Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2016-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

El Metálico Lord

Money and Mythmaking in Thomas Cochrane’s 1859 Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination

Jennifer Hayward

Loup de Mer, El Diablo, El Metálico Lord: these are some of the epithets applied to Admiral Thomas Cochrane, self-styled Liberator of South America, by allies and enemies alike as he sailed the South American coast from 1818 to 1823.1 The last of these phrases, “El Metálico Lord,” exposes powerful connections between the Cochrane myth and money. Throughout his life, Cochrane exulted in his reputation as a brilliant naval commander. Throughout his life, too, he fought persistent accusations that beneath the epaulettes, sword, and grand titles he was no more than a money-grubbing adventurer. Despite his lifelong concern with the pecuniary advantages his fame ought to have assured him, not until the end of his life did Cochrane—who was perennially strapped for cash—successfully cash in on his own reputation.

Cochrane began his career in the British Royal Navy and soon became a popular hero for his audacious conquests of enemy ships. Within the navy, though, his capital plummeted as he became equally notorious for risky and insubordinate acts; moreover, his superiors did not appreciate his relentless and very public denunciations of naval corruption. By 1814, things had gone from bad to worse: he found himself imprisoned for debt, forced to relinquish his position as member of Parliament, expelled from the navy, and stripped of the Order of Bath he had earned for his sensational naval victory in the Basque Roads in 1809. In all these actions, Cochrane saw a conspiracy to ruin him. He retaliated by abandoning his home country to fight as a mercenary in South America, where—with a tiny fleet of repurposed ships manned mostly by foreigners—he led stunningly successful naval campaigns. His rebel navies succeeded in routing the Spanish and Portuguese from the South American coasts and winning independence for Chile, Peru, and Brazil.

Ever since, Cochrane has claimed a central role in the British cultural imaginary. Despite the fact that he achieved his major victories when fighting under foreign flags, Cochrane was lionized back home. Just after Cochrane liberated Peru from colonial rule, for example, his fellow Scotsman, the poet Lord Byron, wrote to his editor John Murray, “[T]here is no man I envy so much as Lord Cochrane. His entry into Lima, which I see in today’s paper, is one of the great events of the day.”2 And Sir Walter Scott, inspired by a standing ovation Cochrane received in an Edinburgh theatre, wrote a poem in honor of his countryman. Across the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the Cochrane myth continued to grow, circulating through discourses ranging from popular broadsides and ballads to naval history, travel literature, and finally maritime fiction by wildly popular authors such as Captain Frederick Marryat and George Alfred Henty. As naval historian Brian Vale observes, “Even during his lifetime, Cochrane was clearly recognizable as the heroic commander of Captain Marryat’s midshipmen Frank Mildmay and Peter Simple, and fifty years later G.

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