The audacious Admiral Cochrane : the true life of a naval legend
"Royal Navy captain, radical politician, respected inventor, Vice Admiral of Chile, First Admiral of Brazil - Lord Cochrane (1775-1860) achieved legendary status during a lifetime that spanned the conflicts of the late Georgian period into the relative peace and stability of the Victorian era. But he is best remembered as a naval hero, immortalised in the protagonists of the fiction of Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester and Frederick Marryat. ... Although his naval accomplishments are numerous, his career was marked by controversy and pathological disputes with some of the eminent men of the period; Admiral Lord Keith described him as 'wrong-headed, violent and proud'. Late in life, he published a series of autobiographies which have been accepted, unquestioned, as an accurate version of events. In this book Brian Vale sets the record straight. He has thoroughly investigated the incidents in Cochrane's life, going back to original sources in the archives of the UK, Chile and Brazil. What emerges is a different picture to the one conveyed by Cochrane that ultimately reveals a much more complex and intriguing figure."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2004
Conway Maritime, London, 2004