the sea wolf

“The Sea Wolf” is the gripping biography of Thomas Cochrane, one of the most daring and brilliant naval commanders in British maritime history. Born in 1775 in Fife, Cochrane first became a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars at the age of twenty-four. His impudent and inspired tactics saw him capture over fifty vessels in his first year of command and earn from Napoleon himself the epithet “le Loup de Mer”, “the Sea Wolf”. Ever charismatic, controversial and free-thinking, he railed against the stuffy and corrupt ways of Admiralty, winning election as an MP in 1806 and advocating his radical agenda alongside the leading reformers of his time. Yet by 1814 he was in prison on a dubious charge of illegal share dealing and debarred from further naval command. He moved abroad, accepting an offer to become commander-in-chief of the Chilean navy in that country’s war of independence from Spain. Following his successes there he moved on in time to command the navies of Peru, Brazil and Greece, his legendary daring and skill still much in evidence (in one episode he chased the entire Portuguese fleet across the Atlantic with just one ship). Returning to Britain, where he inherited the title Earl of Dundonald, he began to dedicate himself to a host of imaginative ideas and inventions, collaborating with Isambard Brunel on tunnel engineering and even borrowing George Stevenson’s Rocket to trial his thoughts on steam locomotion. He died, penniless, in 1860, but his reputation was fully restored and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. “The Sea Wolf” is Ian Grimble’s definitive biography of a remarkable man whose exploits have been admired and mythologised in books from Captain Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy to Patrick O’Brian’s best-selling Master and Commander.

Revised by Charles Stephenson

Edition: 2000