Cochrane

Thomas Cochrane entered the Royal Navy during the wars with Revolutionary France and built his reputation through speed, deception and aggressive independent command. Robert Harvey recounts the cruises of HMS Speedy, including the capture of the much larger Spanish frigate El Gamo, his later service in Pallas and Imperieuse, and the fireship attack at the Basque Roads. Cochrane’s public dispute with Admiral Gambier and the Admiralty was followed by conviction in the 1814 Stock Exchange fraud, expulsion from Parliament and the loss of his naval honours.

Denied a British command, Cochrane became an admiral in the independence struggles of Chile and Peru, where his seizure of Valdivia and cutting-out of the Spanish frigate Esmeralda demonstrated the same appetite for irregular operations. He later served Pedro I in Brazil and the Greek revolutionary government, repeatedly quarrelling with ministers over money, authority and strategy. The biography follows his eventual rehabilitation in Britain and presents a commander whose courage, technical imagination and political radicalism were inseparable from a combative and often self-destructive temperament.