Cochrane

by Donald Thomas

  The bullying of "youngsters" by "oldsters" in the midshipmen's berth was more fearful than the moral example. It generally took the form of "cobbing" in which the victim was held down and beaten black and blue with a stocking filled with wet sand. Cochrane, as the captain's nephew, was a risky subject for such treatment. Instead he shared the ordeal of the menu, eaten at a table whose cloth was rarely changed and bore the marks of several weeks' dinners. At the worst, the diet might be small beer and ship's biscuit, at the best there would be potatoes and beef. While the ship was at anchor off Sheerness, the meals could be supplemented by bread, butter, and fruit sold by a woman who came out with the bum-boat and sat with her wares around her on the main deck. Midshipmen removed their coats to eat and rolled their sleeves up, so that both the coats and shirt-cuffs would remain unmarked when they next appeared on deck.

  In the summer heat, conditions on the orlop deck, below the water-line, were appalling. The officers slept above but the orlop contained the crew, as well as the midshipmen. A hundred men or more slept at intervals of just over two feet, while even the gun-ports on the deck above them were kept strictly closed. Long before morning, the air was fetid and hot. Even those who might, none the less, have fallen asleep from exhaustion were apt to be woken at midnight and 4 a.m. by the shouts and clattering as the new watch turned out.

  Cochrane's close acquaintance, as a midshipman, with the men he was later to command, instilled in him an understanding and admiration for them. None of them, however, made a greater impression on him than Lieutenant Jack Larmour, one of those rare officers who had risen from the ranks. A few days later, at the command "All hands to unmoor ship!" the Hind slipped away from her anchorage into the obscurity of the North Sea, seeking out French privateers who might harry Britain's Baltic trade by sallying out from the fiords of Norway. It was a fruitless reconnaissance, except for Cochrane who set himself to learn from Larmour the practical crafts of seamanship, which most officers considered beneath their dignity to investigate. Cochrane, like Larmour himself, despised those young officers wished on the navy by "parliamentary influence". Such men became first the sycophants of an admiral's flagship and then, more disastrously, commanders of ships in their own right. But, as Lar-mour pointed out, parliamentary influence had never got a ship off the rocks of a lee shore.

  When the Hind returned from her reconnaissance, Larmour and the new midshipman were transferred to the Thetis, bound from Plymouth to North America with Admiral Murray's squadron. Cochrane's apprenticeship continued. "We soon became fast friends," he then recalled, "and throughout life few more kindly recollections are impressed on my memory than those of my first naval instructor, honest Jack Larmour."4

  For a young man whose advancement depended on prize money, North America was as unpromising as the North Sea. But Larmour's tuition had given Cochrane a skill which marked him out from the other midshipmen. Admiral Murray was impressed and, though Cochrane had not yet been in the service long enough to "pass for lieutenant", the admiral appointed him an acting-lieutenant on the Thetis in January 1795. A cruise as acting-lieutenant on H.M.S. Africa followed this and by the beginning of 1796, at twenty years old, Cochrane was eligible to be examined for substantive promotion. The time had come round quickly in his case because of the early date at which his uncle Alexander had entered his name on the books of several ships.

  The examination took place while Murray's force was patrolling off Nova Scotia. Launches from the other ships, bearing young men whose blue coats and cocked hats were carefully brushed and whose breeches were immaculately white, converged on the flagship Resolution. A candidate was required to bring his log books and certificates of conduct, and would probably have a copy of Moore's Navigation, or a similar volume for last minute consultation while waiting to go before the examining board.

  The oral examination was carried out by three senior captains. They assembled in the stern cabin of the flagship, sitting in judgement at their table with a clerk to one side of them. If some midshipmen felt more like criminals facing prosecution than candidates in an examination, the setting certainly reinforced the impression.

