Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

So last week, we brought José de San Martín, Bernardo O’Higgins, and all their friends through the Andes, where after a couple of years of fighting the Spanish and arguing amongst themselves, they all liberated Chile. Now, as we’ll see today, there were still a few Spanish strongholds left in the country. But with the benefit of hindsight, we do know that Chile was never going to be reconquered. And with the patriots now in control of Chile for good, José de San Martín was able to go back to his planned invasion of Peru. And after liberating himself from the government of Buenos Aires in July of 1820, he could now pursue the final boss without distraction. 

San Martín’s plan was to use the small but growing Chilean navy that was anchored in Valparaíso to ferry his army up to Peru and then converge on the capital of Lima from all sides, landing armies that would besiege the capital by land, while using the navy to blockade it by sea. Now, it was a fairly audacious plan, given that at the moment, San Martín’s army was not more than 5,000 men, while the Spanish still had just shy of 25,000 men spread out across the territories they still controlled in Peru and Upper Peru. But that 25,000 was dispersed all over the place. And San Martín was betting that if he could be bolstered by Peruvian recruits, the liberating forces would always be able to at least match, man for man, any Spanish garrison in any given area. 

The naval side of the invasion, however, was still a little dicey. By July of 1820, that is, when San Martín declared his army a free agent, he had at his disposal eight warships and 16 troop transports run by about 1,600 sailors, a mix of Chilean locals and British and North American mercenaries. Now, it was absolutely critical for this fleet to not only successfully ferry the army up the coast but also to maintain the blockade of Lima. As long as Lima could be supplied and reinforced by sea, it could hold out indefinitely. So neutralizing the Spanish navy and controlling the Pacific coast was the key to San Martín’s plan. 

Luckily, the man now leading that little navy was the flamboyant and enormously capable Scottish captain, Lord Thomas Cochrane. And though Cochrane and San Martín would come to hate each other’s guts for a variety of reasons, both good and bad, Cochrane would turn out to be the man who made sure that the key to San Martín’s plan was properly turned and the great Viceroyalty of Peru was finally unlocked. And because Cochrane is so important to this phase of Spanish American independence and lived quite a life both before and after his adventures in Chile, the best way to explain the liberation of Peru is through the eyes of the Seawolf. 

Lord Thomas Cochrane was born on December 14, 1775, into an eccentric family of Scottish nobles. His grandfather, Thomas Cochrane, the 8th Earl of Dundonald, was a career army officer and occasional MP who sired a dozen children, including eight sons who lived to adulthood— a cohort of brothers who would all enter into various aspects of military and political life. Some of whom would wind up respectable, some not so much, and some, like our man Thomas, a bit of both. Of this horde of Cochranes who all came of age at around the same time, the Earl of St. Vincent, who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had had cause to deal with most of the Cochranes at one point or another, said “the Cochranes are not to be trusted out of sight. They are all mad, romantic, money-getting and not truth-telling, and there is not a single exception in any part of the family”. Now, this is hyperbole, but not by much. 

Thomas’s father, Archibald, was the eldest of all these mad, romantic, money-getting, not truth-telling brothers. And so, when the old patriarch of the clan died in 1778, Archibald inherited the family estate and became the 9th Earl of Dundonald. An exceedingly clever chap, Archibald was an inventor by disposition, and though he was pretty brilliant and did innovative work using coal tar to protect ship hulls and developing uses for soda, his work never paid off financially. And by the time Thomas was a teenager, the family fortune was pretty well spent and its estates were being sold off. So despite being the eldest son, Thomas had to go off like he was the younger son of nobility, and his father pushed him to join the army when he was 13. But Thomas hated army life and begged to join the Navy instead. Finally, his father relented, and in 1793, at the age of 17, he was enrolled as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, which, as you’ll notice, was just in time for him to get in on the beginning of the wars of the French Revolution. 

