Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/560

540 540 DUNDONALD triumphantly for Westminster in the Radical interest, along with Sir Francis Burdett : and during a brief interval spent at home, while he was in command of the &quot;Imperieuse,&quot; he had rendered himself still further obnoxious as a critic in Parliament of naval abuses. In 1809, however, the authorities had occasion for a daring service which he alone was found competent and willing to undertake. It had been suggested to them that the French fleet blockaded in Basque Roads might be destroyed by means of fire ships, and the hazardous duty was intrusted to Cochrane. On the night of the llth April he personally piloted the vessels loaded with explosives to the entrance of the harbour, where they spread such terror that seven French frigates slipped their cables and ran on shore, five of them being afterwards destroyed. Unfortunately this first success was not followed up as it ought to have been. Lord Gambier, the commander of the blockading fleet, ignoring the repeated and urgent requests of Cochraue, refused to order a general attack, and thus the opportunity of destroying the whole of the enemy s ships was lost. Lord Cochrane was bitterly disappointed, and made no attempt to conceal his opinion of the incompetency of his superior, who found himself compelled to demand a court martial. The trial was worse than a mockery ; the court was packed, witnesses were manipulated, and charts fabricated, with the scandalous result that Gambier was acquitted and Cochrane by implication disgraced. There was, of course, no further professional employment for one who had been stigmatized as a false accuser. For four critical years Lord Cochrane held no command, and his country lost the services of one of the few naval heroes she has had worthy to be named along with Nelson. In his place in Parliament he did what he could to secure a reform of the many abuses connected with the administration of the navy, and his unsparing criticisms greatly embittered his already un friendly relations with the Admiralty and the Government. In 1814 an unfortunate concurrence of circumstances, suspicious in themselves though capable of a satisfactory explanation, led to his being accused, along with several others, of a conspiracy to defraud the Stock Exchange, by circulating a false report of the success of the Allies and the death of Napoleon. He had only a week or two before so far overcome the disfavour with which he was regarded by the Admiralty as to securs his appointment to the com mand of the &quot; Tonnant,&quot; the flag-ship of his uncle Sir Alexander Cochrane, but he had to resign the position in order to meet the prosecution which the Government were not slow to institute. The trial was conducted before Lord Ellenborough, a noted partisan, who, if he did not, as Cochrane s friends have insinuated, exceed the limits of his office in order to secure a conviction, certainly showed no favour to the accused, who were all found guilty. Lord Cochrane was sentenced to a fine of 1000, twelve months imprisonment, and an hour in the pillory. His ruin and disgrace were completed by his being expelled from the House of Commons, and deprived with the usual humiliating ceremony of the knighthood of the Bath, which had been bestowed on him after his heroic service at Basque Roads. Popular sympathy, however, was strongly with him. An influential minority of forty-four voted against his expulsion from the House of Commons, and when a new writ was issued for Westminster he was unanimously returned, no one having ventured to stand against him. A public sub scription was raised by his constituents for the payment of his fine. His colleague, Sir Francis Burdett, pledged himself to stand along with him in the pillory if that part of the sentence was carried out, and the Government judged it prudent to remit it. Lord Cochrane s conduct was throughout that of an innocent, if somewhat imprudent, man. At his trial he voluntered a full explanation of the suspicious circumstances that were urged against him, and after his conviction he took every opportunity of protesting against the injustice that had been done him, and was urgent in his demand for a new inquiry. During the currency of his sentence he contrived to make his escape from prison, and took his seat in the House of Commons, from which he was forcibly removed by the warden and officers of the King s Bench. At the close of his imprisonment Lord Cochrane soon found that there was little hope of his being again actively engaged in the service of his native country. The peace that followed Waterloo promised to be enduring, and, even had it been otherwise, he could not expect employment, as his name had been struck off the navy list. When, therefore, the command of the fleet of the republic of Chili was offered to him in 1818, he at once accepted it, finding a congenial task in the endeavour to aid a weak state in its struggle for freedom. He arrived at Valparaiso in November 1818; and in a short time afterwards he was ready for action, though the fleet under liis command was in every respect miserably weak when compared with that of Spain, to which it was opposed. It seemed almost the characteristic feature of his genius, however, that the greater the odds against him the more brilliant the success he achieved, and this was signally exemplified during his carser in South America. It is impossible to detail all his marvellous exploits. Two, however, must be specially mentioned as among the most extraordinary achievements in the annals of naval warfare. On the 2d February 1820 he captured Valdivia, a very strongly forti fied town and harbour in the possession of the Spaniards, the forces under his command consisting of his own single frigate and 250 land troops in three small vessels. The place yielded to the mere terror of his name, the handful of troops that obtained possession of it being insufficient to man its guns or even to keep its civil population in order. In the autumn of the same year he blockaded the harbour of Callao, one of the strongest in the world. Within it, fixed to chain moorings, protected by twenty-seven gun boats, and covered by the fire of no less than 300 guns in the batteries, lay the Spanish frigate &quot;Esmeralda.&quot; The ambition of Lord Cochrane was fired by the apparent im possibility of the task to attempt his favourite exploit cf cutting out. The attempt was made on the night of the 5th November, and, in spite of the apparent impossibility, it was completely successful after a sharp engagement of a quarter of an hour s duration, in the course of which Lord Cochrane was severely wounded. The moral effect of this achievement upon the Spaniards was all that Cochrane had anticipated; they were completely paralyzed, and left their daring opponent undisputed master of the coast. Unfortu nately, just at the time when he was rendering her these signal services, the jealousies and intrigues of various mem bers of the Chilian Government were making Lord Cochrane s position uncomfortable, if not untenable. The withholding of prize-money, and even of pay, had nearly caused a mutiny in the fleet, when Lord Cochrane, by tak ing strong measures to obtain part of what was due to his men, brought on an open rupture between himself and the Government. An invitation from the regent of Brazil to undertake the command of his fleet against the Portuguese was, therefore, accepted as a welcome deliverance. Lord Cochrane entered on his new duties at Rio de Janeiro in March 1822. His services to Brazil were quite as import ant, though scarcely marked by so many brilliant episodes, as those to Chili, and they were in the end equally ill-requited. His daring capture of Maranham with a single frigate, in July 1823, added a province to the newly- formed empire ; and the value of the accession was acknow ledged by the title of marquis of Marauhaiu being conferred