mine and others who did things that were valorous to the point of being nearly suicidal because they needed to be done. The heroes are still there, even if the modern town criers are too busy crying to pay attention.
And thank God we still have them.
True. My father was a navigator in the RAF in the 1950s and could tell me a thing or two about what the job involved. But at the end of every mission, no matter how difficult, dad a decent place to lay his head. He had the benefits of modern medicines and so on if needed – rather different from the gruesome situation confronting Jack Tar.
I think one or two commentators have misunderstood my final paragraph, so I will state that I am not denigrating the current generation, nor am I looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. But it seems to me, that if you compare the relative comforts of live on a modern naval destroyer with what faced the people 200 years ago, there is simply no comparison, and it is surely unnecessary to labour the point.
Cochrane was an even more interesting character than the necessarily brief comments above suggest. Having been struck from the Royal Navy following his conviction for fraud in 1814, he took up with the revolutionary causes in Chile and Brazil. He is remembered with respect in both countries, especially Chile, whose navy consciously modeled itself on the Royal Navy, bought its dreadnought battleships from British builders, and still operates a modern, UK-built Type 23 frigate named the Almirante Cochrane. When he was finally reinstated in the Royal Navy, after succeeding as Earl of Dundonald, he went on to become C-in-C of the North America and West Indies station, based in Bermuda, where ships still use the Dundonald Channel to arrive in the main harbor. A very determined man indeed.
I’m pretty sure O’Brian acknowledges his dept to Cochrane in one of his introductions. One of the running themes through all twenty or however many books is the appalling conditions under which common sailors worked and thrived. Imagine climbing icy shrouds while being whipped through a hundred foot arc. If you fell it wouldn’t much matter whether you hit the deck or the ocean because you’d be dead either way. There must be folks living now doing equally wonderful things but I haven’t heard about it.