Thomas was promoted to lieutenant in 1796 and mostly spent his time blockading Cádiz after the French whipped the Spanish and forced them to switch sides in 1795. The young officer was sharp and brave, but he also did not suffer fools gladly, even when, or maybe especially when, they were his superior officers. And in 1800, he escaped a court martial with a mere reprimand after being accused of insolence to a superior officer. But one of Thomas’s uncles, Alexander Cochrane, was on the respectable side of the family and had himself become an Admiral by that point, and so he kept his nephew’s naval career on track. And before we move on, I should mention that this uncle, Admiral Alexander Cochrane, just so happened to be the Governor of Barbados when Francisco de Miranda and the Leander Expedition came through in 1806. Admiral Cochrane offered support and a place of refuge for Miranda before and after the failed invasion. And it was Alexander Cochrane’s letters back to the Ministry that led the British to take Miranda back into their employ after he returned to London in semi-disgrace.

So, after dodging the court martial, young Thomas Cochrane got his first command and from the beginning, showed off his daring and knack for cunning deception that would define his career. He escaped a Spanish patrol boat by pretending to be a Dutch neutral merchant ship under quarantine. He captured a Spanish warship and all 263 sailors on board with just 48 men, after tricking the Spanish into thinking reinforcements were on the way. He took down some anchored French privateers by attacking in boats with all his men, leaving only a skeleton crew on board his own ship. And that skeleton crew used a complicated system of ropes and pulleys devised by Cochrane to make it look like the warship was fully operational, when in fact, there weren’t even enough men left on board to fire the guns. A few months later, Cochrane then successfully destroyed an entire French merchant fleet by sneaking his men up into the fort that was supposed to be protecting them as they sat anchored in the harbor and then blasting them out of the water with the French army’s own guns. After being briefed on the exploits of Lord Cochrane, the Emperor Napoleon himself dubbed Cochrane the Seawolf. 

The British public ate all of this up, and Cochrane decided to parlay his fame into a political career. The Cochrane clan was always coming in and out of Parliament, and Thomas decided to get in on the action. After losing an election in early 1806, after refusing to buy votes, Cochrane didn’t make the same mistake twice, and in the spring of 1807, he was elected MP from Westminster. A reform-minded liberal, one of Cochrane’s abiding passions was rooting out corruption in the Admiralty, which did not sit well with his superiors at all. So shortly after he took his seat, they ordered him to sail at once for the Mediterranean coast, where he could kill Frenchmen and not make any more trouble for them. 

There he again performed splendidly, raiding the coastline as the French began their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. And in late 1807, Cochrane famously held Fort Trinidad and delayed the passage of a 6,000-man French army for two weeks with just 80 men. When he finally had to give it up, he rigged the fort with explosives and blew it up so that the French couldn’t use it. 

But Cochrane ran into major problems in 1809, when the irresistible force of his talent ran into the immovable wall that was the Admiralty. A small French fleet of eleven ships had escaped the British blockade at Brest and was now raiding around the Bay of Biscay, finally tracked down to a small channel near the so-called Basque Roads, sea lanes south of La Rochelle. And the French now occupied a strong anchorage in a channel between two islands, and they could only be rooted out with extreme measures. And Lord Cochrane believed he had such measures in hand. He presented to his superiors improved plans for fire ships and exploding vessels of his own design. After spending a few weeks preparing everything, Lord Cochrane personally led the first wave, and he sent off the three exploding vessels that were packed tight with gunpowder and mortars and grenades. These ships did the work of blowing up the boom that the French had erected across the channel to prevent any ships from entering. Now, this was supposed to be followed by a bombardment of 22 fire ships. A fire ship is just an empty ship that gets set on fire. But the fire ships were cut loose a mile away from the channel, and only four actually hit their target. But still, the French fleet panicked at the sight of this wave of fire coming at them and purposefully ran their ships aground so the crews could escape this apparent explosive onslaught.

Cochrane saw all these beached and vulnerable ships and signaled for the Admiral running the operation to please attack now. But despite receiving the signal, the Admiral didn’t get moving for a good 6 hours, allowing the tide to come in and refloat the French fleet. Now Cochrane finally forced the Admiral to send some ships to attack by pretending that his own ship was damaged and adrift and that he desperately needed help. This detachment was, in the end, able to take out four of the eleven French ships, but the rest got away, and Cochrane was furious at the Admiral for the missed opportunity. 

