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The real master and commander
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 02/09/2007Page 1 of 3

The swashbuckling novels of Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forester owe much of their inspiration to one man: Lord Cochrane, a seafaring scot whose life was marked by adventure, adulation and scandal. David Cordingly reports

The night was as dark as any invading force could have wished. In April 1809, with a heavy sea running, Captain Lord Cochrane was leading an audacious fireship attack against a French fleet anchored in Basque Roads on the west coast of France. Cochrane, with a few selected men, including his younger brother, Basil, was in the leading ship, which was an 'explosion vessel' of his own devising - a floating bomb packed with barrels of gun powder and hand grenades. When they were about half a mile from the French fleet, Cochrane lit the fuses, jumped down into the boat that was being towed astern, and urged his men to pull for their lives.

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Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald, was a man of outstanding courage and tenacity. As a naval commander he was bold and resourceful, but he was also a fighter for radical causes and a champion of liberty. It is little wonder that his adventures have inspired numerous historical novelists, most notably Patrick O'Brian, who has made no secret of the fact that many of the plots of his celebrated series starring Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon, Stephen Maturin, were based on Cochrane's exploits. Indeed the first of these, Master and Commander (also the inspiration for the film starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany), is a faithful retelling of Cochrane's actions in the diminutive warship Speedy.

No doubt O'Brian got the idea for the friendship between Aubrey and Maturin from a few brief references to Cochrane's surgeon in The Autobiography of a Seaman, Cochrane's racy account of his life as a naval officer. What O'Brian did not realise was that the friendship he created between his fictional characters was mirrored in real life: Cochrane's surgeon, James Guthrie, not only followed his captain from ship to ship, but remained a lifelong friend. This is revealed in hitherto unpublished correspondence between Cochrane and Guthrie in the collections of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, which I came across while researching my biography of Cochrane. The letters are fascinating because they provide a vivid commentary on some of the highs and lows of Cochrane's life, and reveal the extent of his determination to get his own back on his enemies: 'What a base pack of rascals they are! I have got their b------s in a cloven stick and I will squeeze them.'

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The plots of three of the books in O'Brian's sequence of novels are taken directly from events in Cochrane's life. Master and Commander is a brilliantly evocative account of Cochrane's career in the Speedy from the moment she sets sail from Port Mahon, Minorca, to her celebrated fight with the Spanish xebec frigate Gamo. O'Brian changes the name of the Speedy to Sophie and gives new names to her officers and men, but otherwise sticks to the story. The Sophie, like the Speedy, is finally captured by a powerful French squadron off Gibraltar, after a desperate chase, and O'Brian subsequently quotes verbatim from the court martial which Cochrane had to face because of the loss of his ship.

And the article goes on ....

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