Items related to Cochrane: Story of Britannia's Sea Wolf
Synopsis
Bestselling account of the life of a real Horatio Hornblower
The life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, later 10th Earl of Dundonald, was more extraordinary than that of Nelson, more far fetched than that of Hornblower or Patrick O'Brien's Jack Aubrey. Born the son of an eccentric and indigent Scottish peer, he entered the Royal Navy in 1793. In a series of outstanding and heroic actions, often against seemingly overwhelming odds, he made his name fighting Napoleon's navy as one of the most dashing and daring frigate captains of his day, before embarking on a career as a mercenary admiral.
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Review
This is a reprint of Thomas's 1975 biography of the sea-captain he calls "the supreme romantic hero". Thomas has a reputation as a literary biographer: His Swinburne is the standard life of that poet and his Robert Browning: A Life Within a Life was runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award. But his biography of Cochrane reads like C.S. Forster's Hornblower or Patrick O'Brian's Blue at the Mizzen. Indeed, as Thomas puts it himself, if Cochrane's life was written as a novel readers would disbelieve it. To begin with he enjoyed a distinguished career as a naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars--seizing over 50 French vessels and destroying much of the French fleet with fireships, so that that Napoleon himself dubbed Cochrane "England's Sea Wolf". After the war he entered Parliament as a Radical politician and democrat. His enemies plotted against him, forging material to discredit his naval achievements and convict him as "one of the principal movers of the greatest Stock Exchange fraud of the century". He was imprisoned, and escaped and went off to command the Chilean navy. He became a mercenary Admiral and commanded in turn the Brazilian and Greek navies. In his old age he returned to Britain and vindication. He proposed secret weapons against the Russians in the Crimean War ("under cover of the clouds of gas from Cochrane's "stink vessels", the port of Cronstadt could be seized ...") and was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet in 1855. Thomas does justice to this rip-roaring story; the tale rattles along as good as any novel. --Adam Roberts
Book Description
Bestselling account of the life of a real Horatio Hornblower
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherCassell Military
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 029784105X
- ISBN 13 9780297841050
- BindingAudio Cassette
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