He was then doubly furious when he got back to London and discovered that the Admiral was going to get a citation for this victory of the Battle of the Basque Roads, while Cochrane himself was barely getting a notice. He made no secret of his feelings, and the press, who already loved him, trumpeted Cochrane’s version of events. The besmirched Admiral demanded a court martial to clear his name. But because a court martial is just a bunch of his buddies sitting around in a room, the Admiral was exonerated even in the face of clear evidence that he was, in fact, full of it. So, though, the truth and the press were on his side, Lord Cochrane’s name was now mud in the Admiralty, and his naval career seemed over. 

Again, Napoleon was later briefed on all of this, and he laughed. He said “both the French and British admirals were imbeciles, and thank God nobody did what Cochrane said or my whole fleet would have been lost.” Instead, Cochrane was stripped of his command and he pivoted over to civilian politics. 

Still a member of Parliament, Cochrane was part of an emerging group of liberal radicals in the House of Commons who made trouble for the conservative powers running the war by highlighting corruption, sloth, and incompetence wherever they could find it. In 1810, Cochrane got caught up defending his friend and fellow radical MP, Sir Francis Burdett, who had offended the honor of the House with some intemperate insult and was now in danger of being thrown in the Tower of London. With agents on the way to pick his friend up, Cochrane rigged Burdett’s house with explosives and seemed sincere about his willingness to blow the whole place up rather than let Burdett be taken alive. When Burdett realized his friend was serious, he defused, almost literally defused the situation and was taken into custody and temporarily tossed into the Tower. 

Now a confirmed gadfly and pariah in polite society, Cochrane then fell in love with a 16-year-old common girl named Kitty, whom he then proceeded to marry for no other reason than love. His uncle Basil, the richest now of the Cochrane brothers, disinherited his nephew over the marriage, cutting Thomas off from really any promise of a comfortable life. His failing fortunes are what made the real scandal of his career so believable, even to those who liked him and wanted to believe the best of him. So, just as we talked about Gregor McGregor and the Poyais scheme as one of the most audacious scams in economic history, we’re going to talk about how Lord Thomas Cochrane was implicated in one of the first great stock market frauds. Indeed, it is called the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814. 

On the morning of February 21st, 1814, a man claiming to be the personal aide to the British Ambassador to Russia disembarked in Dover with extraordinary news. The French Imperial Army had been decisively routed in eastern France and the Emperor Napoleon had been killed in the fighting. This message was then confirmed and relayed up the post roads to London by three French royalist officers, spreading the good news that the Bourbons had reclaimed the French throne. This stunning news spread like wildfire through London, and when it hit the city, the London Stock Exchange went nuts. Any government-backed security shot through the roof as men sought to get in on the financial stability that was sure to follow this great victory.

But now you’re already saying to yourself, what on earth are you talking about? Napoleon didn’t die in eastern France in early 1814. I mean, Waterloo isn’t even for another 16 months. None of this is true, is it? And no, it was not. By the afternoon, the government had issued a stern rebuttal of the rumor and the victory bubble burst as quickly as it had formed.

It did not take long for the authorities running the London Stock Exchange to suspect deliberate fraud had taken place. And combing back through the records of the biggest winners of the brief bubble, they came across the name Andrew Cochrane Johnston, the youngest of the mad, romantic, money-getting and not truth-telling Cochrane brothers. The record showed that Andrew had purchased shares in a government stock on margin just one week earlier and then sold them at the very height of the bubble, clearing over a million pounds profit. Further investigation then unraveled everything and connections were made between Andrew, his stockbroker, Richard Butt, and the man who said he was the aide to the Russian ambassador, who turned out to be a down-on-his-luck mercenary, just playing the part he had been assigned. Then this little circle was connected to our man, Lord Thomas Cochrane, because it turns out that Thomas had dined with his uncle and Mr. Butt on the morning the fraud had begun and been among those who profited in the swindle. The fake ambassador’s aide then also claimed that Lord Thomas had given him money to make his getaway. Now, Cochrane claimed he had no knowledge of anything. He didn’t deny the breakfast, and he didn’t deny that he had met this down-on-his-luck mercenary. But he said, “Look, I didn’t know what they were up to. I only made 1% on the deal. And that was only because I had an automatic sell order with Mr. Butt. So far from profiting, I actually missed out on the whole thing.” But the circumstantial evidence piled up way too high for any juror to really believe that Lord Cochrane’s protests of ignorance and innocence were legitimate. 

