On 2 June Sir Francis Burdett made a second attempt to introduce a motion in the House of Commons proposing parliamentary reform and Cochrane used the occasion to make his farewell speech to Parliament. He was as outspoken as ever:
As it is probably the last time I shall ever have the honour of addressing the House on any subject, I am anxious to tell its Members what I think of their conduct. It is now nearly eleven years since I have had the honour of a seat in this House, and since then there have been very few measures in which I could agree with the opinions of the majority… I will say, as has been said before by the great Chatham, the father of Mr Pitt, that if the House does not reform itself from within, it will be reformed with a vengeance from without. The people will take up the subject and a reform will take place which will make many Members regret their apathy in now refusing that reform which might be rendered efficient and permanent.
He warned them that commotions would arise which would shake the whole framework of government and society to its foundations. He thanked his constituents for their support and for rescuing him from the wicked conspiracy which had nearly ruined him, and he concluded, ‘I shall not trespass on your time longer now – perhaps never again on any subject. I hope His Majesty’s ministers will take into their serious consideration what I now say. I do not utter it with any feelings of hostility – such feelings have now left me – but I trust that they will take my warning, and save the country by abandoning the present system before it is too late.’23
Thirteen years would pass before a Whig government led by Lord Grey would attempt to drive the first great Reform Bill through a reluctant Parliament. When it was rejected there were riots and demonstrations across the country as Cochrane had warned. Public buildings were set on fire in Bristol; in Birmingham the church bells were muffled and tolled as if for a funeral; and in London the papers came out in mourning and the windows of the Duke of Wellington’s house were smashed. Lord Grey threatened to create fifty new peers to force the bill through the House of Lords but the opposition caved in and on 7 June 1832 the Reform Act became law, removing the old rotten and pocket boroughs, allocating seats to the new industrial towns and greatly increasing the size of the electorate.
At the beginning of August the Cochrane family and their servants travelled to the Sussex port of Rye where they boarded a fishing smack and sailed across the Channel to Boulogne. There they boarded the Rose, a merchant ship of 300 tons, and on 15 August they set sail for South America. It would be seven years before Cochrane returned to Britain.
17
The Liberation of Chile and Peru
1818–1822
The voyage across the Atlantic and around Cape Horn to Valparaiso took more than three months. They reached the bleak coastline of Tierra del Fuego without incident. The only signs of life in those cold, southern seas were colonies of penguins gathered on the rocky shores and the occasional albatross soaring overhead on outstretched wings. A fierce westerly wind hit them as they approached Cape Horn. For three days the ship laboured in heavy seas, her decks swept by rain and flurries of snow. They headed south where they picked up a favourable wind and were able to round the Horn and turn north into the calmer seas of the Pacific. A rugged, mountainous region of fiords and glaciers and islands slowly gave way to a densely forested landscape with the distant blue slopes and snow-covered peaks of the Andes in the background. At last, on 29 November 1818, the Rose reached Valparaiso and dropped anchor among the shipping moored in the bay. Built on the steep hills which curved around the harbour was a dense cluster of houses rising one above the other, many with small gardens overflowing with beautiful shrubs and fruit trees. Narrow, steeply sloping streets led down to the waterfront and the centre of the town with its markets and shops, a large church and a square overlooked by the grand façade of the governor’s residence.
Cochrane arrived in the New World at a critical moment in its history. For more than three hundred years the vast continent of South America had been under the rule of Spain and Portugal. The pioneering voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s had been followed by the expeditions of the conquistadors and within less than fifty years Spain effectively controlled much of South and Central America. Only Brazil lay outside Spain’s control and that country was ruled by Portugal, the other great seafaring power of the age of exploration. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the two colonial powers had extended their rule over the continent. They had established estates and plantations, and built towns and cities with churches, cathedrals and plazas along the lines of those to be found in Seville, Cadiz and Lisbon.
