Cochrane in the Pacific

by Brian Vale

  When the news of Ayacucho reached Callao, Commodore Guruzeta decided to salvage what naval forces he could for his King. Ordering the corvette and brig to return to Spain via Cape Horn, he sailed with Asia and Achilles for Manila. Alas, Guruzeta never reached his destination. Open protests from his crews, many of whom were press-ganged South Americans, forced him to hand over the ships to the local patriot authorities. Asia was surrendered to the Mexicans in Monterrey, while Achilles made for Valparaiso where she was taken into the Chilean Navy.

  After Ayacucho, the mainland of Spanish America was firmly in patriot hands. But two tiny Spanish outposts stubbornly continued to resist in the name of King Ferdinand - the Chiloe Archipelago and the Castles of Callao. The Chileans sent two expeditions against Chiloe between 1822 and 1824, but none made any impression. The resourcefulness and courage of the wily Colonel Quintanilla, the poor condition of their ships, and storms and heavy weather, frustrated each attempt. In Callao, Governor Rodil flatly refused to hand over the Castles and conducted a year-long defence of fierce - even manic -intensity, imposing a regime of terror on the 2500 troops he commanded and on the 3000 or so refugees who swelled their ranks. Stores ran out; the inhabitants were reduced to eating rats, cats and mules; unproductive civilians were ruthlessly driven out to die of starvation between the lines; and discipline was maintained with an iron hand. Foreign ships of war were appalled to see those guilty of defeatism or disobedience herded out beyond the walls and shot in daily batches of 30.15 But no relief or reinforcement arrived. Eventually, Rodil accepted the inevitable and, in January 1826, surrendered the fortress. When the gates were opened, only 444 soldiers had survived the siege -thousands of troops and civilians had perished. Rodil, however, lived on, and returned to Spain as a national hero. Meanwhile, news of the loss of Asia and Achilles, and the absence of any relief or reinforcement convinced Quintanilla in Chiloe that the end had come and, when Blanco Encalada arrived in command of the last Chilean expedition in 1825, he too capitulated. By the end of January 1826, the Spanish Empire on mainland South America was no more.

  Chapter 16

  SETTLING ACCOUNTS

  In Brazil, Lord Cochrane's contribution to independence was as decisive as that he had made in Chile or Peru. Given command of its navy as First Admiral on a huge salary, Cochrane sailed from Rio de Janeiro to confront the Portuguese forces occupying the eastern seaboard on 1 April 1823. In a brilliant campaign of only six months, he blockaded the enemy's major arsenal in Bahia, expelled an army and a greatly superior naval squadron, and harried it out of Brazilian waters and across the Atlantic. Then, using an audacious trick, he secured the evacuation of the Portuguese garrisons in Maranhao and Para on the northern coast. Largely as a result of Cochrane's efforts, by December 1823 Brazil had been cleared of enemy troops. It took time for the fact to be accepted diplomatically, but the country was, to all intents and purposes, independent.

  A triumphant Lord Cochrane returned to Rio de Janeiro in November to be given all the rewards a grateful nation could bestow. He was made Marquis of Maranhao by the Emperor Pedro, became a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Cruzeiro do Sul, received a vote of thanks from the National Assembly, and was made a member of the Privy Council of the Empire. But as happened so often in his career, the renown of his dazzling victories was quickly overshadowed by bitter disputes over prize money and alleged poor treatment. The acrimony was interrupted by an outbreak of rebellion in the turbulent northeast. Now preoccupied with his wrongs, Cochrane applied himself with little energy to the suppression of the outbreak and, in April 1825, effectively absconded to England in a Brazilian frigate ingenuously claiming that the need for urgent repairs had been discovered in mid-Atlantic.

