Excellent biography of Thomas Cochrane, a daring sea captain capable of near-mythological genius on the waters, but blind and deaf to the institutional politics of his own military.
The finest biographies teach, and this one teaches readers twice over: by backdrop, it teaches 18th and 19th Century world history; by telling of Cochrane's various successes and failures, it offers lessons for navigating life.
Analogous historical figures from the 20th Century could be someone like George Patton (brilliant on the battlefield but a constant irritant to superior officers) or John Boyd (a revolutionary military thinker who was so revolutionary that his own chain of command in the Air Force saw him as an existential threat). Cochrane, according to his own son, "made enemies were a cautious man might have made friends" and it led to him being brought down by the military and political leaders of his own time.
Cochrane also reminds me of a long list of examples in corporate America, where a genuinely decisive and effective mid-level manager--who would be an unbelievable asset if he were put in charge--has a lackluster or even ruined career because he's seen as a threat by senior management. And since he's seen as a threat by those currently in charge, he will never get put in charge, thereby hurting the organization. See for example Jamie Dimon, seen as a threat to then-CEO Sandy Weill at Citigroup. After Weill passed him over for Citi's next CEO, Dimon left to run JP Morgan, famously leading that bank through the great financial crisis to emerge stronger and more dominant than ever. Citi collapsed pathetically, diluting shareholders some 99%.
This might go down as the most atrocious personnel decision in modern banking history, all because Weill saw Dimon as a threat to be hindered rather than an asset to be promoted.
It's also highly instructive to witness Cochrane's failure to understand the perverse, kafka-esque tendencies of large bureaucracies (his country's own naval bureaucracy would be a poster child). Worse, Cochrane watched his own father fail to understand these tendencies too: Archibald Cochrane had discovered a simple, low cost solution for shipworm--a worm that rotted out timbers in ships, requiring them to be frequently rebuilt or replaced. Archibald failed, however, to understand the interests that benefited from ruined ships, even as a shipbuilder confessed to him in a moment of candor: "My lord, we live by repairing ships as well as by building them, and the worm is our best friend. Rather than use your preparation, I would cover ships' bottoms with honey to attract worms." The insight here is to recognize that because of twisted institutional incentives a simple, logical, enormously cost-saving solution isn't not only rejected, it must be rejected. Why? Because having the problem pays too well!
Notes:
* Revulsion at the behavior of revolutionaries in France stokes feelings of war in England in 1792: "The next despatch to you, or the next but one, will announce the commencement of hostilities. Probably the French will commence them." This sets in motion a war between England, Holland and France.
* The prize money system of naval captains: "Sailors always begin to reckon what their share of prize money may be, before a shot is fired." On the economics of naval life during war, how piracy was basically made legal for the duration of hostilities, and sailors prioritized cash before glory: "Glory was excellent for national morale and personal reputation, but it had proved a notoriously unnegotiable commodity for heroes and their dependents."
* The "pressing system"--basically, how England enslaves its own people to staff their ships, both military and merchant.
* Corruption of one sort or another at every level of the British Navy. The prize system formed into a sort of multi-layer marketing system: the admirals had a "downline." There was an actual court system through which they extracted captured materiel. Some of the prizes went to the captain of the ship who actually did the capturing (and some went to his crew) but most of it went up the line.
* Also, administrative corruption in promoting connected people rather than by merit. The shipping industry was also corrupted with poor quality ships, poor quality timber, etc. As always, in war there's lots of money to be made... usually at the expense of those who fight it.
Politics: the art of transferring the contents of one's opponents pockets to those of one's supporters (saying from Dean Inge)
* Cochrane starts on a frigate, the HMS Hind. Not the kind of ship that gripped the patriotic imagination of that era.
* 22 years of nearly uninterrupted war versus France from 1793 on.
* "If it seemed to Cochran that he had entered a world ruled by lunatic logic and peopled by grotesques, there were further and stranger surprises in store."
A minor act of insubordination that blew up into a court-martial, for which Cochran was acquitted, but then again blew up in his face in another year or two.
* Admiral Nelson to Cochrane: "never mind maneuvers, always go at them!"
* Cochrane earns the respect of the men on his ship the Généreux during a storm; he is then given the captaincy of a small captured French ship, the Bonne Citoyenne, which was quickly taken away, and then he was given the captaincy of the HMS Speedy, not even a frigate, a laughable ship if it was actually intended as a warship.
A couple of engagements later while guarding convoys he had captured over 50 prisoners and a ship.
* Cochrane has so many daring and outlandishly successful engagements in just his first few years as a captain--he was so good at what he did--that he was a threat to his entire institution. Very interesting to see how a bureaucracy can act completely contrary to the purposes that it's supposed to have, its ostensible purposes.
* If you want to be effective in an organization, you also need to be effective inside the bureaucracy itself, this is a nuance that certainly was lost on me during my working career, and it was clearly lost on Cochrane during his. In the meantime, this guy performs one daring raid after another, with unbelievable luck, skill and guile, doing unbelievable damage to the French army and forts along the Catalan coast.
