Free Cochrane by Donald Thomas Page A

Atlantic coasts of France and Spain. Corsica had been occupied at the start of the war. There had even been the portentous possibility that, on his father's advice, the young Napoleon Buonaparte was to volunteer for the Royal Navy.
     
    The turning point in the history of the Mediterranean war came on 14 February 1797 in the Atlantic battle of Cape St Vincent. Admiral Jervis dealt a costly blow to the Spanish, prevented their rendezvous with the French to support an invasion of Ireland, and won himself the title of Earl St Vincent. Among the cheers of victory, the British commanders returned to the Mediterranean, St Vincent in command with Nelson and Keith as his assistants. Minorca was taken in 1798 and the base at Malta re-established. Brest and Cadiz were mere blockades, but the Mediterranean promised a running fight.
    Cochrane's superior, Lord Keith, was a youngish commander, inclined to keep his thoughts and opinions to himself. He appeared to encourage Cochrane's enterprise and daring, though he attacked his character without mercy in private correspondence. Lord St Vincent, who was so often to be Cochrane's opponent, was still at Gibraltar, a caricaturist's portrait of advancing age, the flushed and pear-shaped head settling forward on the breast, the body crippled and swollen by dropsy. He received Cochrane with courtesy, however, and confirmed his appointment on Keith's flagship, H.M.S. Barfleur.
    Soon after, St Vincent retired to seek a cure at Bath, haunted by Sir John Orde who had been passed over in favour of Nelson and now demanded "satisfaction" from the aged lord with pistols or swords. Cowardice was not one of St Vincent's failings. It took a court order and a direct command from the Admiralty to prevent him from "obliging" Sir John.
    The Barfleur and Keith's other ships were at first detained by the necessity of maintaining the blockade against Cadiz. Blockading was both the most important and most dreary of the Royal Navy's tasks. The French needed only a momentary lack of vigilance on the part of the blockaders to slip away from the anchorage and be lost indefinitely. Cochrane spent over four months anchored seven or eight miles off Cadiz waiting for the enemy to attempt a break-out. The break-out never came. From time to time, as he surveyed the port through his spy-glass, there were signs of the ships preparing for sea. It was the standard bluff, carried out by a few men who did not even have to be sailors. Here, as at Toulon and Brest, scores of British ships, their marines and crews, were kept idle by the tricks of a few untrained enemy civilians.
    Tempers grew short on the Barfleur. Then Cochrane first brought himself to the notice of the Admiralty and his immediate superiors in the simplest and most dramatic way. He got himself court-martialled.
    A lieutenant's life on a flagship was in many ways enviable. He ate well in the wardroom and better still when invited to dine with the captain. He had a cabin to himself, even if it was only eight feet square and its "walls" consisted merely of painted canvas stretched on wood. But the formal etiquette and judicious flattery of superiors which contented the young men appointed through "parliamentary influence" made Cochrane increasingly irritable. He had joined the navy to fight, both as a profession and because he desperately needed the rewards of prize money to continue in his career. Neither the Spanish fleet in Cadiz nor his own superiors seemed in any hurry to oblige him.
    Deprived of a chance to match himself against the French or the Spanish, he opened hostilities against the first lieutenant of the Barfleur, Philip Beaver. It was an odd choice, since Beaver despised the useless "parliamentary" officers quite as much as Cochrane did. "We have so many for promotion," he burst out one day, "that few are left for plain duty. We had just now nearly run over a brig, but where from, or whither bound, the Lord knows - a pretty look-out for a smart ship." The