  Back in Britain, Cochrane was cheered in the streets and hailed by excited liberals as a conquering hero and the liberator of South America. The Tory Government was less enthusiastic. Many ministers still regarded him as a demagogue and a fraudster. Indeed, a threat to prosecute him under the 1819 Foreign Enlistment Act, which prohibited service in foreign wars in which Britain was neutral, forced Cochrane to go on his travels once more. This time, he accepted command of the Greek Navy in its war for freedom from Turkish oppression, convinced that the squadron of armed paddle steamers he intended to bring with him would sweep the enemy from the seas. But there, Cochrane's career as First Admiral was neither happy nor distinguished. In two years even he could achieve little. The military situation was chaotic, the Greek maritime forces were unreliable and undisciplined, few steamships arrived, and the techniques Cochrane had used so successfully in Chile and Brazil fell embarrassingly flat. When Greek independence did come, it had little to do with Cochrane's activities but was due to allied intervention and the destruction of the Turkish Navy at the Battle of Navarino by the combined squadrons of Britain, Russia and France. Depressed by this apparent failure, he retired to Italy to restore his spirits.

  Meanwhile, in 1830, Britain experienced a political revolution in which the Tories were ejected after 25 years of power. They were replaced by a Whig government made up of Cochrane's political friends. Seizing his opportunity, Cochrane - who had just inherited his father's title as Earl of Dundonald - returned with Kitty and his family to London determined to clear his name from the Stock Exchange fraud and to secure the restoration of his rank and privileges. His political friends rallied round; the press was favourable; petitions were presented; and strings were pulled. In 1832, Cochrane achieved the first of his objectives by being granted a Royal Pardon for the Stock Exchange conviction and restored to his original position in the Navy List. Indeed, as the list had moved steadily upwards during the intervening 17 years, Cochrane found himself reappointed as a Rear-Admiral of the Blue. Encouraged by this success, he began to lobby for the restoration of the Knighthood of the Bath that had been stripped from him in 1814.

  Cochrane's case for rehabilitation was greatly helped by the appearance of a series of books that publicised the heroic aspects of his naval career. First, in 1824, Maria Graham published her Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822. This was followed by William Bennet Stevenson's Historical and Descriptive Narrative of a 20 year Residence in South America. Then, in 1826, came John Miers's Travels in Chile and La Plata. All of these books included glowing accounts of Cochrane's triumphs in South America; but all three writers had been members of his inner circle and all retailed the admiral's distorted - even paranoid - claim that his victories had been won in spite of plots, obstruction and jealousy. Then Captain Marriott's naval novels began to capture the public imagination. Marryat had been a midshipman on Cochrane's frigates during the Napoleonic Wars and his books were filled with descriptions of actions and of characters drawn from his experiences. Indeed, Frank Mildmay, which appeared in 1829, was a fictionalised account of the voyages of the

  Imperieuse with the heroic captain easily recognisable as a thinly disguised Lord Cochrane.

  Not that Cochrane himself was backward in publicising his own version of events. Aided by a group of friends and hangers-on, who included his secretary William Jackson, in the late 1830s Cochrane began to produce a series of petitions and memorials that related at length his services, feuds and financial claims against the governments of Britain, Chile, Peru and Brazil. The campaign reached its first high point in his 1846 publication, Observations on Naval Affairs ... including Instances of Injustice experienced by the Author. The story as he told it, whether it was set in the Napoleonic Wars or in South America, was the same - that of the noble warrior hero achieving miracle victories in spite of disloyalty by his subordinates and persecution by his superiors. Unfortunately, there were few survivors of the wars with France left to contradict his version of events, and information from South America was unobtainable. Cochrane's claims were swallowed whole by the Victorian public. Indeed, the story of the hero being betrayed by lesser men appealed to the sentimental taste of the time. The Queen herself was deeply moved by Cochrane's story of suffering, and took a lead
ing part in ensuring that he achieved his ambition and was restored to the Order of the Bath in 1847.

  By this time, Cochrane's rehabilitation in Britain was completed. He was now 72 years old, a Vice Admiral, a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, the holder of high Chilean, Brazilian and Greek decorations, and the recipient of a special pension for meritorious service. In Britain he was admired as a surviving hero of the Napoleonic Wars, a leading figure in fashionable wars of liberation, and a political radical whose struggles for Parliamentary reform had been vindicated. His opinion was keenly sought by the Admiralty on the technical and tactical challenges posed by steamships, iron and new weapons. In 1848 he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy's North America and West Indies Squadron for a three-year term of duty. In 1854 he volunteered his services for the Crimean War, but was refused by a cautious Admiralty, which feared that his impetuosity and habit of disobeying orders might get them into trouble. He may have been 79 years' old at the time, but his reputation lived on!

