El Metálico Lord
Money and Mythmaking in Thomas Cochrane’s 1859 Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination
Jennifer Hayward
Loup de Mer, El Diablo, El Metálico Lord: these are some of the epithets applied to Admiral Thomas Cochrane, self-styled Liberator of South America, by allies and enemies alike as he sailed the South American coast from 1818 to 1823.1 The last of these phrases, “El Metálico Lord,” exposes powerful connections between the Cochrane myth and money. Throughout his life, Cochrane exulted in his reputation as a brilliant naval commander. Throughout his life, too, he fought persistent accusations that beneath the epaulettes, sword, and grand titles he was no more than a money-grubbing adventurer. Despite his lifelong concern with the pecuniary advantages his fame ought to have assured him, not until the end of his life did Cochrane—who was perennially strapped for cash—successfully cash in on his own reputation.
Cochrane began his career in the British Royal Navy and soon became a popular hero for his audacious conquests of enemy ships. Within the navy, though, his capital plummeted as he became equally notorious for risky and insubordinate acts; moreover, his superiors did not appreciate his relentless and very public denunciations of naval corruption. By 1814, things had gone from bad to worse: he found himself imprisoned for debt, forced to relinquish his position as member of Parliament, expelled from the navy, and stripped of the Order of Bath he had earned for his sensational naval victory in the Basque Roads in 1809. In all these actions, Cochrane saw a conspiracy to ruin him. He retaliated by abandoning his home country to fight as a mercenary in South America, where—with a tiny fleet of repurposed ships manned mostly by foreigners—he led stunningly successful naval campaigns. His rebel navies succeeded in routing the Spanish and Portuguese from the South American coasts and winning independence for Chile, Peru, and Brazil.
Ever since, Cochrane has claimed a central role in the British cultural imaginary. Despite the fact that he achieved his major victories when fighting under foreign flags, Cochrane was lionized back home. Just after Cochrane liberated Peru from colonial rule, for example, his fellow Scotsman, the poet Lord Byron, wrote to his editor John Murray, “[T]here is no man I envy so much as Lord Cochrane. His entry into Lima, which I see in today’s paper, is one of the great events of the day.”2 And Sir Walter Scott, inspired by a standing ovation Cochrane received in an Edinburgh theatre, wrote a poem in honor of his countryman. Across the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the Cochrane myth continued to grow, circulating through discourses ranging from popular broadsides and ballads to naval history, travel literature, and finally maritime fiction by wildly popular authors such as Captain Frederick Marryat and George Alfred Henty. As naval historian Brian Vale observes, “Even during his lifetime, Cochrane was clearly recognizable as the heroic commander of Captain Marryat’s midshipmen Frank Mildmay and Peter Simple, and fifty years later G. A. Henty produced his gung-ho boy’s adventure story, With Cochrane the Dauntless, based on his adventures in South America. In the twentieth century, the trend continued [with] . . . C. S. Forester’s hero Horatio Hornblower . . . and Patrick O’Brian.”3 But while these authors profited from recounting Cochrane’s exploits, Cochrane repeatedly found himself near bankruptcy.
In 1858, forty-one years after he first sailed south and decades after his heyday as a naval hero, Cochrane finally found a way to convert the social capital of the Cochrane myth into economic gain for himself. Capitalizing on the rise of popular genres such as travel writing and military memoir and building on the nineteenth century’s increasing fascination with mythic heroes, Cochrane hired a ghostwriter to help him pen his memoirs. The resulting texts, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination (London, 1859) and The Autobiography of a Seaman (London, 1860), achieved both of Cochrane’s goals: they restored the social and economic value of the Cochrane myth, and they enabled him to convert that value into the cash he desperately needed.
. . .
In this chapter, I examine Thomas Cochrane as a pivotal figure in the nineteenth-century economy of fame. All his life, Cochrane struggled with the popular conflation of money with value, as discussed in this volume’s introduction: throughout his career, he was awarded generous praise as well as promises of untold riches, and his desire for wealth led him to believe that abstract promises held concrete worth. Compounding his expectations was the fact that as a popular hero, Cochrane—or rather, the Cochrane image created by the popular press—acquired considerable symbolic value. And because Cochrane saw himself, like the promissory notes he accumulated, as embodying that value quite literally, he never understood why he could not simply cash in on his golden reputation. This is the story of a rebellious Scotsman who fought for freedom in the New World. But the Cochrane myth, as it intersects with the rise of the mass media, imperial and economic ideologies, and shifting constructions of national identity, illustrates the ways that core Enlightenment principles including liberty, enlightened self-interest, and progress toward a commercial society were both abstracted and literalized in the popular realm in Cochrane’s time and after. In turn, the mythic stature and individual stories of Cochrane and other Romantic-era heroes helped to shape nationalist movements worldwide.
Distinguishing among economic, cultural, and social capital, Pierre Bourdieu’s essay “The Forms of Capital” argues that from the eighteenth century onward, European economic theory placed increasing weight on money as the central medium of exchange; other forms of capital, while retaining their importance for social advancement, were increasingly marginalized. Social capital, in Bourdieu’s view, is “made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which [are] convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.”4 As a result, social capital retains some degree of visibility. By contrast, Bourdieu argues that cultural capital’s “transmission and acquisition [is] more disguised than [that] of economic capital, [and therefore] it is predisposed to function as symbolic capital, i.e., to be unrecognized as capital and recognized [instead] as legitimate competence, as authority exerting an effect of (mis)recognition, e.g., in the matrimonial market and in all the markets in which economic capital is not fully recognized.”5 Here Bourdieu helps us to understand Cochrane’s confusion as, abstracting Adam Smith’s theory of value, he expected the cultural capital he had so laboriously acquired to be recognized as legal tender in the marketplace. As he works to close the gap between his public reputation as a national hero and his private conviction that he was inadequately compensated for his heroic deeds, Cochrane demonstrates the interdependence of all three forms of capital.
As a nobleman who would inherit a title, the Earl of Dundonald, Cochrane’s social capital served him well early in his career. For example, his uncle’s influence won him a more advanced position in the British Royal Navy than he would otherwise have enjoyed; social connections also enabled his election as a member of Parliament. But his connections were Scottish rather than English, and as such they could also work against him; thus he did not rise through the naval ranks as quickly as his abilities and spectacular victories would seem to have warranted.
In terms of cultural capital, too, Cochrane felt simultaneously advantaged and inadequate: his naval knowledge and abilities were unquestioned, but his formal education had been neglected because of his father’s impoverishment (a common state among nineteenth-century Scottish peers). As a result, he felt self-conscious throughout his life, as demonstrated in his letters and other private papers as well as his compensatory behavior: he hired a succession of tutors for his young, socially inferior wife, invested in the best education he could manage for his sons, and continually policed his family to ensure that their conduct accorded with their social station. By his relentless efforts to increase his family’s standing, Cochrane demonstrated his conviction that social capital could be reinforced by the symbolic or cultural capital derived from his professional abilities and his family’s accomplishments, and that together these proofs of social and cultural relevance should be easily convertible to the economic capital he needed to support his family and invest in his many (generally failed) inventions. But he would learn that the equation was not so direct.