* An interesting anecdote helps illustrate genuine pragmatic smarts: Cochran had raided various French signal stations on the Spanish Coast, but he also left burnt pages of code books in the debris, which led the French to conclude that Cochran's men were too stupid to know the value of those papers, and that they didn't need to replace their signal codes. As it turned out, however, Cochran carefully left those burnt pages in order to give the impression of stupidity while already giving his commanders details of the French code signaling system. The British thus easily knew all the movements of French and naval vessels before they were known to their own commanders.
* "Le loup des mers" the respectful nickname the French gave Cochrane.
* Lyin' Sdmiral Gambier and Cochrane's amazing initiative at the 1809 Battle of the Basque Roads, an engagement that was argued over Parliament, the media and the courts for years afterward, and which effectively ended Cochrane's career in the British navy.
* As sophisticated a naval strategist and tactician as he was, Cochrane was completely outmatched and uncompetitive in the world of court-martials, politics and bureaucracy.
* Cochrane exposes embarrassing corruption at the British naval court in Malta, then goes on to develop some strikingly modern military technology: a massive mortar ship, naval applications of poison gas (!), both technologically well ahead of their time. No one wanted to use his ideas, though: Cochrane had become radioactive because of his antagonism of the naval bureaucracy.
* Cochran elopes and marries Kitty Barnes.
* In some ways it's a sort of relief to find that governments in other eras are also incompetent, capricious, malicious, greedy, don't give a shit about doing the right thing, deliberately fuck over the people, etc. Perhaps this era maybe isn't such an outlier after all?
* Cochrane gets caught up in a complicated stock market swindle with Omnium stock, also called the De Bourg hoax or the stock exchange fraud of 1814. Found guilty and stripped of all of his titles in the Navy, although many years later his innocence was admitted and his rank fully reinstated. It can be incredibly costly to have enemies in high places!
Also amazing (but somewhat relieving) to see how a court system can be totally corrupted in other eras too, not just ours.
* The judge actually wanted to put Cochrane into pillories (yes they still used pillories in England in the 1810s), but it was decided that it would be unwise because of Cochrane's tremendous popularity with the people.
* Revolutionary leaders in Chile, Peru and Brazil offer Cochrane command of their entire naval force to win liberation from Spain and Portugal.
* Absolutely gripping to hear about his exploits in South America, capturing Spain's largest battleship, quickly neutralizing the Spanish navy, essentially defeating the Spanish almost by himself, but then finding, lamentably that "men who lead 'wars of liberation' frequently harbor schemes no less to radical than those whom they propose to overthrow" as Jose de San Martin essentially took over dictatorial power in Peru.
* And a reader might think his exploits on behalf of Chile and Peru couldn't be topped, but they were: his exploits on behalf of Brazil and its battle for independence against Portugal are beggaring readers' belief. Incredible.
* Once again, liberation leads to disappointment: Cochrane nevergot paid for all that he did, and newly-independent Brazil devolved into factions, civil war and petty warlordism shortly thereafter.
* His last naval military exploit: Cochrane gets recruited into Greece's freedom movement from Turkish hegemony. The philhellenism ("Greekaphilia" essentially) of England is very strong in those days, particularly from famous poets like Shelly and Byron, also see Eugene Delacroix's influential painting The Massacre of Chios, a visually arresting representation of the aftermath of a Turkish attack on the Greek city of Chios in 1822, after which the Turkish victors sold tens of thousands of Greek women and children survivors into slavery.
* Unfortunately, Greece really starts falling apart into factions and factional disputes, but as Cochran arrives the rebellion against Turkey (as well as Egypt which had joined the fight against Greece too) starts to unify the Greek people.
The Greeks come off here looking basically like tall children: unable to defend themselves, unable to organize, low morale, low competence on the field and at sea, etc. Cochrane could not do militarily what he normally would do given the low quality of Greek fighting men.
* Despite this, see the Battle of Navarino, 1827, where the British Navy annihilates the entire fleet of Turkey and Egypt. Suddenly Cochrane no longer had a reason to fight for Greece anymore since the naval aspect of the conflict was instantly over!
* Capodistrias then became the ruler of Greece, quickly degenerating into tyranny, and he was assassinated three years later, Greece proving unworthy of the support of European powers. This is also interesting proof to a modern reader that European (or American) "powers" cannot "make the world safe for democracy" nor externally impose democracy, via endless wars, on countries and cultures that simply are not ready for it. This is an age-old problem and we have still not learned it.
* "Cochrane had shed the delusion that the society of Plato and Demosthenes, as enshrined in its literature, bore some resemblance to the Greek culture of the 1820s." He returns home from Greece to fight a final battle--over the rest of his life--for personal justice against the false accusations of his own government and his own country's Navy.
To Read:
Bernard de Lacombe: Talleyrand the Man
Lewis Gibbs: Sheridan
Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That
Michael McNally: Fontenoy 1745: Cumberland's Bloody Defeat
Justin McCarthy: A History of Our Own Times