  Like other candidates, Cochrane handed over his log books and certificates of conduct for the board's perusal. There followed standard questions in trigonometry and navigation, which were no real problem to a midshipman who had read his textbooks. It was the second part of the examination which unnerved and defeated most of them. The young man was told to imagine himself in command of a vessel in a particular location and under certain weather conditions. Various hazards were then thrown in his way by the questioners, and he was required to give instant answers as to the action he would take. Delay meant theoretical shipwreck and actual failure in the examination. But when the captains, sitting at their table, came to Cochrane they were dealing with a young man who had more than a year's practical experience as acting-lieutenant. This, at least, was some defence against them as they strove to dismast him, run him aboard another vessel, or wreck him on their own carefully contrived rocks.5

  Thanks to Jack Larmour's practical instruction and his own ability to think quickly, young Lord Cochrane survived the perils of the examiners' imagined storm. Other midshipmen emerged crestfallen from the great cabin, their reputations smashed on the rocks of Beachy Head or stranded on the Goodwin Sands. Cochrane, instead of being told to do six more months at sea and try again, left the Resolution with a lieutenant's commission.

  It was Admiral Vandeput, Murray's successor, who appointed Cochrane as a lieutenant on the Resolution for a brief period. Cruising the waters from the St Lawrence to Chesapeake Bay, Vandeput found little sign of the French or the war and the Resolution settled down to an agreeable social routine.

  Cochrane's first dinner was in the captain's dining cabin, a spacious room in the stern of the vessel with large square-paned windows overlooking the sea. Its elegant furnishings and studied ritual seemed a world away from the life of the orlop deck, twenty feet below. As the braided and cock-hatted officers walked the deck before dinner, the Royal Marine band piped "The Roast Beef of Old England" to summon them to their food. The sunlight, reflected through the stern windows by the shifting sea, caught the polished silver and finely-wrought glass. Dinners of this sort began at about 3 p.m. and lasted for the best part of two hours, several courses and a number of wines being consumed.

  Cochrane noted, however, that the "leading motive" of a seaman was "prize money", and it was never more true than in his own case. The social pleasantries on board the Resolution hardly masked his ravenous need of this extra income. To make matters worse, Vandeput and his well-heeled officers decided that, when winter came, there was no point in resuming patrols until the spring. The admiral dropped anchor in Chesapeake Bay and went ashore to a large house which he had rented. Parties of officers joined him for shooting and hunting. As Cochrane remarked, it was fortunate for the admiral that the Virginians "retained their affection for England, her habits, and customs. Even the innkeeper of the place contrived to muster a tolerable pack of hounds". Admiral Vandeput, whose particular fetish was very tall girls, was also in pursuit of the Misses Tabbs, each more than six feet high.6

  During the boisterous dinner parties and the enforced gaiety, Cochrane brooded over the war he was missing and denounced the government of toadies and placemen who had lost England's colonies for her. He believed that the United Colonies meant what they said in 1775, "that on the concession of their just demands, 'the colonies are to return to their former connections and friendship with Great Britain'". Might not a more democratic and reformist government in Britain have prevented the great schism?7

  Among such thoughts came the announcement that H.M.S. Thetis was to return to England. His companions behaved with tolerant amusement towards the tall anxious "Sawney" with his mop of red hair and his unpredictable sentiments. But since he seemed so desperate for a chance to fight, he was sent back across the Atlantic with the Thetis. His orders were to proceed with Admiral Keith's
flagship from Plymouth to Gibraltar, for the great battle of the Mediterranean had just begun.

  The Mediterranean had not been the scene of many British victories between 1793 and 1797. To blockade the major ports of Toulon, Cadiz and Brest, in order to prevent the escape of French battle-fleets and wholesale slaughter among British convoys to the West Indies, had proved an intolerable strain on the Royal Navy's resources. By 1796, the British had abandoned the bases at Leghorn, and Corsica, pulling back to Gibraltar and concentrating along the Atlantic coasts of France and Spain. Corsica had been occupied at the start of the war. There had even been the portentous possibility that, on his father's advice, the young Napoleon Buonaparte was to volunteer for the Royal Navy.

