Book Review: Cochrane, Britannia's Sea Wolf

the most absurdly cinematic biography I've ever read

As a military history buff, I’ve always found Hollywood action movies of the Die Hard or James Bond ilk hard to watch. The hero’s always outnumbered ten to one. His superiors hate him, resent him, or have been bought off by the enemy, so are always trying their best to sabotage him. Despite all this you know the hero has to win so there’s hardly any suspense. You’re just waiting to see what crazy physics-defining stunt he pulls this time to triumph over his enemies. Thanks to plot armor thicker than a battlecruiser, his plucky squad hardly ever suffers casualties. And this happens dozens of the times over the course of the movie until you get this sense of unreality, like the hero is playing the world as a video game, as an arena to play and test his skills but with no real stakes because he can never really lose.

I always thought this whole genre of action movie was Hollywood screenwriters trying their best to appeal to the teenage male brain. I’m happy to report that I was wrong. The whole genre is fan fiction for the life of Lord Thomas Cochrane (1775-1860), a Scottish captain in the service of the Royal Navy.

Cochrane’s career

Some highlights of Cochrane’s long career, as described by Donald Thomas in Cochrane: Britannia's Sea Wolf:

• Capturing the Gamo, a Spanish ship four times the size of his own. In command of only fourty men, Cochrane boards a ship with over three hundred men and gets them to surrender.

• After accusing the Admiralty of corruption and being blackballed by them, he decides to go into politics. He wins one of most notoriously corrupt Parliamentary seats in Britain despite having almost no money and no powerful allies, through the following ridiculous strategy: He campaigns on an anti-corruption platform, refuses to give bribes, and predictably loses to his opponent who offers five pounds to everyone who votes for him (voting records were public then). He then publicly announces a retroactive reward of ten pounds to the few honest people who voted for him. A year later he runs for re-election and wins handily - then rebuffs everyone who asks him for the ten pounds they expected.

• He invents a new kind of convoy lamp and offers it to the Admiralty, who ignore him. The Admiralty later announce a convoy lamp design contest, which Cochrane enters under an agent’s name, wins the competition, then reveals himself - with the result that no lamps are ever ordered.

• When the Napoleonic wars resume in 1806, he uses his one ship to outmaneuver six ships in the Gironde estuary, destroying three, capturing one, and putting the other two to flight. This escapade, when reported to Napoleon, earns Cochrane his nickname “le loup des mers” - the Sea Wolf.

• When a French convoy hides from him under cover of a coastal fort, he feigns a prepared landing, drawing the troops out of the fort - then at night lands behind the fort, captures it, blows it up, and as the French troops are pulling back, attacks and destroys the convoy - destroying a fort and capturing and destroying fifteen French ships. All while still in command of a single ship.

• When the Peninsular War breaks out he starts harrying the southern French coast, especially targeting the signal stations, eventually capturing the codes to the French semaphore system which allows England, Bletchley-Park-style, to intercept French navy movements for the rest of the war. Why didn’t the French realize the codes were missing? Cochrane left the signal station full of half-burned papers to convince the French that his men didn’t realize the value of the codes and burnt them indiscriminately.

• In an action off the coast of Port Vendre, he defeats an entire French army column, including cavalry, in a ridiculous stunt involving dressing his ship’s boys in the scarlet uniforms of British marines and faking a landing, and timing the movements of his ship and gunners so precisely as to destroy a detachment of cavalry charging across a beach towards his exposed troops:

  The cavalry were out of sight during most of their return gallop, but there was one stretch of coast where they would appear at full length, their white uniforms picked out against the rock behind them. The two frigates were cruising offshore at three knots with no conceivable means of engaging cavalry. Then, as the horsemen appeared against the rock, the Imperieuse responded to a sudden order. The anchor splashed down and, to Brenton’s disquiet, she began to swing at the anchor cable, almost across the bows of the Spartan. As she turned in this arc, her starboard side turned, briefly, parallel with the shore. With perfect judgement of range and precisely at the moment when the cavalry was at full stretch and the ship’s side facing them, every gun roared out in a hoarse cannonade and a bank of rolling smoke. When the smoke cleared, those on the quarterdeck of the Spartan saw that the squadron of cavalry had virtually ceased to exist. A few dismounted figures were scrambling clear of the débris but, as a military formation, it had been totally destroyed by the terrifying accuracy of Cochrane’s fire.

• When a large fraction of the French fleet escapes blockade into the Basque Roads and is about to break out, Cochrane executes a plan, using a novel “explosive ship” of his own design, that manages to destroy a large fraction of the French fleet. The Basque Roads would likely be known as a Trafalgar-level victory if it wasn’t for the cowardice of the commanding admiral who refused to take advantage of the breakthrough. Cochrane’s refusal to shut up about the admiral’s cowardice eventually ends up leading to his imprisonment; naturally he escapes the jail in dramatic fashion and immediately shows up to Parliament to proclaim his innocence.