. . .
Long after his career peaked, Cochrane was still a popular figure in British national mythology as well as that of Chile and Brazil. Therefore, in the 1850s Cochrane determined to publish accounts of his travels and victories in the hope of achieving several goals simultaneously: making money on the sales of the volumes themselves; shaming the current governments of Chile and Brazil into awarding him back pay for services rendered and (as Cochrane saw it) inadequately compensated; and setting the record straight about his past deeds, since he believed his reputation had been tarnished by the accusations of several of the South American military leaders alongside whom he had fought. In writing his memoirs, then, he intended to communicate his cultural capital, increase his social capital (and thus his leverage in bargaining with Chile and Brazil), and translate both into economic capital to invest in the future of his family.
Before exploring his memoirs, however, an overview of Cochrane’s intellectual influences and professional trajectory will provide context for his belief that Britain had betrayed him, and his consequent fascination with South America. As he sought to prove his status as a British hero—which entailed justifying his actions in fighting as a mercenary for the liberation of countries not his own—Cochrane drew directly on the intellectual heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment. He absorbed ideas of political economy at Edinburgh University, which he briefly attended while on leave from the Royal Navy in 1801, studying under the dominant intellectual influence of the time, Dugald Stewart.6
In 1800—just a year before Cochrane’s time at the university—Stewart introduced the formal study of economics at Edinburgh with his series of lectures on political economy, inspired by his book Life and Writings of Adam Smith (1793).7 Cochrane clearly absorbed the central tenets of Smith’s Wealth of Nations; Stewart’s lectures may have been a key influence, one that could hardly have been better suited to Cochrane’s specific interests and experiences. As Samuel Fleischacker explains, Wealth of Nations is known as a very “American” book, published in 1776 and inspired by the American Revolution. The idea of a New World strongly appealed to Smith, since it promised unlimited possibility for experimentation with new forms of government; Fleischacker notes that Smith’s proposals seemed to have “the best chance of success in a newly formed country that could design its politico-economic institutions and policies free of the weight of old legal and popular superstitions.”8
When the navy recalled him in 1803, Cochrane’s intellectual apprenticeship under Dugald Stewart came to an end. But echoes of Scottish Enlightenment ideas reverberated in Cochrane’s writings throughout his life, as we will see later in this essay.
From its beginning, Cochrane’s naval career followed a mythic trajectory. Cochrane begged to be allowed to go to sea from late childhood on. His father initially resisted, but in 1793—the year his father was finally forced to sell the family estate to cover his debts—he was at last permitted to join the navy, serving as a midshipman under his uncle, Captain Alexander Cochrane of the ship Hind.9 He quickly acquired a reputation in Great Britain as a bold, thorough, and exceptionally inventive seaman, achieving stunning—though highly unorthodox—victories against the French at the helm of the thirty-eight-gun frigate Imperieuse and later, against seemingly overwhelming odds, while commanding the tiny fourteen-gun brig Speedy. Cochrane’s tactics included ingenuity, surprise, and meticulous preparation.10
But even as he was lionized as a brilliant seaman and was highly successful in virtually all of his naval assignments, Cochrane was not promoted as quickly as he expected, possibly as a result of English prejudice against Scots (which he inadvertently fed through his own, stereotypically Scottish rebellion against authority).11 By 1809, Cochrane’s naval career was stalled. He was widely regarded as a loose cannon by his superiors, and he had become disenchanted with the corruption and favoritism of the Royal Navy.
In 1814, as the result of a confluence of circumstances much too complicated to go into here, Cochrane’s political career abruptly ended as well: he was convicted of stock market fraud and lost his naval commission and his seat in Parliament simultaneously. Here, too, he was driven out by what he perceived as prejudice but others may well have seen as his own hotheadedness.
Cochrane’s future in England did not look bright. He had no money, and his house, Holly Hill, was seized to repay his debts. Moreover, he had lost all interest in fighting for his own country; he was furious with an English establishment that he saw as deliberately persecuting him through jealousy and prejudice. Two years after the arrest and trial, in the spring of 1816, he wrote to his wife, Katherine:
My dear and lovely Kate
God grant that fortune may smile on us at [last] for we have had anxiety and distress enough. It is now drawing to a close; the result of the next six days will show whether this Country is to be my abode or a foreign land—but wherever I go my dearest Kate shall accompany me. Let us hope for fortune elsewhere if denied in our native Country.12
Cochrane had clearly lost faith in England as a land of opportunity. As a result, he began to turn his thoughts to the New World.
. . .
The larger historical context of British involvement in South America puts Cochrane’s adventures in perspective: British obsession with the liminal space of South America at this time demonstrates that Cochrane was hardly unique in pinning his hopes on “the voyage out.” By one estimate, roughly seven thousand European mercenaries fought in South American armies and navies under independence leader Simón Bolívar between 1816 and 1825;13 by another, ten thousand British troops served in the wars of independence altogether.14 Of these troops, the great majority were Irish or Scottish. As a Scotsman seeking his fortune far from home, then, Cochrane was in good company. Indeed, the Scottish served in such great numbers and held so many top administrative posts that some scholars claim the British Empire was largely dominated by a “Scottish mafia.”15
Popular attention to the Americas as potential sites for imperial adventuring peaked in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as one independence movement followed another. As early as 1806, Robert Southey captured early nineteenth-century views on the Americas when he claimed that the England of his day was “South American mad.”16 Beginning with the American Revolution and continuing into the 1820s with the freeing, one by one, of former colonies from Spanish and Portuguese rule, the New World revolutionary spirit had a profound effect on Britain; Tim Fulford notes that these revolutions appealed strongly to the public during the Romantic era because they fit squarely with the Romantic emphasis on individual freedom, sensibility, and sublime nature as a vehicle for self-discovery.17
Once independence had been declared across the former colonies, fledgling South American governments capitalized on this wave of enthusiasm by “float[ing] approximately £20 million in bonds while British capitalization of Spanish American mining companies reached over £30 million.”18 The centuries-long struggle for imperial dominance between Spain and Britain meant that the British had a strong economic and political stake in helping American colonies to achieve independence from Spain. One conspiracy theory posits that José de San Martín, the Argentinean general whose leadership proved essential to routing the Spanish from Latin America, worked as an agent paid by the British to open the continent to British trade; Moises Enrique Rodriguez, author of a history of British mercenaries in the South American Wars of Independence, examines the sources of the rumor and concludes that while this “serious allegation indeed . . . can neither be proved nor refuted conclusively . . . we can say that the events of 1811 confirm the happy community of interests between South America and the United Kingdom during the Wars of Independence.”19 Evidence of this “happy” convergence includes the surge of British investment in the fledging South American republics—which led, by the late 1820s, to the collapse of the South American investment bubble.
