Synopsis
From the bestselling author of Under the Black Flag comes the definitive biography of the swashbuckling nineteenth-century maritime hero upon whom Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower are based.
Nicknamed le loup des mers (“the sea wolf”) by Napoleon, Thomas Cochrane was one of the most daring and successful naval heroes of all time. In this fascinating account of Cochrane’s life, historian David Cordingly unearths startling new details about the real-life “Master and Commander,” from his daring exploits against the French navy to his role in the liberation of Chile, Peru, and Brazil, and the shock exchange scandal that forced him out of England and almost ended his naval career. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, his own travels, wide reading, and the kind of original research that distinguished The Billy Ruffian, Cordingly tells the rip-roaring story of the archetypal romantic hero who conquered the seas and, in the process, defined his era.
The Washington Post - Ken Ringle
The stops and starts and shifting alliances of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), including, in a larger sense, our own War of 1812 with Britain, tend to blur the memory of even passionate history buffs, and one of the strengths of Cordingly's narrative is how well he places the naval battles, which the British could never seem to lose, against those on land, where they could hardly seem to win. He also excels at describing the world of the age of sail (keeping nautical jargon to a merciful minimum) and the socio-political arcana of early-19th-century Britain, with its "rotten boroughs" and "pocket boroughs" and Dickensian brutality. But his signal achievement is in bringing to life both the conflicted genius of Cochrane and the remarkable cultural context in which he lived.