• Develops a plan to win the war for Britain using explosion-ship-based saturation bombing of French harbors combined with poison gas. Presents this plan to the Prince Regent who is horrified and asks him to keep his ideas private, which Cochrane does - the plans are only published a hundred years later.

• After the Napoleonic wars end, disgraced and stripped of his honors by his political enemies, he enlists as a mercenary admiral in the Chilean war of independence. He conceives a secret plan to break Napoleon out of St Helena and make him the leader of a newly liberated South American republic, to rival the US in North America. He helps win the independence of Chile and Peru but by the time his ship reaches St Helena, Napoleon is already terminally ill.

• He then goes on to help win the Brazilian and Greek wars of independence as their mercenary admiral, continuing to win sea battles often with only a single functional ship against entire fleets.

• … amid literally fifty more crazy adventures, ruses and death-defying escapes.

He accomplished all this under relentless persecution from his bosses at the Admiralty and many powerful British politicians - partly because he was a political reformer and anti-corruption crusader, partly due to his outspoken style and low tolerance for bullshit. Roughly half the book is “Cochrane having exciting adventures and winning so much your eyes start to glaze over”; the other half is “Cochrane stuck in interminable legal proceedings being outmaneuvered by politically savvy bureaucrats”.

The Secret of Cochrane’s Success

How did Cochrane achieve all this? The book doesn’t give a general theory, but a few patterns that stood out to me:

1. Extreme detail-orientation and understanding of every aspect of naval warfare down to chemistry and physics. This is obvious in the incredible ship-vs-cavalry action described above, and in his design of exploding ships and plans for saturation bombing. At one point in the Chilean war his flagship started sinking and he personally figured out how to repair the pumps enough to make it to port. He often seems to be the only person engaged with actual physical reality while his peers are typically engaged with social reality, or just winging it.

2. Constant manipulation of the enemy’s expectations. He’s not just modelling physical reality - even on the social level, he constantly seems two or three steps ahead of the enemy, and is constantly toying with their expectations. Once, when outnumbered three-to-one with a skeleton crew, not enough people to man all the sails let alone fire his guns, he gets his men to tie all his sails down with ropes then cuts them, unfurling all his sails at once - a feat only doable, apparently, by a full and extremely disciplined crew. This spooks his enemies into running away. To keep up the charade, he of course starts chasing them - leading one of the ships to run aground in a desperate attempt to escape from his totally useless ship.

3. Incredible physical courage and willingness to gamble his life - but given he almost never loses his engagements, maybe it’s mostly consummate skill.

4. The Royal Navy had extremely well-designed incentives. In general the Admiralty come off as the main villains of the book, constantly trying to get rid of Cochrane. But the Navy has a prize system - any ship captured means rewards distributed to the crew, the captain, and the admiral in charge of the theater. So even while the Admiralty hate Cochrane, he is so good at capturing ships that his immediate superiors have strong incentives to treat him well and give him wide latitude to do as he pleases. He also gets his pick of the best crew members, because they know they’ll be making an order of magnitude more money with him than with most captains.

5. The British political system has many different centers of power. In a more centralized system like Napoleonic France, having the First Lord of the Admiralty as your personal enemy is immediate career suicide. But in Britain there is also Parliament, the House of Lords, a (mostly) independent press and judiciary, and so there’s always someone to stand up for Cochrane or ask inconvenient questions.

A High Integrity Napoleon

As a kid I used to idolize Napoleon for much the same reasons that made Cochrane successful - his encyclopedic, Renaissance-man mind, the ability to repeatedly succeed at the highest-stakes contests through deep understanding, meticulous planning, and raw audacity. But Cochrane, at least as portrayed by Donald Thomas, also seems like a man of deep integrity and humanity - unwilling to lie or cheat, careful to minimize loss of human life, loyal to his friends, graceful and generous to his enemies - traits that Napoleon sorely lacked and that ultimately led to his defeat.

Perhaps this difference in integrity is also what put Napoleon on the throne while making Cochrane an exile - high integrity is rarely a winning political strategy.

Though reading Cochrane’s plans for Regency-era saturation bombing and poison gas reminds me that his style of first-principles reasoning about the physical world in the context of war is exactly what led to the horrors of the First World War and in many ways the complete destruction of the society Cochrane knew and loved. Sometimes not thinking too hard about how to really win the game you’re playing and just winging it, just doing the socially normal thing, is the more humane choice to make.