The whole crew was indicted in late April 1814, and by June, the trial was wrapping up. Cochrane’s disreputable uncle Andrew, the man clearly at the center of this scheme, managed to escape to France before the verdict was handed down. But Lord Thomas Cochrane, great naval hero and MP, was not so lucky. He was sentenced to one year imprisonment in King’s Bench State House and ordered to pay a £1,000 fine. His name was then removed from the Navy’s pension list, and he was booted from Parliament, though his defiant and well-paid supporters went ahead and reelected him in the next election anyway, even though he was sitting in prison. 

Now, Cochrane was not exactly ruined by all this. The whole affair only deepened his popularity in the small but vocal radical circles, who now considered him a martyr, prosecuted by the malicious conservative enemies they all shared. He served his sentence, paid his fine, and was released shortly after the real news came correctly this time, that Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo. So, despite the stock market scandal, Cochrane was still an MP, and he spent the next three years as a radical member of Parliament, railing against the conservative post-war governments and joining in the movement for parliamentary reform to get rid of the kind of rotten boroughs that had actually elected Cochrane in the first place and backing universal manhood suffrage. But by 1818, he was pretty well down on his luck. He had been cut off from his naval pension and, despite constant badgering, was never given his full share of prize money from his success out on the high seas. Now approaching insolvency, his house was seized for failure to repay debts, and it really did seem like there was no hope for him to ever recover his career or his fortune.

Enter the Chilean ambassador to Great Britain, José Alvarez, who had a job offer he wanted to discuss with Lord Cochrane. 

For the patriot South Americans, Lord Cochrane’s misfortune was a huge opportunity to procure the services of a man who, if nothing else, was a uniformly brilliant naval officer. Alvarez offered Cochrane command of the navy that José de San Martín was putting together for his invasion of Peru. And after extravagant promises of the profits to be made, Cochrane agreed to join the fleet, and he turned his back on Great Britain. 

In August of 1818, Lord Cochrane, his wife Kitty, and their two young sons boarded a ship and sailed for Chile. While en route, Lord Cochrane, without any apparent patriotic hangups, tried to convince his new bosses to swing by St. Helena and rescue Napoleon from exile, then bring the great man to South America and install him as, like, Emperor of the liberated continent. The Chileans apparently listened politely to all this and said, “Yes, well, we’ve already gotten word that the viceroy in Peru has landed an invasion force back home, so maybe we should just keep moving, okay?”

Now, by the time the ship docked in Valparaiso in November 1818, that invasion force had long since been destroyed by San Martín at the Battle of Maipu, which we talked about last week. And for Cochrane, at least, the situation really was as it had been described to him back in London — a rare occurrence for British officers recruited to serve in South America. General San Martín and Supreme Dictator O’Higgins had by now acquired a small fleet of seven warships, some of them purchased in England, some in the United States, and a few others captured on the high seas, including what became Cochrane’s flagship, a 48-gun frigate, rechristened The O’Higgins. As the new vice admiral, Cochrane’s job was to get the fleet into real fighting shape and hopefully make some effective cruises up and down the coast to clear space for the invasion of Peru. 