  The turning point in the history of the Mediterranean war came on 14 February 1797 in the Atlantic battle of Cape St Vincent. Admiral Jervis dealt a costly blow to the Spanish, prevented their rendezvous with the French to support an invasion of Ireland, and won himself the title of Earl St Vincent. Among the cheers of victory, the British commanders returned to the Mediterranean, St Vincent in command with Nelson and Keith as his assistants. Minorca was taken in 1798 and the base at Malta re-established. Brest and Cadiz were mere blockades, but the Mediterranean promised a running fight.

  Cochrane's superior, Lord Keith, was a youngish commander, inclined to keep his thoughts and opinions to himself. He appeared to encourage Cochrane's enterprise and daring, though he attacked his character without mercy in private correspondence. Lord St Vincent, who was so often to be Cochrane's opponent, was still at Gibraltar, a caricaturist's portrait of advancing age, the flushed and pear-shaped head settling forward on the breast, the body crippled and swollen by dropsy. He received Cochrane with courtesy, however, and confirmed his appointment on Keith's flagship, H.M.S. Barfleur.

  Soon after, St Vincent retired to seek a cure at Bath, haunted by Sir John Orde who had been passed over in favour of Nelson and now demanded "satisfaction" from the aged lord with pistols or swords. Cowardice was not one of St Vincent's failings. It took a court order and a direct command from the Admiralty to prevent him from "obliging" Sir John.

  The Barfleur and Keith's other ships were at first detained by the necessity of maintaining the blockade against Cadiz. Blockading was both the most important and most dreary of the Royal Navy's tasks. The French needed only a momentary lack of vigilance on the part of the blockaders to slip away from the anchorage and be lost indefinitely. Cochrane spent over four months anchored seven or eight miles off Cadiz waiting for the enemy to attempt a break-out. The break-out never came. From time to time, as he surveyed the port through his spy-glass, there were signs of the ships preparing for sea. It was the standard bluff, carried out by a few men who did not even have to be sailors. Here, as at Toulon and Brest, scores of British ships, their marines and crews, were kept idle by the tricks of a few untrained enemy civilians.

  Tempers grew short on the Barfleur. Then Cochrane first brought himself to the notice of the Admiralty and his immediate superiors in the simplest and most dramatic way. He got himself court-martialled.

  A lieutenant's life on a flagship was in many ways enviable. He ate well in the wardroom and better still when invited to dine with the captain. He had a cabin to himself, even if it was only eight feet square and its "walls" consisted merely of painted canvas stretched on wood. But the formal etiquette and judicious flattery of superiors which contented the young men appointed through "parliamentary influence" made Cochrane increasingly irritable. He had joined the navy to fight, both as a profession and because he desperately needed the rewards of prize money to continue in his career. Neither the Spanish fleet in Cadiz nor his own superiors seemed in any hurry to oblige him.

  Deprived of a chance to match himself against the French or the Spanish, he opened hostilities against the first lieutenant of the Barfleur, Philip Beaver. It was an odd choice, since Beaver despised the useless "parliamentary" officers quite as much as Cochrane did. "We have so many for promotion," he burst out one day, "that few are left for plain duty. We had just now nearly run over a brig, but where from, or whither bound, the Lord knows - a pretty look-out for a smart ship." The junior lieutenants were respectful to his face and laughed at him behind his back. There was an occasion for great hilarity when someone contrived that Beaver should be hauled before the admiral for having sent his own correspondence at the reduced seaman's rate. It was a trivial enough matter and Beaver was soon proved innocent of it, but the air of pompous gravity which he displayed on his return must have caused further ill-suppressed snorts of mirth. "No man can be too careful of character," he announced over the matter of the postage stamp. "Such an accusation might have been whispered at a future time, but its utter falsehood is now placed on record."8

  As a matter of fact, Beaver's record was good but not distinguished. He had joined the navy at eleven and fought under Rodney against D'Orvillers at twelve. After seven years as a midshipman and fifteen as a lieutenant his promotion seemed ominously long-delayed. Apart from an attempt to found a colony of high-minded men and women on an island off Sierra Leone, which had ended in disaster, the Royal Navy had been his life.