A short notice published in the Edinburgh newspaper the Caledonian Mercury in August 1817 explicitly links British imperial policy in South America, Scots emigration, and Lord Cochrane’s decision to set sail for South America, emphasizing the ways that the trajectory of Cochrane’s career intersected at every turn with larger historical developments. First, the article dramatizes the Spanish ambassador’s visit to Lord Castlereagh, the Irish peer who served as British foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822. The Spanish ambassador, says the Caledonian Mercury, “made use of some warm expressions” in complaining that British officers were assisting the revolutionaries in South America “in their contest with the mother country,” but Castlereagh “took his Excellency up short,” replying “that there was no law in existence in England to prevent a British officer on half-pay from leaving the kingdom, or from throwing up his commission.” And indeed, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the glut of British officers languishing on shore needed somewhere to go. Immediately after this account, the same article includes the following brief notice: “The passion for military enterprise in South America continues—every day sees the departure of a great number of British officers for the scene of action. Lord Cochrane has set off, it is supposed, for the Spanish main.”20 Castlereagh’s rival and successor as foreign secretary, George Canning, revealed an even higher level of hubris regarding Britain’s New World ambitions when he told Parliament in 1826, “Contemplating Spain, such as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that if France had Spain it should not be Spain ‘with the Indies.’ I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old.”21
For his part, Cochrane seems to have gone “South America mad” as soon as the Chilean emissary José Antonio Alvarez invited him, in early 1817, to join their cause. In March of that year he took out an advertisement in the Times that read,
LORD COCHRANE,
HAVING resolved to view (during a few months) the operations going on in South America, will give to . . . any gentleman immediately interested in the commerce or mercantile concerns of that country the most ample security for the loan of £10,000, to be repaid with interest within 12 months.22
Not surprisingly, Cochrane does not seem to have had any takers on his offer (though his effrontery in requesting such a large loan signals his curious overconfidence in his own prospects and influence).
Bankrupt, dispossessed, and reduced to begging for loans, Cochrane had good reasons to be caught up in the wave of New World enthusiasm. Again the trajectory of his life became entangled with larger forces, as we see in a follow-up to the Caledonian Mercury article on South America quoted above:
Notwithstanding the prohibition, said in a Ministerial evening paper to have been signified at the Commander in Chief’s office, against half-pay officers repairing to the Insurgent Spanish provinces . . . we understand that a considerable number of gentlemen of that class have actually set out with the intention of entering into the service of the Patriots. They are abundantly supplied with money, and means of comfortable conveyance, by a South American General, who is agent for the Patriots in London.
The “South American General” here referred to was, most likely, Alvarez, who had indeed been sent to London to recruit officers and purchase supplies and had hired Cochrane to develop a Chilean navy. The Caledonian Mercury article continues,
It is still understood that Lord Cochrane persists in his intention of proceeding to the Spanish Main. . . . We learn that the purchase of arms of the gun manufacturers here and in Birmingham is brisk to a degree that cannot well be accounted for, without supposing they are destined for the Spanish Patriots.23
Note that the South Americans fighting for independence are slightingly referred to as “Insurgent[s]” in the context of Spain’s prohibition—but then the author shifts to the positive term “Patriots,” a change implying that despite the supposed neutrality of its reporting on South American affairs, this Scottish newspaper harbored some sympathy for those fighting for independence against a colonial power.
In 1818, Cochrane did indeed sail for South America, making his decision in reaction to the persecution—legal, political, and professional—he believed he had suffered as a Scotsman stalled in his efforts to rise within British naval and political hierarchies. He retaliated by fleeing the vaunted liberties and opportunities of Great Britain to fight beside independence seekers in a land under Spanish rule. Once in South America, too, Cochrane became far more than a disinterested mercenary. He clearly identified with the peoples whose independence he hoped to win. Primed by William Robertson and other Scottish Enlightenment authors to celebrate the “peculiar magnificence” of the New World and see limitless potential in its new nations,24 Cochrane eagerly embraced the cause of Latin independence.
Over the next few years, Cochrane achieved astonishing naval victories on this new continent as well. He continued to perfect the strategies for which he was already famous: ingenuity and surprise, coupled with meticulous preparation. But because the fledgling Chilean navy was ludicrously undermanned and underpowered, he added a new element of sheer bravado to his arsenal. With his tiny fleet, he seized key ports in Chile, Peru, and later Brazil. His most spectacular victories—as when with only two ships and three hundred men he captured the fully garrisoned, seven-fort-strong port of Valdivia from under the noses of the Spanish—were communicated by British eyewitnesses to audiences back home, chief among them travel writers such as Basil Hall, Maria Graham, and William Miller, who were instrumental in ensuring that Cochrane’s fame continued to grow. As Tim Fulford argues, Cochrane and his equally romantic wife, Kitty, became key figures in British imaginings of South America: “It was a tantalizing zone of possibility, cleared of its colonial masters, and ripe for British enterprise. . . . Now that Cochrane had helped bring independence about in a blaze of publicity not only merchants and manufacturers, but also the general public, hoped to cash in. His taking of Valdivia had helped Chile to float a loan from London bankers. Similarly, the clearing of the Spanish from Peru and the Portuguese from Brazil led to an investment boom.”25 Cochrane’s mythic victories led to direct economic gain for both South America and Britain, as well as the host of writers who recorded them. Is it so surprising, then, that Cochrane was bewildered to find that he alone seemed unable to profit from his international reputation?
. . .
This paradoxical state of affairs came about, in part, because the Cochrane myth did become tarnished in the wake of the Wars of Independence. Cochrane left Chile’s service on poor terms with its leaders, particularly General San Martín, who regarded him as little more than a money-grubber. Just as Cochrane’s decision to set sail for South America was inspired by a combination of personal, cultural, and economic factors (especially his knowledge that South America offered unique possibilities for economic advancement), so too his decision to publish his travel memoirs four decades after sailing for South America resulted from a combination of the same factors—including, most transparently, his interest in boosting his own symbolic and economic capital simultaneously. By the 1850s, Cochrane was again mired in debt. He was haunted by his enemies’ claim that he had served Chile and Brazil for purely mercenary rather than altruistic motives and—fully aware of the rapidly growing influence of the mass media—devastated by his tarnished reputation, since his longing for material gain was equaled only by his craving for public admiration. Moreover, he seems to have been genuinely sad that his idealism in fighting for South American independence had been misinterpreted. He decided it was high time he reclaimed the Cochrane myth for himself, to ensure that its circulation rebounded to his credit and profit and not that of others.