The bulk of the Spanish fleet, 14 warships in all, was stationed in Lima’s heavily fortified port of Callao. Neutralizing that fleet and blockading Callao was Cochrane’s overriding mission, and in January 1819, he sailed out on his first voyage as Admiral of the Chilean Navy. He dropped most of his ships outside Callao so they could begin a blockade of shipping into Lima, while he himself conducted raids up and down the Pacific coast. Well-versed in sea raiding from his days in the Napoleonic Wars, Cochrane found the coast of Peru easy pickings, as most of the natives had never had to deal with anything more than the odd pirate. But the chain of command in the Chilean Navy was still a work in progress, and the man Cochrane had left in charge of the blockade — and the man he had replaced as commander of the Chilean Navy, by the way — claimed that he was short of supplies and inexplicably sailed back to Valparaiso in June of 1819. 

So, returning to Valparaiso, and reasserting his authority, and regrouping the fleet, Cochrane promised to break Callao by the end of September, and he sailed back up the coast. Always the explosives expert, Cochrane hoped to use a new type of rocket he devised to bombard the main fortress of the port, but they did not work as well in practice as they did in theory, and Cochrane was forced to break off the attack without doing any real damage at all. 

So then, on his own initiative, he abandoned his attempt to capture Callao and instead decided to try his luck further south. Now, though the Battle of Maipu had saved Chilean independence, that did not mean that the royalists were gone for good. And down south of Concepción, there was a particularly hard iron nut that they could never crack — the fortresses of Valdivia. 

Ironically built by Bernardo’s father, Ambrosio O’Higgins, when he was Captain General of Chile, the heavily fortified mouth of the Valdivia River was called the Gibraltar of Chile and would forever remain an entry port for the Spanish if they decided to come back. Lord Cochrane got it in his head that he wanted to go take it. 

Cochrane combined every trick he knew to take Valdivia, which was defended by a string of seven different forts plus an island castle, collectively manned by 1,600 Spanish soldiers and 118 cannons. In all of the wars of Chilean independence, the patriots had never come close to seizing Valdivia. But in December 1819, Cochrane picked up intelligence that the forts were expecting three Spanish ships any day now. And so he sailed down with three ships of his own, hoisted the Spanish flag, and waited for a pilot to come out from shore to navigate him through the treacherous harbor. This guy was, of course, seized. And then Cochrane sailed away, much to the bewilderment of the Spanish soldiers manning the fort, who still thought the vessels were their comrades, and that them picking up and leaving was very peculiar behavior.

Cochrane then sailed back up to Concepcion, picked up 250 soldiers, and came back down to Valdivia in late January 1820. But as he was making preparations to attack, his ship, The O’Higgins, accidentally ran into a reef, and though it was patched together, was crippled and taking on water. So Cochrane transferred his 250 men to two smaller ships, and then, using the intelligence they had pumped from the captured pilot, they flew the Spanish flag and sailed on into the harbor, just as confident as you please. And it wasn’t until they were practically landing that the soldiers in the forts put together that these were not, in fact, their comrades. 

Landing now under heavy fire, the little Chilean force took cover until night fell, and then they launched what became something of a stampede attack on the string of forts. They attacked the fort closest to their position, overtaking it and sending the defenders racing for the next fort in line. But the Chileans were so close on the heels of these running Spaniards that they were able to fight their way into the second fort too. So pretty soon, the defenders of the first two forts were all running together for the third fort, and chaos was reigning. It went on like this all night, and by morning, the entire west side of the harbor had been captured by the Chileans, and the main castle was forced to surrender under threat of bombardment. 

With only one fort left, Cochrane then ordered The O’Higgins to come barreling into the harbor, which scared the last of the Spanish soldiers, who did not realize the ship was running on a skeleton crew, was crippled, probably did not have enough men to run the guns, and, frankly, might sink at any moment. But the appearance of The O’Higgins broke Spanish morale, and the remaining garrisons all fled up the Valdivia River towards the city of Valdivia proper. Two days later, Cochrane’s men followed them, and rather than fight it out, what was left of the Spanish garrisons evacuated into the deep interior. At the cost of just seven dead, Lord Cochrane had taken the supposedly impregnable Gibraltar of Chile. 