  When Cochrane returned to London in 1831, he had been a rich man. His activities in South America alone had earned him some £42,700 in pay and prize money, and in Greece he had received a handsome advance of salary totalling £37,000. But by 1840, he was in severe financial difficulties. He was unable to control his expenditure at the best of times: now he had real problems. First, the consequences of his South American activities caught up with him. He was sued by his Brazilian prize agents and by Hoseason and Dean who claimed that he owed them £20,000.1 Then he was taken to law by the owners of French and British merchant ships - such as Gazelle, Admiral Cockburn and Edward Ellis - which he had seized during the Chilean blockades. According to Cochrane, adverse judgements in these actions cost him £14,000.2 His financial situation was made worse when Kitty demanded a separation in 1839, and moved to France to live in high style on the income from the French bonds that Cochrane had purchased with his Greek pay. Then his eldest children went off the rails, going to moneylenders and running up enormous debts that a despairing Cochrane was forced to settle. And all the while, his fortune was being slowly dissipated by the development costs of his scientific experiments with steamships, new weapons, poison gas, tar and bitumen - all of which seemed to lose money rather than make it. His unsuccessful attempt to turn the armed paddle steamer HMS Janus into a viable proposition, for example, soaked up at least £25,000.3

  With his financial situation deteriorating, Cochrane began to look round for other sources of money. In 1839, he put in a claim for Royal Navy half-pay between 1814 and 1832, ignoring the fact that he had been earning large sums in South America and Greece during this period. Cochrane firmly believed that he had suffered financially and psychologically as a result of the Stock Exchange conviction and, now that he had been given a Royal Pardon, was convinced that he was entitled to compensation for what he had lost. The full extent of what this meant was revealed in Observations on Naval Affairs, in which he listed his claims as being £4000 for 18 year's half-pay; £5000 for the fine and costs of the Stock Exchange trial; £40,000 for the loss of a legacy from his rich uncle Basil, who had been turned against him by the 'aspersions and insinuations of those around him'; and £50,000 for the loss of the Culross estate for similar reasons.4 It was soon made clear to Cochrane that he had no chance of getting the British Government to swallow any of this. He therefore pinned his hopes on South America and on the huge debts that he was convinced were owed to him by Chile and Brazil. Cochrane's initial calculations put these amounts at £126,000 - though the total steadily grew and he thought up more and more claims.

  In spite of Cochrane's assertions to the contrary, he had already received all the pay owing to him and a substantial amount of prize money when he left Chile in 1823. But behind him he left two acknowledged debts - the balance owing on his accounts for the Peruvian campaign and his share of the Esmeralda prize money. There were two other complaints - that he had received nothing in the way of prize money for the capture of Valdivia; and that after he had left the country the government had taken back the estate he had been granted in Rio Claro. While Chile was in a state of instability, Cochrane could do little to advance his claims. But by 1837, the situation had improved, and he decided to revive them with the help of a local agent called Alexander Caldeclough. First, it had to be decided exactly what Cochrane could legally claim. Caldeclough's view was that this comprised $14,300 for Valdivia and other prize money, a revised figure of $66,100 for the balance on his accounts for the Peruvian Expedition, and $4000 in compensation for the loss of the Rio Clara estate - a total of $80,400, or £16,100.5 Caldeclough was given the necessary powers to enable him to pursue these claims with the Chilean authorities, and Cochrane produced a powerful Petition to the President and Congress of Chile, which described his services during the war of independence and listed his demands. Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen was prevailed upon to order the British Consul General in Santiago, Colonel John Walpole, to exert pressure on Cochrane's behalf; and in the early 1840s, his son Arthur, then serving with the Royal Navy's South America squadron, was sent a Power of Attorney and told to add his weight.