In 1858, Cochrane began writing two books, his Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination and Autobiography of a Seaman. Each illustrates the interplay among literature, more popular genres, and commercial society. Although clearly nonliterary—in pursuit of profits, and open about it—both texts draw on a range of literary genres, capitalizing on these genres’ evolution in tandem with market demands. Thus, Autobiography of a Seaman, more heterogeneous than its title implies, includes elements of adventure and maritime fiction as well as the travelogue, although it also conforms quite closely to the established traditions of autobiography.26 Defining the genre of his Narrative—a unique (not to say bizarre) amalgamation of travel narrative, naval adventure, autobiography, apologia, and demand for payment of a decades-old debt—is more difficult. Like many travel texts, then, Cochrane’s uneasily straddled the borders of literary, commercial, and even economic and scientific discourses.
In Genres of the Credit Economy, Mary Poovey examines the ways that literary and economic discourses evolved along distinct lines over the course of the eighteenth century. As Poovey explains, “[I]t was not until Literature was declared to be a different kind of imaginative writing that a secular model of value completely at odds with the market model was articulated.”27 Cochrane made no pretense of writing Literature; instead, he deliberately incorporated narrative strategies from genres that he thought would boost the book’s value as a commodity. The book’s composition process situates it in the specific nexus of literary, mercenary, and political factors that inspired its creation: this “memoir” was patched together with the help of a ghostwriter, G. P. Earp, as well as Cochrane’s former secretary William Jackson, not only from the original contracts, letters, proclamations, and other official documents saved from his time in Chile but also from the contemporary accounts that his fellow British travelers in the New World had written about him.
Thus Cochrane’s self-mythologizing was built on the scaffold of the very Cochrane myth that had already been circulating for decades. In letters to Jackson in January 1858, Cochrane explained that his primary motivation for compiling his memoirs was to claim back pay from both Chile and Brazil.28 In a letter written later that spring, he expanded on his reasons for publishing: he was determined to correct the “unfavorable impressions” created by General San Martín’s charges that Cochrane was money-hungry and to amend the “falsehoods propagated by the Portuguese faction in Brazil.”29
In April, having finished a draft manuscript, Cochrane hired a translator, explaining to Jackson,
My idea at present is to print the Chilean memorial and that to Peru, and give them in charge to my son; but to consider in what manner the Scoundrels in Brazil can best be moved to a sense of justice, whether by translating it and circulating the Document in the Country, or by publishing it in English, (for it will be, I hope, a Document that may be read even by indifferent persons) and so let the shame of such conduct operate, if possible, obliquely on the Villains.
My health remains tolerably good, but my mind is obviously giving way fast as to my remembrance of events, to which disagreeable circumstances have greatly contributed.30
In discussing his difficulties in facing his long-repressed memories, Cochrane was disarmingly open about his weaknesses; he revealed the extent to which the Cochrane myth had shaped his memory of his life, retroactively constructing his life as an adventure novel featuring a hero and numerous nefarious “Villains.”31 He consistently returned to two not necessarily harmonious themes: the need to set the record straight concerning his past deeds and debts owed, and the need to write a compelling narrative that would appeal to the reading public. In September 1858, for example, he thanked Jackson for (finally) providing some assistance to Mr. Earp and then continued, “It has materially assisted the narrative especially by giving dates. My fear however is that this narrative of dry facts will not be read by the Public—but we can publish a cheap Edition for the railroad Libraries, in which you may insert some of your [fun] to enliven the narrative. The trip to Boulogne has done me good, but my mind is still sadly oppressed by having all the injustices done to me during a long life brought to my recollection, in too overwhelming a form.”32 And finally, probably sometime in December, Cochrane wrote morosely to Jackson, “I send you the proof sheets complete. The work has been more troublesome than anticipated, by reason of the confusion of my papers. . . . I am [miserably] low in spirits and cannot assign the cause. I hoped when the Memoir was completed I should have felt relieved.”33
He should indeed, because his initial confidence in the power of the pen was not misplaced. Cochrane’s Narrative (published just as the British Empire began to reel under new threats to its expansion, for example the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857) satisfied a public thirst for old-style imperial heroes. As a result, despite its occasionally shrill tone of victimization and the virtual absence of typical travel-narrative descriptions of the flora, fauna, and customs of the foreign land, the Narrative sold very well, going into a second edition within the year and becoming the foundation for future pirated or excerpted accounts of his adventures that were reprinted into the early twentieth century.
Cochrane arranged to have the book simultaneously translated into both Portuguese and Spanish, and excerpts were sent to governmental authorities in Britain, Chile, and Brazil to ensure that his demands for retroactive payment were officially recognized. Thus Cochrane applied both direct pressure, from personal demands, and indirect leverage, from the weight of public opinion, to Brazil and Chile. Because Cochrane was increasingly revered as a key hero of independence in those countries, his very public demands received a rapid response in the form of precisely the financial windfall Cochrane had banked on in publishing his books: the Chilean government awarded him £6,000, and the Brazilian government arranged for bills of exchange for £34,000.34 At last, symbolic capital proved its value: the Cochrane myth was converted into the cold hard cash he had long sought.
The history of the book’s publication and reception indicates Cochrane’s (and, by extension, his time period’s) reliance on the publishing industry as a means to leverage publicity for profit. At the same time, its narrative strategies indicate the extent to which life writing had developed clear conventions by the 1850s. Cochrane attempted to adhere to these both directly (as in his self-construction as a bold, hypermasculine hero) and indirectly (as in, for example, begging Jackson to “insert some of [his] fun” so that the book would be accessible to the reading public).
Cochrane’s memoirs succeeded not only in extracting payment from Chile and Brazil, but in reinvigorating their author’s fame. As David Cordingly explains, Cochrane’s Autobiography of a Seaman “would reinforce his reputation as the most brilliant naval officer of his generation.”35 The publication of the Autobiography and Narrative so close together flushed Cochrane fans from the woodwork, inspiring praise such as the following in the Quarterly Review: “On his eighty-fourth birthday Lord Dundonald has given to the world the history of the brilliant triumphs and bitter disappointments of his own memorable career. The famous Lord Cochrane of the great naval war, the terror and then the idol of the Spanish coast, the hero of Basque Roads, and the founder of the liberties of Chili and Brazil, has attained . . . to honour after unmerited and heartbreaking disgrace.”36 This reviewer helped revive the Cochrane myth by means of strategies that parallel those of Victorian melodrama: hyperbole and binary oppositions jostle for position in juxtaposed phrases such as “brilliant triumphs” and “bitter disappointments,” “terror” and “idol,” and “honour” and “heartbreaking disgrace.” Next, the review waxes poetic about Cochrane’s abilities as well as his enemies’ persecution in full “block that metaphor” mode: “Like a noble ship driven by a violent storm high on shore and left by the receding tide helpless and useless to her owners, so was Lord Dundonald, in the prime of his vast abilities, forced by unpitying destiny from his country’s service just when the appearance of a new enemy opened to him a field for glorious exploits. . . . If we were to examine the history of all our defeats by the Americans we should find that the whole might have been turned to victories if only there had been a Cochrane to command.”37 This unlikely praise indicates the public thirst for old-style Romantic heroes of a kind increasingly rare in a media-saturated age.