With this victory in hand, Cochrane was now a bona fide war hero, and at this point, he also apparently followed up on his stymied little dream of freeing Napoleon and bringing the great French General to rule the continent. He ordered a fast ship to sail back around Cape Horn and make for St. Helena, but by the time the ship arrived a few months later, the exiled emperor was clearly on his last legs and would, in fact, die less than a year later. So despite Cochrane’s dream, there would be no final chapter for Napoleon in South America. It would make for a good alternative history, though, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

So this all gets us back to where we left off last time in July of 1820. San Martín had declared his own personal independence from Buenos Aires, and final preparations for the invasion of Peru were now wrapping up. And on August 21, the great Liberating Fleet set sail. Now with eight warships and 16 troop transports manned by 1,600 sailors, Cochrane’s navy ferried San Martín and 4,100 men north, landing first at the Peruvian city of Pisco, 150 miles south of Lima on September 7. 

San Martín disembarked his forces and hoped to raise more recruits from liberated slaves in the region, but the owners had been tipped off that he was coming, so they moved everybody inland, and the patriots were only able to raise about 600 new black soldiers. Ever careful, though, San Martín stayed in Pisco for a good six weeks, sending about 3,000 men on a great sweeping march in through the interior to clear out local Spanish forces, raise more men, and then converge on Lima. But the sitting around and doing nothing started to rub Cochrane the wrong way, he was chomping at the bit, and he started making reckless accusations that General San Martín was, in fact, a coward who was afraid of actual combat. And San Martín got understandably sick of Cochrane’s impatient carping. He had a plan. It was going to work; just relax.

But unwilling to sit idly by, Cochrane went a little rogue. He led a few ships back up to Callao, ostensibly on a reconnaissance mission, but really, Lord Cochrane was just looking for some action. Spying the Spanish flagship, the 44-gun Esmeralda, anchored in the harbor, Cochrane decided to seize her.

Orchestrating a daring night raid by boat, on the night of November 5, Cochrane and his men took the crew of the Esmeralda completely by surprise. The Spanish sailors offered stiff resistance, and Cochrane himself was wounded in multiple places. But after less than 20 minutes of fighting, Cochrane and his boys took the Esmeralda. 

The shore batteries were then alerted that the ship had been seized by the enemy and started firing their guns into the darkness, at which point, any neutral merchant ship in the harbor quickly raised their prearranged light to signal their neutrality and sailed away from the fray to avoid the bombardment. Cochrane’s men simply raised lights of their own to match the neutral signal and sailed away with them.

The capture of the Esmeralda turned out to be a major turning point. The Spanish fleet was now well and truly cooped up in Callao and could not hope to break out without risking total annihilation. Meanwhile, the whole rest of the Pacific coast, practically as far north as Mexico, was now dominated by Cochrane’s Chilean Navy. And in fact, it was a direct result of these naval victories that the port of Guayaquil revolted in January of 1821, just a few months later. This was the revolt that led Bolívar to peel off Sucre to go capture the city before San Martín could claim it for himself.

Controlling the sea had always been the key to victory in Peru, and though Cochrane and San Martín clashed personally and clashed over strategy — and really clashed over everything — Cochrane kept up his end of the bargain and handed San Martín the key to victory. 

After the patriots landed a second liberating force north of Lima, the slow strangulation of the capital began. With their forces now taking control of the interior roads in and out of the city and the navy cutting off all hope of resupply and reinforcement, the population of Lima started to get nervous, and then they started to get desperate.

In February 1821, the old viceroy was overthrown by a more liberal Spanish General, though this was not at all in preparation for surrender, but rather to offer stiffer and hopefully more united resistance. While the situation inside Lima grew more desperate by the day, Lord Cochrane kept urging San Martín to attack, and San Martín kept refusing. Instead, he smuggled Patriot propaganda into Lima and let it be known that he might start letting food in to relieve their suffering. “You know, none of you are my enemies. Not even the Spanish garrison is my enemy, and they will never be my enemy so long as they do not meet me on the field of battle.”

San Martín was not a coward, but he did want to take Lima without firing a shot, and it drove Lord Cochrane nuts. 

