A GREAT NAVAL HERO.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 195, 26 January 1915, Page 3

A GREAT NAVAL HERO.

STORY OF LORjJ COCHRANE. THE SCOTTISH FIGHTING CAPTAIN. A most vivacious story of one of the great fighting captains who destroyed the naval power of Spain and gave freedom to the wh<..'c Pacific coast is told in the Candid Review. Incidentally it shows how greatly naval conditions have changed in a hundred years. THE MIDSHIPMAN'S CHEST. • * large, raw-boned Scottish midship- - - joined his ship, H.M.S. Hind, at ■mess, on June 17, 1793. • \ s he came aboard, his sc~ chest ,■•■• ried behind him, the voice <" Lieutenant Larmour shouted frmv above, 'Does Lord Cochrane think he ' going to bring a cabin aboard, The service is going to the devil. Get it. up on •main deck.' "This was done, and Jack Larmour superintended the process of sawing off one end of the chest, contents and all, just beyond the key-hole. The lad was Thomas Lord Cochrane, eldest son of the ninth Earl of Dundonald. "This was the opening of a career which may well be compared with that of Francis" Drake. HE MEETS NELSON.

"In the autumn of 1799 he met Nelson at Palermo, and talked much with •him These days were the crown of his training. To one of Nelson's frequent injunctions 'Never mind manoeuvres; nl•ways go at them.' Cochrane writes that lie. subsequently had reason to consider himself indebted for successful attacks under apparently difficult circumstances. Cochrane regarded Nelson as "an embodiment of dashing courage,' to whom victory was so much a matter of course that he lurdly deemed 'the chance of defeat worth consideration' Such, indeed, was the nature of Cochrane himself. "His first adventure, in September, 1799, the boarding, absolutely singlehanded, of a privateer off Algeciras, gives us a taste of his quality. For the first and only time in his career his men failed to follow him—and well lie rated them on regaining the cutter. His name was not yet a name of magic among the seamen of England. He was then a prize-master of the Genereux.

HTS BURLESQUE OF A SHIP. "His appointment followed to the command of the little sloop Speedy. 'A burlesque of a vessel of war' of 15S tons burden, carrying 14 4-pounders with a crew of 84 men and six officers. But Cochrane gloried in hiis command, and set to work with a will, searching neutral vessels, ehasicg, boarding, and sinking French and Spanish privateers and gunboats and recapturing their prizes. "The breathless Speedy became the object of pressing Spanish attentions, which were discreetly and ingeniously evaded by a Danish disguise. Cochrane combined boundless resource with splendid daring in almost equal degrees, and the ingenuity that enabled him to escape under Danish colours and a quarantine flag suggesting plague, from the Spanish frigate on October 21, 1800, was balanced by the calm and apparently reck-! Ices capture of the xetiee frigate Cfamo on May fl, 1801.

i AN AMAZING CONTEST. I I "This vessel, carrying 22 long 12I pounders on the main deck, and eight long fl-pounders and two 24 pounder earI ronndes on the auarter-dcek and a cw of SIP men, wa"s deliberately attacked ! by t! e Speedy with his miserable 4-po.m-•lers ar.d a total complemnit of 54 m-i, officers and boys It looked an absurd. but was in fact a wonderful, enterprise. Evading two broadsides, the Speedy ren in under the great cruiser's lee, locked her yards in the Span bird's rigging ind then poured on to tho Gnnio's main deck a devastating broadside of the treb!.'shotted 4-pounders. The Spanish guns loomed over the heads of the F.m?iHi crew, and could but riddle the rigginp and sails of the little craft. The Spanish', order to board was heard througli the smoke, but the Speedy sheering off before it could be carried out, poured in another broadside. "Twice Cochrane executed this manoeuvre, and then, following Nelson's maxim, determined to board, though the odds were six to one. The ship's doctor, Guthrie, took the helm, and with splendid skill ran the Speedy close alongside the Gamo. ,Then part of the crew, \vith blackened faces, boarded the Gamo by the head, emerging like foaming devils from the white smoke of the bow guns; the rest boarded by. the waist and took the brave but terrified Spaniards in the rear. It was a momentary • business. In a few seconds fifty Eng-.' lishmen, led by the gigantic Lanarkshire! man. were raging in the frigate's waist 1 like fiends from hell.