. . .
Despite its success, Cochrane’s Narrative is less readable than he had hoped. His obsessive cataloguing of prize money won and lost, payments evaded, and promises broken becomes a litany of victimization that ultimately engulfs the more compelling narrative of his contributions to South American independence. In the end, then, Cochrane’s Narrative succeeds mostly in illuminating intertwined issues of social, symbolic, and economic capital: Cochrane’s public persona as a peer of the British Empire as well as a naval hero of increasing reputation; his almost uncanny ability to win battles against much larger naval forces; and his consequent expectation that his social prestige and professional skills would, together, reap enormous economic rewards.
In his preface, Cochrane bluntly explains that he published the Narrative in part to shame Brazilian and Chilean authorities into awarding back pay for services rendered. After dwelling on these debts, Cochrane then abruptly shifts ground from economic to social and cultural capital, telling his readers that despite his determination to reclaim what is owed him, a still more pressing goal is to redeem his reputation as a brilliant and knowledgeable admiral of the fleet. He wants to set the story straight, as he puts it, “for the sake of my family—to whom my character is an heir-loom,—[so] that no obloquy shall follow me to the grave, for none have I merited. On the day these volumes see the light . . . I shall have completed the eighty-third year of a career strangely chequered, yet not undistinguished; and, therefore, the opinions of either Chilians or Brazilians are now of small moment to me in comparison with a reputation which has been deemed worthy of belonging to history.”38 In his metaphor of character as heirloom, Cochrane fuses Bourdieu’s three forms of capital, indicating that he understood how deeply they are intertwined.
Paradoxically, however, his metaphor also reveals Cochrane’s misunderstanding of Adam Smith’s economic principle of value. For Smith, an object’s value is determined by its use to an individual, as well as by the labor that individual is willing to expend to obtain it. As Smith explains, “The word value, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys.”39 In other words, commodities have both use value and exchange value: Smith uses the examples of water (which has high utility but may have little exchange value) and diamonds (which have little utility but high exchange value) to point out that these types of value do not often coincide.
Cochrane’s “character,” by contrast, is not a commodity; it is not even an heirloom in the sense of a concrete legacy that might be exchanged—like family silver or an art collection—for its value in the marketplace. It is true that character, in the small, incestuous, and relentlessly competitive world of the early nineteenth-century British navy, encompassed personal, social, and professional worth and could thus be considered a kind of legacy to one’s heirs, in that a family’s reputation was key to obtaining promotions. Nevertheless, Cochrane’s metaphor is flawed: a sterling character is not equivalent to economic value. Thus Cochrane could not simply “cash in” on the currency of his still-circulating reputation, claiming for his family’s benefit the rewards that had accrued to other writers who had published popular accounts of his exploits.
However, Cochrane could—like earlier writers—create a book that would sell, thus realizing the value of his character indirectly. When he begins the memoir proper, from its opening pages Cochrane develops an unmistakable narrative persona: a hypermasculine naval commander uninterested in trifles such as personal comfort, social niceties, and other nations’ naval policies. Invited by Don José Antonio Alvarez to assume command of the Chilean navy on page 1, he lands in Valparaíso by the end of page 2, after which he loses no time in distinguishing his active, forceful, and iconoclastic habits from those of his more ritual-bound Chilean hosts: “A variety of fêtes was given at Valparaiso in honour of our arrival, these being prolonged for so many days as to amount to a waste of time. The same scenes were, however, re-enacted at the distant capital, whither the Supreme Director insisted on taking us, till I had to remind His Excellency that our purpose was rather fighting than feasting.”40 Contrasting his no-nonsense focus on fighting with his hosts’ (presumably Latin) preference for feasting, Cochrane depicts himself as a true British hero with all the “virtues” of that national character. But he also feels driven to emphasize his alienation from the Britain that had so grievously wounded his national pride. He tells his audience, “[T]he reception we had met [with] impressed me with so high a sense of Chilian hospitality, that, heartbroken as I had been by the infamous persecution which had driven me from the British navy, I decided upon Chili as my future home” (3).
In the narrative that follows, Cochrane pursues his plan to live the rest of his life as a Chilean. Although he does not explicitly say so, he clearly hoped his fortunes would rise in tandem with the South American investment bubble. We know from letters that he intended to invest his anticipated prize money in a new shipyard he planned to build north of Valparaíso, along a coast with almost boundless potential for sea trade but severely limited infrastructure to support such trade. The Narrative describes Cochrane’s progress towards this goal as he imports furniture and machinery from England and is given a generous grant of land at Quintero Bay by his staunch friend and ally, Chile’s supreme director Bernardo O’Higgins. Cochrane expected, then, to both contribute to and profit from a post-Independence Chilean maritime industry. In his Narrative, Cochrane accordingly constructs Chile as a paradise of unbounded opportunity—a direct counterpoint to England—and proclaims his intention to adopt it as his new homeland.
Cochrane’s declaration of Chilean citizenship immediately upon arriving in the New World inevitably recalls his vexed relationship with English authorities. Throughout his life, Cochrane remained obsessed with earning enough money to buy back the family estate in Scotland41—but “home,” to him, would ever remain an alien concept as he remained trapped in the place of the unheimlich. It is no wonder that even before arriving in the New World, buoyed by the powerful current of British economic and cultural interest in South America discussed above, he had announced his intention of finding a home at last.
While actively engaged in the wars of independence, Cochrane articulated his desire to help Chile to achieve Adam Smith’s fourth stage of human development—the commercial society. As he explains in a letter to Chile’s leader, Bernardo O’Higgins, in 1821,
Nothing is wanting to render the South a happy land, but fixed laws; the impartial administration of justice; and a wise commercial policy; in which no Spanish colonial restrictions shall find place—in which everything enacted by them shall be avoided as the beacon of destruction. Will you permit me humbly to state that I was grieved lately to see a [decree shutting up the port in Maule], instead of opening every creek, port, bay, and river from end to end of Chile. No pretence, of duties being evaded, will recompence your Excellency for the want of a nursery of seamen. . . . The day is not distant when you will want seamen, more attached to the Country, than those I now command are, from circumstances which I need not again detail to your Excellency.42
Here Cochrane implicitly contrasts Spanish “colonial restrictions” with the informal empire Britain was beginning to establish in South America through trade. But clearly the free trade he advocates here would benefit Britain enormously, though of course Cochrane refrains from mentioning this obvious fact. When he turns to discuss naval matters, by contrast, Cochrane interestingly seems to think more of Chile’s interest than of Britain’s, asserting that opening the ports to free trade will encourage Chileans to take to the sea at last, now that maritime activity will no longer be forbidden by the Spanish colonists.