  But there was a flaw in Beaver's character, as Cochrane saw it. On several occasions the Barfleur left the blockade force to collect supplies from the North African port of Tetuan. Instead of taking on cattle already slaughtered, the animals were embarked five and slaughtered on board. Beaver permitted this, though he knew it was done to allow certain officers to run a lucrative trade in hides. These were stowed in empty casks. The result, as the noses of Cochrane and his companions soon detected, was that throughout the months of the blockade the Barfleur reeked like an ill-ventilated glue factory. Other ships of the squadron caught a hint of it, cheerfully hailing their leader as "The Stinking Scotch Ship", a compliment to Keith's nationality rather than Cochrane's.9

  The wardroom storm broke after a visit to Tetuan. Cochrane and Captain Cuthbert of the Marines had been ashore duck-shooting. They returned in the launch just as the Barfleur was about to sail, both of them covered in mud. Deciding that it would be "disrespectful" to report to the quarterdeck in that state, the two men went to change. Lieutenant Beaver had watched them come aboard, so there was no urgency. By the time that Cochrane emerged from his cabin into the wardroom, the Barfleur had weighed anchor and set sail for the Spanish coast. Almost at once, he was followed into the wardroom by Beaver, who began to berate Cochrane and Cuthbert in front of the other officers.

  "You have both made me appear exceedingly ridiculous, for I have just reported you to the captain as left on shore, not having heard of your return to the ship!"

  This outburst, from a man who had watched them come aboard, was calculated to bring out the worst in Cochrane. His temper was violent but, as his adversaries discovered, its expression was controlled and withering.

  "I cannot help it," he said casually, "if you appear ridiculous to the captain." The "parliamentary" lieutenants goggled.

  Beaver, totally unaccustomed to such language from a junior officer, stopped abruptly. But his was the ultimate weapon.

  "Unless I am acquainted with your return to the ship," he said sharply, "while I am first lieutenant, you shall not go out of this ship."

  "Aye," said Cochrane softly, as Beaver sat down at the wardroom table. Then he added, "Lieutenant Beaver, I do not wish to hear more on the subject now, but you shall hear from me on the subject another time."

  And having said this, Cochrane turned his back on Beaver, looking towards the windows in the stern, and began to whistle. Beaver sat upright, got to his feet, and strode from the wardroom to the quarterdeck, where he complained that the arrogant young Lord Cochrane, when reprimanded, had challenged him to a duel. The warm and sickly odour of rotting hide was hardly noticed in the new wardroom atmosphere of insulted honour and abused authority.10

  It was in everyone's interest that the matter should die a quiet and speedy death. They reckoned without Lieutenant Beaver's do
ur sense of duty. Within a few days, Lord Keith received the first lieutenant's official application for a general court-martial on Lord Cochrane. There was no means of denying it. Cochrane lived under open arrest until the Barfleur and ships of the fleet were next assembled at the anchorage of Tetuan. There the trial was to take place.

  At eight o'clock in the morning, the ritual began, the Barfleur firing a signal gun and flying the Union Jack from her mizzenmast, the nearest of the three masts to the stern, from which signals were flown. The ship was prepared as if for a general inspection, decks scrubbed white, hammocks stowed, guns run out, and a party of Royal Marines, in scarlet with white pipe-clayed belts, under the command of a lieutenant, ready to receive each member of the court as he came aboard.

  Full dress uniform was not worn unless an admiral was on trial. But by nine o'clock the members of the court had assembled, with Lord Keith as president. The court-martial was to be held in the great cabin, normally occupied by the captain. The long dining table was covered with traditional green baize, on which pens, ink, paper, prayer books and the Articles of War were laid for the members of the court who sat there. "Open the court," said the president, and Cochrane was marched in, his sword placed before the president himself.

  Lieutenant Beaver called the witnesses to prove his case, while officers and men of the Barfleur, as was their privilege, pressed into the cabin to stand and watch the proceedings. Lieutenant Robert Jackson was examined. "Was you at the wardroom table on the evening of the ninth instant ?" demanded Beaver. "Do you remember my coming into the wardroom, and saying to Lord Cochrane and Captain Cuthbert of the Marines that they had both made me appear exceedingly ridiculous ?"