_THK_SPEEnrs HAUL. ' -""'■ ,T ~' "i "Then Cochrane, with a master-touch, bade one of his men haul down the Spanish colours, when the crew, believing that their ship had struck, surrendered, and were driven into the hold while their own deck guns were pointed down the hatchway readv for instant discharge by men standing over them with lighted matches. So Archibald, Cochrane's midshipman brother, carried the Oamo into port Tf, was a unique adventure carried out in the forenoon in 00 minutes with the loss of three killed

and eight wounded. "When the Speedy was at last eantured by three French ships of the line after a emisc of thirteen months, the tiny sloop had taken or re-taken upwards of 50 vessels. 122 guns, and 534 prisoners, an achievement that no words can amplify.

TIOW HE DEFEATED SPAIN. "There was a certain fitness that a seaman of Cochrane'.' calibre should follow in the wake of Drake's last voyage to achieve new laurels and create new fame for England in the far Pacific. From Mexico southward Spain still, in IRIB. infamously misgoverned an area greater than Europe. Naval force alone

was capable of breaking tlie chains forged before the afe of Drake. Bolivar laboured on land for fredcom, Chili declared her independence, but her freedom and independence were but names while Spain controlled the sea. The fiovcnimcnt of Chili xeraved the services of Lord Cochrane. Their representative knew what he was doing. Lord Cochrane, he wrote, is a man who. through his reputation alone, will he the terror of Spain, and a pivot of American liberty. Sa, at the age of 43, the greatest of living seamen, rejecting a counter offer by the Spanish Government, and forestalling by a few months the Foreign Enlistment Act, set forth in the Rose Vd'th his wife and children on the congenial task of lowering in the new world the famous flag that for England's sake he had honoured and saved in the old. " 'EI Diablo,' as the Spaniards called Jiim. witli seven sina'lT vessels of war. mostly old and useless converted merchant men. soon secured control of the sea and locked the Spanish fleet under' the guns of Callao. The key of Spanish dominion was lost and won. It brought over the native Indians to the Bide of freedom, deprived Spain of her main harbor, fortress and organising point in the south, and shook the Spanish hold on the whole 0/ South America.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY. After that great feat he "determined in once to fulfil his long-standing intentii .1 of earying his sword to the liberation of Greece. Of that last adventure in 1827 it is sufficient to say that his command led indirectly but inevitably to the battle of Navarino, and to he' end of Mohammedan influence in the [editerranean. " 'Your services to the coun' y are rejrded among the most brilliiu.., of a war | signalised by heroic achievements." So wrote Lord John Russell to Lord Dundonald, and in so writing swept away for ever the meanness, the jealousy, and the corrupt memory of the dead politicians who had vainly striven to destroy the greatest seaman of a great age. "At the age of 72 he became the Com-mander-in-Chief for the North American and West Indian stations, and so crowned his active career on tha coast of a continent where his name will ever be associated with that of Drake. He died at the age of 85 in London, on October 31, 1860, and was buried among his peers in Westminster Abbey. NEW GRANARIES FOR THE WORLD.

"A life so homeric is, not easily paralleled among the heroes of the modern world, but we believe it to be full of lessons for the future. We see in the darkest hour this tried and noble spirit conjoined with another as heroic as His own, found in a woman so kinjn spirit, so dowered with the gifts of self-sacri-fice, that these twain, with children destined to honour their immortal memories, are able to set forth on a new Odyssey of achievement and in a new world to build up out of the wreck of the old a second career even more wonderful than tha first, a career that freed an entire continent from its chains and gave new granaries to the earth. We i see tlie darkness disappear and a broad cloudless evening, untroubled and serene, .receive these two;'we would not miss one moment of their lives, nor even one hour of thei,r sorrows; for in their sorrows even more than in their triumphs they heap up honour to our race. HIS WONDERFUL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

"Lord Dundonald is a deathless example to a race and a nation that to-day need more than ever examples from the heroic age His history bids us beware of professional politicians, of professional jealousy, of reliance on mere armaments. It is in politics and war as in faith, the spirit that quickens. It is the men, not the ships; it is the minister, not the measure; it is the workman more than the tools, that matter. ''Lord Dundonald is to us an example both as an hero and a tactician; he is still more an example as a man; honest, God-fearing brave a"d true; he never doubted of his duty iu life or of his goal, and never failed to fulfil the one and achieve the other.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SEAMAN. "His wonderful autobiography is one of the best of books. It not only reveals to us a genius for narrative scarcely excelled by Defot himself, but unfolds for us with unconscious art the drama of a life that seems to shine ever more clearly as the decades glide away' and his great naval age falls into the perspective of time. Looking back a cen-. tury we see the stars separating themselves from the fitful gleams of sea and land, and among -the constellations of immortal lights smiles fairly and steadily the star of the great fighting captain, —Cochrane."