So Cochrane attempted to shape the future political economy of Chile by directly advising its supreme director on trade policy and investing in its mercantile potential. He also attempted more indirect influence through publishing and distributing political propaganda. Importing a printing press from England, he mistakenly claimed in his Narrative that his was the first in South America: “The above addresses were printed by a lithographic press in my house at Quintero, this being the first introduced into the Pacific States. I had sent for this press from England, together with other social improvements, and a number of agricultural implements, hoping thereby, though at my own expense, to give an impetus to industry in Chili” (252). Similar to his lauding of free trade as the best way to advance Chilean naval interests, Cochrane implies in this passage that importing industrial and agricultural machinery from Britain was the best way to develop Chilean manufactures.
Chile disagreed, desiring that Chilean industry should develop internally, without interference from European imports and investors. But the government’s demurral had no effect on Cochrane. As his tiny fleet of ships swept south to Valdivia and north to what is now Ecuador, seizing control of harbor after harbor through brilliant naval strategy, Cochrane littered the coast with addresses that he wrote and then set and printed (with the help of travel writer Maria Graham) on his press. He reprints some of this propaganda in his Narrative. Describing the events surrounding his “liberation” of Peru in May 1819, for example, he explains that “the best effect [on Peruvian citizens] was produced by the circulation of the following Proclamation”:
Compatriots! The repeated echoes of liberty in South America have been heard with pleasure in every part of enlightened Europe, more especially in Great Britain, where I, unable to resist the desire of joining in such a cause, determined to take part in it. The Republic of Chili has confided to me the command of her naval forces. . . . By their co-operation must your chains be broken. Doubt not but that the day is at hand on which, with the annihilation of despotism and your now degraded condition, you will rise to the rank of a free nation, to which your geographical position and the course of events naturally call you. (18)
This proclamation combines many of the strands of late Enlightenment thought that Cochrane absorbed through Dugald Stewart’s lectures: European fascination with New World constructions of liberty and natural rights; the Dispute of the New World, which posited the Americas alternately as sites of degeneration and primitive nature and as sites of unbounded fertility and possibility; and the Black Legend of Spanish colonization. In the proclamation, Cochrane also echoes the language of his philosopher models, repeating key terms such as “enlightened” and “liberty”; invoking important causes of his time, particularly abolition; and echoing the stadial theory of Adam Smith and others in constructing inhabitants of the New World as inhabiting an earlier stage of human development.
In Cochrane’s view, at least, publication and distribution of this proclamation had a performative effect: his distributed documents officially liberated the country from Spanish rule. As he says in his Narrative, “This proclamation was accompanied by another from the Chilian government, declaratory of the sincerity of its intentions, so that these combined caused us to be everywhere received as liberators” (18). Because the proclamation was a form that was generally used to enact legislation in colonies, the document reveals Cochrane’s hubris: he presumed that he had the right to proclaim the independence of the citizens of foreign shores.
Cochrane also used the press to promulgate his views of individual liberties and the Rights of Man. In his “Address to Guayaquilenos” in 1822, which he again proudly reprints in his Narrative, Cochrane proclaims,
May you be as free as you are independent, and as independent as you deserve to be free! With the liberty of the press, now protected by your excellent Government, which [disseminates] enlightenment from that fount, Guayaquil can never again be enslaved. . . . Remember your former ideas on commerce and manufactures. . . . Accustomed to the blind habits of Spanish monopoly, you then believed that Guayaquil would be robbed, were not her commerce limited to her own merchants. All foreigners were forbidden by restrictive laws from attending even to their own business and interests. (170)
Here Cochrane again echoes Scottish Enlightenment ideals in praising “the liberty of the press” for bringing enlightenment, in arguing against monopolies, and most of all (courtesy of Adam Smith again) in urging free trade as the cure for all evils. Cochrane also echoes the language of the abolitionist movement, constructing Spanish colonization as metaphorically akin to slavery and using chiasmus to intertwine freedom with independence. Having established Spanish domination as an evil stifling an abstract “freedom,” Cochrane goes on to set up British commerce and, more generally, capitalist consumption as a good productive of freedom, assuring the Guyaquileños that after they gain independence from Spain: “Your river will be filled with ships, and the monopolist degraded and shamed. Let your customs’ duties be moderate, in order to promote the greatest possible consumption of foreign and domestic goods. . . . Let every man do as he pleases as regards his own property, views, and interests; because every individual will watch over his own with more zeal than senates, ministers, or kings. By your enlarged views set an example to the New World” (171).
Adam Smith’s influence can be traced not only in Cochrane’s ideas but also in his imagery and language. Just one of many sources for Cochrane’s ideas in the address above is chapter 7 of the Wealth of Nations, in which Smith excoriates monopolies and warns us,
The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked . . . sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate.
The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken.43
Leaving aside the intriguing implications underlying Smith’s phrase “the natural price,” we can see Cochrane echoing Smith’s tone and points almost directly here as he abstracts Smith’s economic principles and applies them to his own experiences in South America.
What Cochrane leaves unsaid in all this is his adaptation of Adam Smith’s principle of enlightened self-interest, which Smith developed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). A key passage comes in the chapter “Of the Influences and Authority of Conscience,” where Smith sets up the problem of selfishness and then counters it with an idea of an internalized monitor: “When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? . . . It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. . . . [T]he natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator.”44 As D. D. Raphael observes, critics have pointed to an inconsistency, dubbed the “Adam Smith problem,” between Smith’s ethics and his economics, located in a potential contradiction between the ethical principles as laid out in the Theory of Moral Sentiments above and the self-interested roots of human action claimed in The Wealth of Nations (1776). A famous passage from the latter reads, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”45
Cochrane himself straddles this contradiction in notions of enlightened self-interest: as he looked back over his service to South American independence, Cochrane positioned himself squarely with the “generous and noble” impartial observer. As he considered his own financial embarrassments, by contrast, Cochrane joined ranks with the self-interested butcher and baker. In his published Narrative, when Cochrane begins to consider the consequences, for trade policy, of Chilean independence, his tone quickly shifts from initial celebration of a new phase in South American history to almost obsessive harping on a policy that would work to his own enlightened self-interest, transferring the monopoly on South American trade from Spanish to British merchants and businesses—including Cochrane’s own planned shipyard in the harbor granted to him at Quintero.