As the South American countries grew in economic strength the local people came increasingly to resent the restrictions placed on their trading activities and wanted more control over their own affairs. The American Revolution of 1776 leading to the declaration of independence by the United States had shown the way, but it was the invasion of Spain and Portugal by Napoleon’s armies in 1808 which encouraged armed resistance to the colonial powers. Within a few years of the overthrow of the monarchy in Spain there were uprisings against the Spanish royalists in the New World. A military junta declared the State of Paraguay independent and in Buenos Aires there was an armed rebellion which ejected the Spanish viceroy and established a republic in what is now Argentina. The independence movement in the north was led by Simon Bolivar and his campaigns eventually led to the establishment of the independent republics of Colombia and Bolivia.
In the south the key figures were General José de San Martin and General Bernardo O’Higgins, both of whom would play a crucial role in Cochrane’s life. San Martin had been born in Argentina, trained as an army officer in Spain and fought against Napoleon’s invading army with distinction. He had returned to South America in 1812 to join the patriot forces under General Belgrano and had fought a number of actions against royalist forces in the region of the Rio de la Plata. In January 1817 he led an army over the high mountain passes of the Andes into Chile. On 12 February this army fought and won a crucial battle with Spanish forces at Chacabuco, and a few days later San Martin entered Santiago. He declined the offer to head the independent republic of Chile, leaving it to his friend General Bernardo O’Higgins to become Supreme Director.
O’Higgins, whose Irish father had been Spanish viceroy of Peru, had been sent to England for his education, returned to the family estate in Chile and joined the patriot army. He had displayed conspicuous bravery and leadership in numerous skirmishes and hard-fought actions, and eventually joined forces with San Martin. He took part in the epic march over the Andes and led the infantry at the Battle of Chacabuco. It was O’Higgins who said, ‘This battle and one hundred more will be meaningless unless we control the seas.’1
Both men were in their early forties when Cochrane arrived in Chile and were very different in character and appearance. San Martin was tall and imposing with the air of a man of the world. ‘He has a dark attractive countenance, with black, expressive and penetrating eyes,’ noted one observer. ‘His manners are dignified, easy, friendly.’2 O’Higgins was round-faced and stocky and lacked the worldly manners of San Martin. However, the writer and traveller Maria Graham admired ‘the plain simple good sense, honesty and right feeling of O’Higgins’ and it was O’Higgins that Cochrane warmed to and most respected.3 The two men remained on good terms through all the difficulties of the next four years.
A chart of the harbour of Valparaiso in 1826. The town of Valparaiso is in the top left corner of the bay and the town of Almendral (now called Vino del Mar) is at the bottom of the illustration.
When the news reached O’Higgins that the merchant ship Rose had dropped anchor in the bay at Valparaiso, he left the presidential palace in Santiago, boarded his carriage and hurried to greet the new commander of the Chilean navy. Cochrane and his party were invited to join the Supreme Director in Santiago. They arrived at the country’s capital on 4 December and were entertained for several days with a series of l
avish banquets and balls at which the young and beautiful Lady Cochrane made a great impression. Cochrane made less of an impression, according to George Worthington, the American agent in the city. ‘His first appearance is not prepossessing. He is about forty years old, very tall and not corpulent, rather of a stripling appearance; not courtly in his address, but very plain and bold in his remarks and opinions; yet not authoritative nor pompous.’4 When Worthington met Cochrane at a dinner given by General San Martin a few days later he was more enthusiastic and noted that he was ‘very much pleased with him as a man of no ordinary talents, of great frankness and an advocate of civil liberty’.5
Cochrane appreciated the hospitality of the Chileans but he thought that the festivities and feasts were ‘prolonged for so many days as to amount to a waste of time’.6 He reminded O’Higgins that his purpose in coming to his country was to fight rather than to feast. On 11 December he became a Chilean citizen and was formally appointed vice-admiral and commander-in-chief of the Chilean navy. His pay and allowances were to be $6,000 a year (£1,200). On 9 January 1819 he received his orders from Zenteno, the Minister of Marine. He was to lead an expedition which was to ‘blockade the port of Callao, to cut off the maritime forces of the Viceroy of Lima… and by so-doing enable them to be defeated in detail’.7 The expedition was intended as a preliminary foray to encourage patriot resistance, gather intelligence and to seize all ships and property belonging to Spain. Cochrane was ordered to keep clear of shore batteries, to avoid action with superior forces and to ensure that nothing should put at risk the invasion of Peru which was planned for the following year.
