from Hacker News

Thomas Cochrane

by neural_thing on 1/2/24, 3:27 PM with 78 comments

• by cjs_ac on 1/2/24, 5:21 PM

  Some non-military context.

  > with what he got, instead of partying, went to Edinburgh to get a first class education in moral philosophy

  Scotland was the place to get such an education at the time.[0]

  > decided to get elected. went to a very corrupt district where votes were bought for five guineas. campaigned on principles. lost heavily but paid all those who voted for him ten guineas after the fact. next year campaigned on principles again and won. when people came to him for the ten guineas, said “The former gift was for their disinterested conduct in not taking the bribe of five pounds from the agents of my opponent. For me to pay them now would be a violation of my own previously expressed principles”

  Prior to the Reform Act 1832[1], each town with a Royal Charter had the right to elect two burgesses to the House of Commons. There were numerous 'rotten boroughs', such as Old Sarum, whose two burgesses were chosen by just seven electors, the rest of the population having moved downhill to Salisbury in the thirteenth century, or Dunwich, once one of the most important towns in England, but now washed away into the North Sea. Elections were not secret, and in rotten boroughs, electors could be bribed individually. Manchester, a bustling settlement of one million inhabitants by the time of the Act, on the other hand, was not chartered, and consequently had no burgesses in the Commons at all.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Enlightenment

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832

• by benrules2 on 1/2/24, 6:21 PM

  He's my ancestor! He hovers just on the edge of obscurity as a historical figure, and most people have never heard of him, so it's cool to see a summary like this out in the wild. My grandfather still shares exactly the same name too, though he's the last of the juniors.

• by stnmtn on 1/2/24, 4:52 PM

  I'm fascinated with Cochrane and this era. For anyone who is looking for novels that attempt to tell the story of people like Cochrane, look no further than Patrick O'Brien's books. Starting with Master and Commander

• by hansjorg on 1/2/24, 11:52 PM

  This is very entertaining, but it seems a bit too crafted for a specific audience with all the "those damned bureaucrats!" and whatnot.

  For a similar naval hot shot, check out Peter Tordenskjold (lit. thunder shield):

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tordenskjold

  There are lots of amusing stories about his crazy deeds, but he employed people to do PR for him, so take it with more than the usual grain of salt.

• by bbarnett on 1/2/24, 6:49 PM

  commanded a vessel with 14 4-pounder guns, all of the balls for a round of which would fit in his pockets

  This one confuses me. Anyone know what this means?

• by awei on 1/2/24, 5:17 PM

  Explosives in the 1800s are like rapid unscheduled refactoring today. Most programming issues can be solved with a careful application of the right amount of rapid refactoring at a precise point in space and time.

• by tbm57 on 1/2/24, 5:48 PM

  love that he helps win the war against napoleon only to try to break him out of exile a few years later

• by peter_d_sherman on 1/4/24, 6:16 AM

  Insert list of highly questionable, immoral activities -- before the following entry:

  >"with what he got, instead of partying, went to Edinburgh to get a first class education in moral philosophy"

  And, insert another continuing list of highly questionable, immoral activities -- after the above entry...

  This particular entry, if true, would portray this historical character -- as a rather humorous historical character, who was, at least, somewhat hypocritical! :-) <g> :-)

  (But who knows? Perhaps he needed the class in moral philosophy to learn about what hypocrisy is, and how it works! <g> :-) <g>)

  Anyway, the article is an excellent biographical summary of a very colorful historical character!

• by foldr on 1/2/24, 5:48 PM

  There’s an entertaining fictionalised account of some of his antics in Sharpe’s Devil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe%27s_Devil

• by niccl on 1/3/24, 1:32 AM

  And he was one of the models for Horatio Hornblower, created by CS Forrester. They're great reads and I understand that their descriptions of Napoleonic sea battles are fairly accurate

• by flobosg on 1/2/24, 5:52 PM

  Several streets in Chile bear his name.

• by l2silver on 1/3/24, 4:06 PM

  Anyone else a bit skeptical?

• by btilly on 1/2/24, 8:13 PM

  Dang it. Reading that, I want to give the book to my wife. But she does all of her reading these days on audible. And https://www.amazon.com/Cochrane-Britannias-Wolf-Donald-Thoma... shows only a paperback. (Only 3 books left.)

• by lucas_membrane on 1/3/24, 5:48 PM

  Doesn't mention his role in burning Washington, DC, and attacking Baltimore. If he had been brave enough to send one of his ships of the line into Baltimore harbor instead of just a few frigates and gunboats, Ft McHenry would now be a long-forgotten pile of rubble.

• by rraghur on 1/3/24, 1:45 PM

  Dan Snow's history hit podcast just started a series on him - https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ispIHiXbKt6ocJJH4RqN6

• by bandrami on 1/3/24, 6:22 AM

  The inspiration for the captain in the "Master & Commander" book series, though also, somewhat confusingly, a peripheral character in them.

• by elnatro on 1/2/24, 7:56 PM

  > started (legally) pirating left and right

  This made me chuckle.

• by porkbeer on 1/3/24, 5:30 PM

  This is awful. Paragraphs exist for a reason.

• by Log_out_ on 1/4/24, 1:52 PM

  TL, Dr:Empires always reward incompetence.

• by n4r9 on 1/2/24, 5:04 PM

  Off topic I know, but what's with the tonnes (nearly 70?) bullet points? It's like the author had a normal piece of text and semi-randomly decided where to split it into bullets, losing context and structure along the way. Some of the items are sequential, others are standalone. Some are paragraphs, others are tiny addendums to the previous point.

  Cochrane sounds like a very unique character, but after the first few bullets I just wants to go and read his Wikipedia page.

• by paxys on 1/2/24, 9:47 PM

  - I hate the writing style

  - Of breaking up a paragraph

  - Into a hundred individual sentences

  - And fragments

  - We really have Twitter

  - To thank for this