Implicit in Cochrane’s proclamation to Guayaquil, and explicit in later proclamations, is the belief that for these South American republics, the goal must be to move toward the kind of commercial society that Adam Smith had identified as the fourth or highest stage of civilization, and that requires relatively free trade with other nations. In his memoir, not only does Cochrane claim to have liberated South Americans politically but also he takes full credit for increasing the trade routes available to Britain, and he rebukes the British for not having rewarded his initiative. Because, of course, his free trade policies benefited—primarily—the British mercantile houses that poured into South America as soon as Spanish and Portuguese restrictions were lifted. Not incidentally, Cochrane’s version of free trade would also have benefited him personally had he been permitted to develop the Quintero harbor.
. . .
But despite his attempts to shape the economic policy and national character of the South American countries he embraced, Chile, Peru, and Brazil exceeded the colonial spaces Cochrane defined for them. As Cochrane became increasingly invested in a view of himself as naval hero, increasingly convinced that he deserved enormous sums in prize money, and increasingly determined to open South American ports to free trade for the benefit of British commerce, the newly independent republics began to distance themselves from Cochrane. He confronted the limits of his power to shape the future of the nations he had helped to liberate when his vision of a primitive, picturesque New World of infinite possibility returned the gaze, making Cochrane’s own problematic identity the object of surveillance.
Carlos López Urrutia, whose balanced and rigorously researched Más allá de la audacia: Vida de Thomas Cochrane (Beyond audacity: Life of Thomas Cochrane) is one of the best of the crop of recent studies of the admiral, tells us that the abhorrence of Cochrane is so strong in some Chilean historians that they have affirmed false rumors (for example, that Cochrane first offered his services to Spain to fight against Chile’s independence before switching allegiances because Chile’s bid was higher).46 We see the seeds of this future loathing planted in Cochrane’s own time—often, unsurprisingly, by the ever-paradoxical Cochrane himself.
Early in his Narrative, Cochrane proudly claims that the Spanish fleet called him “El Diablo” out of fear of his surprising methods of attack (12). But he forgets to mention his less flattering nicknames, like those cited earlier. Perhaps most damning was “El Metálico Lord,” a title given him by San Martín when Chileans tired of his constant demands for money. Indeed, Chilean accounts of Cochrane are full of criticism of his behavior and motivations. To cite just a few examples, San Martín’s aide-de-camp James Paroissien commented that Cochrane was “sólo ansioso de ganar dinero” (only anxious to gather loot) (López Urrutia, 228). San Martín himself acknowledged that Cochrane was indispensable to the cause of independence but added that “Cochrane es un niño grande que nos causará muchas molestias; pero cuyos servicios puden ser inapreciables” (Cochrane is a big baby who will cause us plenty of trouble—but his services may be inestimable) (ibid., 208–9). And later in life, San Martín called him a “gringo badulaque, Almirantito que cuando no podía embolsicar lo consideraba robo” (gringo rogue, the little admiral who, when he couldn’t fill his purse, considered himself robbed).47
Some of these accusations arose from Cochrane’s quite jingoistic assumption that British economic theory and political practices should shape the policies of other nations: to cite just one example in addition to the free trade debate discussed above, Cochrane continually sought to impose British guidelines for the distribution of the prize money when he seized enemy ships, known as “prizes.” In Britain, the captain and crew were awarded the lion’s share of profits from these prizes. In Chile and Brazil, by contrast, ships seized by naval personnel in the course of duty were considered the property of the state. So when Cochrane captured Spanish, Portuguese, and even occasional British or American ships, he assumed that he was enriching himself enormously. The Chileans and Brazilians, by contrast, were horrified by what they perceived as his shameless piracy in refusing to hand the prizes over to the fledgling nations, which desperately needed funds to secure their independence.
Amid these and many other misunderstandings, Cochrane, far from remaining above the fray, found his reputation tarnished by his ceaseless demands for money as well as continued conflicts with his South American employers—hence his need to revise the Cochrane myth at the end of his life, as if to erase those haunting accusations. In his Narrative, Cochrane’s self-proclaimed motive for leading the Chilean and Brazilian navies to independence from Spain and Portugal was his altruistic desire to help colonized nations achieve liberation from oppression—and as a Scotsman expelled from the British navy, Cochrane understood all too well the consequences of marginalization. At the same time, this averred motive contradicts his actual role in the South American wars of independence: like so many of his fellow British officers, at the end of the day he was essentially a mercenary hiring himself out to the highest bidder.
The geopolitical dynamics of Thomas Cochrane’s involvement in South American independence—and the class, gender, and national anxieties that accompanied his service there—demonstrate the extent to which an individual life can become mythologized, as well as the profits such a reputation can bring to those who successfully capitalize on it. Cochrane’s life and the Cochrane myth also reveal the intertwined development of British and South American national identities over the course of the nineteenth century, as well as the entanglement of individual life stories and changing ideas of nationhood.
Cochrane published his Narrative for multiple reasons. As we have seen, he used it to convince Chile and Brazil to pay him for past services rendered. At the same time, he hoped to redeem his reputation as well as to cash in on the increasing commodification of the figure of the hero in British mass culture. His published travel memoir, itself straddling the nexus of literary and commercial discourses, marks his final—and somewhat successful—attempt to convert his social and symbolic capital into cash. Although his embarrassingly obsessive self-promotional narrative tarnished the “heir-loom” of a sterling character that he had hoped to leave his heirs,48 his memoirs did succeed in producing the desired profits, both from their sales and from the back pay granted by Chile and Brazil.
In its reliance on codes of imperial masculinity no less than its restless idealism and its anxious rehearsal of the meanings of liberty, freedom, and even free trade, Cochrane’s Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil speaks to the self-construction of the British hero abroad in the empire. In turn, the Chilean response to him points to the distinctions between British and South American perspectives on liberty, ideal government, free trade, and stadial theory. When juxtaposed against popular representations of Cochrane, then, his own narratives helped to crystallize public discourse about the circulation of goods and capital in British imaginings of the New World—discourses that had direct economic repercussions. The stories about and profits of Thomas Cochrane—military genius, eccentric Scot, or lord metálico—that continue to circulate through our culture help us to understand the complex and reciprocal processes by which myths and money are imagined, invested, and ceaselessly intertwined.
NOTES
1. These phrases translate, respectively, as Sea Wolf, Devil, and (in Brian Vale’s alliterative though not literal translations) Baron of Bullion or Count of Cash (Brian Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific: Fortune and Freedom in Spanish America [London: I. B. Tauris, 2008], 202). Lord Cochrane, as the eldest son of the ninth Earl of Dundonald, became the tenth earl on his father’s death in 1831 and thenceforth should properly be referred to as Dundonald. But because the central focus of this chapter, his involvement in South American independence, took place while he was still Lord Cochrane, for clarity and consistency I refer to him as “Cochrane” throughout.
2. Quoted in David Cordingly, Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 1.
3. Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, 11–12.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Cultural Theory: An Anthology, ed. Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy (Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 82.