Callao was chosen as the first objective for Cochrane’s naval campaign because it was Spain’s principal naval base on the Pacific coast and it was the port for Lima, the capital of Peru and the administrative centre for the Spanish colonial empire in South America. As long as the Spanish navy controlled the seas in the region there would be a constant threat to the independence of Chile and it would be difficult for San Martin to achieve his long-term aim – the liberation of Peru. There were differing accounts of the strength of the Spanish navy. Commodore William Bowles of the British squadron operating off South America reported that in 1817 ‘the whole naval force of His Catholic Majesty in these seas consists of the Venganza and Esmeralda of 36 guns each, and three corvettes of 16 or 8 guns’.8 Other accounts reported that the Spanish had fourteen warships including three frigates and four brigs, as well as six armed merchantmen and twenty-seven gunboats.9 The Spanish may have had a notional force as large as this scattered up and down the coast but few of the ships were ready for sea, and the gunboats were only suitable for port defence.
The Chilean squadron under Cochrane’s command consisted of seven vessels in all, three frigates, three brigs and a sloop.10 Two of the frigates were former East Indiamen but the O’Higgins was a powerful Spanish warship of 50 guns. Formerly the Maria Isabel she had recently been captured in Talcahuano Bay while escorting a convoy of transports. For Cochrane, who had spent three years in the Spanish-built frigate Imperieuse, the rig and fittings of the O’Higgins must have been reassuringly familiar and he had no hesitation in making her his flagship. While inferior to a British squadron of similar size, the Chilean vessels were perfectly adequate for Cochrane’s purposes. He described the squadron as ‘a force which, though deficient in organisation and equipment, was very creditable to the energy of a newly emancipated people’.11
Chile had no naval tradition and was therefore reliant on foreign sailors to man the ships. A recruiting campaign in Britain and North America had proved remarkably successful and by 1819 had attracted 1400 officers and seamen. Two-thirds of the seamen and almost all the officers were British or American. In addition to the sailors a force of some four hundred marines was recruited, all of whom were Chilean.12 The senior officers of the squadron varied considerably in background and experience. The Chilean-born Manuel Blanco Encalada was the youngest and least experienced but he had proved his bravery as an artillery officer in the liberation struggle and before Cochrane’s arrival he had been made commodore and commander-in-chief of the new Chilean navy. His only previous naval experience was as a midshipman in the Spanish navy but he had justified his promotion by capturing the Maria Isabel. He was now twenty-eight and became Cochrane’s second in command with the rank of rear-admiral. The third in command was Robert Forster from Bamburgh, Northumberland. He had spent twenty years in the British navy in frigates and ships of the line and seen action in the Bay of Biscay and the Baltic and also in America where he had impressed Alexander Cochrane when serving as first lieutenant of the Asia. Cochrane had recruited him in London and now appointed him flag captain of the O’Higgins. This created some ill will because Captain Martin Guise was three months senior to Forster on the Navy List. Guise, who was also a Royal Navy veteran with considerable fighting experience, had arrived in Valparaiso several months before Cochrane’s arrival and had brought with him the former British brig Hecate (now called the Galvarino). He was given command of the 44-gun frigate Lautaro but he and his friend Captain John Spry, who commanded the Galvarino, would cause problems for Cochrane in the future. The best officer by far, who would prove his gallantry on numerous occasions, was Major William Miller, formerly a British artillery officer and now the Commandant of Marines.13 He had fought with Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula, and in due course would rise to the rank of general. His memoirs provide a valuable corrective to the version of events which Cochrane published in his last years to justify his actions in South America.