  In fact they were pushing on a half open door. The Chilean Government had put money aside in anticipation of Cochrane's claims, although nothing had been possible earlier because of his refusal to answer the audit queries on the squadron's accounts.6 Once he agreed to do so - even though most of the answers he gave were vague and imprecise - the Chileans could not avoid confronting the issue.7 Walpole and Caldeclough exerted continuous pressure to get a result and, on 6 September 1844, they succeeded. The Chilean Government issued a decree that began with a fulsome tribute to Cochrane's services to independence and ended with an offer of £6000 in settlement.8 Walpole, who had seen all the figures and arguments, wrote that 'though in amount only a moiety of that claimed, it does not on investigation ... appear to me to be unreasonable considering that there were some charges which were not justified by the necessities of his position or by his instructions, and others for which no vouchers have been produced.'9

  Cochrane, however, was furious. He rejected the offer and in 1845 produced a 14-page closely printed Memorial to the President and Government of Chile. He had been busy elaborating his claims, which had now risen to $297,000 (or £60,000)! But this time they had little to do with real debts. Cochrane had managed to convince himself that his pay as Vice Admiral of Chile was only designed to cover his routine duties, and that he was entitled to bonuses for 'extra-official services' - that is, for doing anything else! On the basis of this novel idea, he now demanded more money. Each of his claims covers at least a page of print, but in summary they comprised $66,000 as settlement of the accounts of the Peruvian Expedition; $50,000 for 'planning and executing an attack on Valdivia ... without orders or the knowledge of the government'; $30,000 in prize money for conceiving and personally taking part in the capture of the Esmeralda: $20,000, being his share of $200,000 captured in Peru; $15,000 in compensation for losses resulting from law suits by the owners of ships taken during the blockades of Peru; $50,000 for declining the offer to lead the Peruvian Navy and for being 'denied' prize money for Prueba and Venganza; and $60,000, being Chilean half pay from 1823 to 1844 calculated at $3000 per annum - a matter that had been neither discussed nor agreed during his period of service.10 The Chileans remained tactfully silent in the face of these shameless demands, and it was not until 1852 that Cochrane saw sense and took the money on offer, accepting it as a token of national gratitude.11

  The Chilean Government may have had difficulty in accepting Cochrane's financial demands, but they had no doubts that he had played a key role in the liberation of their country. On 28 July 1857, they therefore published a decree that contained a fulsome and admiring tribute to his services and reappointed him as Vice Admiral with the right to receive full salary wherever he lived.12 When the offer was passed on to him, Cochrane wrote to thank the Chileans for the compliment, but could not refrain from pointing our grumpily t
hat the appointment and the salary meant little to a man who was over 85 years old!13 Among the congratulatory letters that followed was one from Admiral Blanco Encalada writing from Paris,14 and another from his old subordinate Robert Simpson. In addition to expressing gratitude, admiration and wishing his old chief good health, Simpson, who was now a Vice Admiral and the sole surviving British officer of the wars of independence in the Chilean Navy, may have planted a seed in Cochrane's mind when he added 'I have been requested to procure a biographical sketch of Your Lordship's eventful life in order to secure its publication in this country.'15

  Meanwhile, Cochrane had set his sights on Brazil, and appointed the local firm of James Moore and Co, to press his claims. The case was more straightforward than in Chile. In response to Cochrane's worries about his terms of service, in 1824, the Imperial Government had issued a decree stating that he could remain First Admiral until he chose to resign; and that thereafter he would be entitled to receive half-pay for life. Likewise, it had solved the political problem caused by the enormous number of seizures made during the war of independence by deciding that the Brazilian Treasury would pay the value of all prizes to the captors whether they were legally condemned or not. Cochrane would have been entitled to one-eighth of all this as commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, neither happened. Cochrane's actions in absconding from Brazil without explanation in 1825, his rejection of orders to return to give an account of his final voyage, and his refusal to resign when the world knew he had been recruited to command the Greek Navy caused the Brazilians to put the whole issue on ice. Eventually it was forgotten. But in October 1847 Cochrane revived it dramatically in a Petition to the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, which described in detail his activities during the War of Independence and enumerated his financial claims.16 His period of service as commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy's North America and West Indies squadron then intervened; but, in March 1854, he returned to the attack by producing a Description of Services, followed up a year later by a Memorial to the Legislature of Brazil.17