5. Ibid, 84.
6. Cochrane’s class anxiety was fuelled, in part, by the fact that his father’s relative poverty had prevented him from attending university. Early in his naval career, Cochrane found himself temporarily without a ship and took advantage of this period of enforced unemployment to patch this crack in his aristocratic veneer by attending the University of Edinburgh for as long as his leave lasted. It is telling—though perhaps not surprising given Scotland’s long-standing emphasis on education—that despite his long residence in London, he did not consider pursuing his studies anywhere but in Scotland.
7. Stewart transmitted his knowledge of Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers to many intellectual and cultural leaders in the early nineteenth century.
8. Samuel Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Reception among the American Founders, 1776–1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 4 (October 2002): 897–924; 903, 905.
9. Cordingly, Cochrane, 21.
10. For example, several of his most spectacular victories (including both his controversial attack on French warships lying at anchor in the Basque Roads and his much more straightforward victory against the Spanish in the Capture of Valdivia, Chile, in 1820) were carefully planned, with Cochrane personally studying and taking soundings of the harbors before the attacks.
11. As part of his critique of English authority, Cochrane decided to run for political office; helped by the political journalist William Cobbett, he won election as the representative to Parliament first of Honiton, Devon, and the next year, with the radical candidate Sir Francis Burdett, of Westminster (1806–7; Cordingly, Cochrane, 105–28). Once elected, Cochrane used his new position to offend as many high-ranking government officials as he possibly could; for example, his first motion (intended to uncover corruption) read “that a committee be appointed to enquire into an account of all offices, posts, places, sinecures, pensions, situations, fees, perquisites, and emoluments of every description . . . held or enjoyed by any member of this House, his wife, or any of his descendants” (1807; quoted in ibid., 131). Unsurprisingly, this motion was not well received in either house of Parliament. Although Cochrane was right that naval abuses were in urgent need of reform, his methods were ineffective.
12. Cochrane to Katherine Barnes Cochrane, May 21, 1816, Dundonald Archive, National Archives of Scotland (Edinburgh), GD233/13/6/1/1.
13. Matthew Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 1.
14. Moises Enrique Rodriguez, Freedom’s Mercenaries: British Volunteers in the Wars of Independence of Latin America (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2006), 2.
15. See, for example, Michael Frye, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2002); and Tom Devine, Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2003).
16. Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 1.
17. Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
18. Heinowitz, Spanish America, 182.
19. Juan Bautista Sejean, quoted in Rodriguez, Freedom’s Mercenaries, 57.
20. “Private Correspondence,” Caledonian Mercury, August 16, 1817.
21. Canning, Speeches of the Right Honourable George Canning, ed. R. Therry, 3rd ed. (London: Ridgway and Sons, 1836), 6:111.
22. “Cochrane, Having Resolved . . .” (advertisement), The Times (London), March 25, 1817, 2A, available online at The Times Digital Archive, 1785–1985.
23. “Private Correspondence,” Caledonian Mercury, September 6, 1817.
24. Robertson, History of America (1777), quoted in Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 159.
25. Tim Fulford, “‘El Diablo’ and ‘El Angel del Cielo!’: Tomas and Kitty Cochrane and the Romanticisation of Revolution in South America,” in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, ed. Joselyn M. Almeida (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 103.
26. Autobiography was fairly well established as a genre with its own conventions by the time Cochrane began his writing; see William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
27. Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.
28. Cochrane to Jackson, Dundonald Archive, National Archives of Scotland (Edinburgh), GD233/28/215.
29. Cochrane to Jackson, Letter 8, n.d., Dundonald Archive, GD233/28/215.
30. Cochrane to Jackson, Letter 7, n.d., Dundonald Archive, GD233/28/215.
31. Jackson nevertheless seems well able to resist his former boss’s dubious charms. Reading between the lines of Cochrane’s replies, one can infer Jackson’s reluctance to assist with the compilation and writing of the irritable admiral’s apologia; Jackson apparently pleaded—repeatedly—that the ill health of his sister made it impossible for him to help with the manuscript. As the eighty-three-year-old Lord Dundonald’s letters become longer and longer and increasingly insistent on his continued relevance to the world political situation, Jackson’s long-suffering sister sounds more and more like a convenient fiction—which lends extra poignancy to Dundonald’s hope that, for example, “the fine weather now setting in will contribute to relieve your sister and consequently place your mind more at ease (Cochrane to Jackson, Letter 7, n.d., Dundonald Archive, GD233/28/215).”
32. Cochrane to Jackson, September 13, 1858, Dundonald Archive, GD233/28/215. Words enclosed in square brackets represent my best guess at illegible or partially missing text in the original letters.
33. Cochrane to Jackson, n.d. (sometime after December 4, 1858), Dundonald Archive, GD233/28/215.
34. Cordingly, Cochrane, 351.
35. Ibid., 35.
36. “Earl of Dundonald,” Bentley’s Quarterly Review 2, no. 4 (January 1860): 575.
37. Ibid., 579.
38. Cochrane, Narrative, xvii. Brian Vale notes that “as a work of history, the Narrative of Services is deeply flawed. It is therefore unfortunate that for more than 150 years, the book has been accepted at its face value and has had a perverse effect on the way the wars of independence in the Pacific has [sic] been recorded by British, Spanish and—indeed—Chilean historians” (Cochrane in the Pacific, 202). Vale redresses this imbalance in his book, drawing on Chilean and Brazilian sources to correct Cochrane’s “disturbingly distorted” account of many of the events he experienced.
39. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hampshire, UK: Harriman House, 2007), 18.
40. Cochrane, Narrative, 3. In the text, subsequent references to the Narrative will be noted in parentheses.
41. Cordingly, Cochrane, 316.
42. Earl of Dundonald to Bernardo O’Higgins, March 10, 1821, Dundonald Archive, GD233/28/215.
43. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 4:1.
44. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 158.
45. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 9–10.
46. Carlos López Urrutia, Más allá de la audacia: Vida de Thomas Cochrane (Mexico City: Editorial Andres Bello, 2001), 172n17. In the text, subsequent references will be noted in parentheses.
47. Perez Rosales, quoted in ibid., 255.
48. One of those descendants, planning a reissue of the Autobiography with a secretary, conveyed the family’s perspective on the tone of Cochrane’s memoirs: “I have to say that I entirely agree that much elimination could be made in the Tenth Earl’s Account of services in Chile, Peru and Brazil. Such elimination would be confined to such passages as (1) might affect the popularity of the book in South American countries and (2) might detract from the dignity of the writer and the value of his great work by their insistence upon a note of personal complaint. . . . The book, with all doubtful passages omitted, and greater brevity secured, might become a South American classic.” Earl of Dundonald to Miss Dibbin, May 31, 1928, Dundonald Archive, GD233/187/4/111.