But events kept working in San Martín’s favor. In early July 1821, the new General in charge of the Spanish garrison announced his intention to pull all of his forces out of Lima and hole up in fortified Callao, leaving the capital itself wide open to attack. Terrified that a horde of blacks and Indians were about to come murder them all in their beds, the residents of Lima begged General San Martín to please enter the city and defend us. And so, on July 9, 1821, José de San Martín entered Lima. But as he had done in Chile, San Martín made it clear that he had come to liberate the Peruvians, not to rule them. Nine days later, he orchestrated the formal declaration of Peruvian independence.

But the liberation of Lima did not mean the liberation of Peru, and up in the mountainous interior, Spanish forces were regrouping to hold their last precious possessions in South America. And San Martín’s lack of adequate resources and his soon-to-be failing political reputation would come to hinder his ability to bring about the full liberation of Peru, leading his occasional correspondence with Simón Bolívar, his fellow liberator to the north, to turn into a more practical correspondence about how to join forces and enter the endgame of Spanish American independence. 

So, we’ll move back up to deal with Bolívar and that part of the story next time. But before we go this week, we have to wrap up with Lord Cochrane. 

Now, through his two-and-a-half-year service to Chile, Cochrane and San Martín had clashed repeatedly. While just days after the declaration of Peruvian independence, the two finally blew up at each other. As we’ll see next time, the now essentially stateless San Martín was ready to leave Chile behind and focus on Peru and to that end, he started talking about his desire to buy the Chilean Navy from O’Higgins and recommission it for the Patriot Peruvians. Cochrane was 100% opposed to the idea and thought the whole scheme reeked of treachery and betrayal. All the more so when Cochrane started demanding to settle all accounts for him and his men now that the war was supposedly over and San Martín seemed to be deliberately stalling. 

On August 4, 1821, the two got into the argument to end all arguments. Cochrane accused San Martín of being a drug-addled coward, and San Martín accused Cochrane of being a hotheaded mercenary. Cochrane then stormed off, boarded his ship, and, after taking the temperature of his men, led them north to track down a treasure ship that had been dispatched by San Martín to help pay for operations in the north. Cochrane overtook the ship, seized it and its treasure, and dispersed it among his grateful sailors. He then kept sailing, looking for any other lingering prizes he might catch, making it as far north as Acapulco by January 1822, before turning around and heading back to Chile. When he arrived in Valparaíso, he was greeted as a hero — doubly so because it was clear that he had defended Chile’s honor and sovereignty against San Martín’s manipulations. Cochrane warned Supreme Director O’Higgins that San Martín could not be trusted. But by then, O’Higgins had come to rely on a secretary who really did not like Lord Cochrane at all. And so, despite his heroic service, Lord Cochrane was becoming persona non grata. 

Now, Cochrane’s adventurous life was not over, though; this was just the end of one chapter. At the end of 1822, he was contacted by agents from Brazil in much the same way he had once been contacted by agents from Chile. A civil war had broken out among patriot Brazilians who refused to be resubordinated to European domination, and they had launched a war of independence. Cochrane agreed to take over their navy just as he had taken over the Chilean Navy. And so, in January of 1823, he sailed back around Cape Horn, never to return.

But his time in Brazil went much like his time had gone everywhere. He was successful in war, but squabbles over honor and prize money led him to depart Brazil at the end of 1825 under a cloud of mutual recriminations. He then went off and joined the Greek Navy, who were fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire, and he fought well in that war until it came to an end in 1829. So that’s three wars of independence in a row for him.

Cochrane then returned to Britain, somewhat rehabilitated. He was re-enrolled in the Royal Navy and got his pension back. He then started getting promoted back up the ladder, eventually becoming an Admiral. When his father died in 1831, he also became the 10th Earl of Dundonald. After a series of promotions took him all the way to the top of the Admiralty, he finally died of an operation to cure a kidney stone in 1860.

But we are now far removed from our story. We have to get back to Peru, which we will do next time, and finally bring about the face-to-face meeting between José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar in liberated Guayaquil in 1822.

Return to The Latin American Revolutions >>