As always Cochrane was impatient to get going and on 16 January 1819 he set sail with four ships, leaving the remainder to follow as soon as they were ready. The departure was accompanied by a minor drama. Lady Cochrane had said goodbye to her husband and returned to their house when she looked out of the window and was horrified to see their five-year-old son Tom being carried on the shoulders of a cheering crowd to the waterfront. He had slipped out of the house and told a lieutenant that he wanted to see his father. As the last gun was fired to summon all hands on board, the lieutenant and Tom clambered aboard the ship’s launch and were rowed out to the O’Higgins. The ship was already under way as they came alongside so it was too late to send Tom ashore. He joined the crew of his father’s ship and was soon fitted out with a miniature midshipman’s uniform.
It took them more than a month to cover the 1,500 miles from Valparaiso to Callao. They sailed past a constantly changing coastline of great natural beauty: bleak, rocky headlands alternated with sheltered bays and deep, wooded valleys; at first the windblown trees, undulating hills and pastures resembled those of Devon or Cornwall but as they headed north the climate and vegetation became more Mediterranean with olive groves and palms, and barren plains covered by coarse grass and scrub; and always, rising up in the background, were the snow-covered mountain peaks of the Andes. The port of Callao was situated in a semicircular bay on low-lying land and was heavily defended by more than 160 guns. Charles Darwin, who visited the place a few years later during his voyage in the Beagle, noted in his diary, ‘Callao is a most miserable, filthy, ill-built, small seaport; the inhabitants both here and at Lima present every imaginable shade of mixture between European, Negro and Indian blood. They appear a depraved, drunken set.’ However, he thought that, ‘The fortress, which withstood Lord Cochrane’s long siege, appears very imposing.’14
When the squadron arrived off the town a carnival was taking place and Cochrane determined to attack the anchored Spanish frigates while everyone was distracted by the noisy festivities. His plan was foiled by a dense sea fog which shrouded the coast for a week. When the fog lifted on 29 February, Cochrane sailed in with his flagship and the frigate Lautaro, both ships flying American colours, but light winds and more fog hampered their movements. At one stage they were becalmed for two hours and subjected to heavy gunfire from the gun batteries and the anchored Spanish warships. When Captain Guise was severely wounded and the Lautaro withd
rew from the action, Cochrane had to accept the inevitable: ‘I was reluctantly compelled to relinquish the attack and withdraw to the island of San Lorenzo, about three miles distant from the forts.’15
Young Tom had a narrow escape during the action. He had refused to remain in the after cabin and had climbed through the quarter gallery window and joined his father on deck. Cochrane allowed him to remain and gave him the job of handing gunpowder to the gunners, but while he was doing this a round shot took off the head of a marine standing by him. Major Miller later recalled, ‘The shot scattered the brains of the marine in the child’s face. He ran up to his father, and, with an air of hereditary self-possession and unconcern, called out, “Indeed, papa, the shot did not touch me; indeed I am not hurt.” ’16
The Spanish authorities were using San Lorenzo as a prison island. Thirty-seven Chilean soldiers taken prisoner eight years before were being forced to work in chain gangs and when Cochrane learnt that there were prisoners being kept in even worse conditions in Lima he wrote to Don Joaquim de la Pezuela, the Spanish viceroy, proposing a general exchange of prisoners. The viceroy politely parried the request and expressed his surprise at finding a nobleman of Great Britain, ‘a country in alliance with the Spanish people’, commanding the naval forces of a rebel government. This prompted Cochrane to engage in a lengthy correspondence with the viceroy during the course of which he came up with a statement which could be said to encapsulate his political beliefs: ‘A British nobleman is a free man, capable of judging between right and wrong, and at liberty to adopt a country and a cause which aim at restoring the rights of oppressed human nature.’17
Cochrane the Dauntless Page 29