An admirable afternoon: the Navy of Chile visit Admiral Cochrane, The Real Master and Commander

By Dr Stuart Allan, Senior Curator of Military History

Saturday 26 November was a busy day in the life of the exhibition Admiral Cochrane, The Real Master and Commander, and for its lead curator. In the afternoon our Saturday Showcase ‘Cochrane: Fact and Fiction’ event saw myself and Cochrane biographer Dr David Cordingly offering some observations on the career of Lord Cochrane, and its depiction in historical and fictional writing. I somehow knew reading all these Aubrey-Maturin and Hornblower books would come in useful one day.

This well-attended event was immediately followed up by an official visit to the exhibition by the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Chile, Admiral Edmundo Gonzalez. Lord Cochrane’s extraordinary victories in the Pacific are far from forgotten in Chile, and it was a pleasure to welcome Admiral Gonzalez and his colleagues to see an exhibition which the Chilean Navy has so strongly supported.

(left to right): Dr Tristram Clarke, National Records of Scotland, Commodore Rob Thompson RN, Commodore José Miguel Rivera, Dr Stuart Allan, Admiral Edmundo Gonzalez, Captain Ronald McIntyre.

Admiral Edmundo Gonzalez, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Chile, presents a gift to National Museums Scotland to mark the exhibition Admiral Cochrane, The Real Master and Commander.

In order to represent Cochrane’s honoured place in the Chilean Navy of the present day, the Museo Naval y Maritimo at Valparaíso kindly lent to us, through the Chilean Embassy in London,  the ensign from the Almirante Cochrane, one of a sequence of Chilean naval vessels that have borne the Scottish admiral’s name. The ensign hangs at the entrance to the exhibition.

Admiral Edmundo Gonzalez, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of Chile, and lead curator Stuart Allan with the ensign from the Almirante Cochrane.

Our guests from the Navy of Chile and the Royal Navy gather with museum representatives beneath the ensign from the Almirante Cochrane.

The Almirante Cochranecurrently in service is a Type 23 frigate originally launched for the Royal Navy in the Clyde. The ensign was flown from its predecessor, a County class destroyer, also Clyde built, which was in service with the Navy of Chile from 1984 until 2006.

The former Chilean naval destroyer, Almirante Cochrane.

Ships of the Chilean navy are only one of the many ways in which Lord Cochrane’s contribution to national independence is remembered in Chile. Visitors to that marvellous country will find streets named in his honour, statues at Valparaíso and at Valdivia, scene of his greatest victory, displays at the naval and maritime museum, and his house at Valparaíso preserved on the hill overlooking the harbour. Further south, in the Aisén region, there is a town and a great lake named after him, and even an amateur football team called ‘Lord Cochrane’.

Cochrane-spotters in Valparaíso should not overlook La Sebastiana, former home of the Chilean 20^thcentury poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s admiration for Cochrane’s achievements led him to compose his 1967 poem ‘Lord Cochrane de Chile’, an excerpt from which can be heard in our exhibition. A portrait of the Admiral is one of the many interesting Neruda possessions which may be seen at La Sebastiana.

The Lord Cochrane statue at Valparaíso, Chile.

 

Admiral Cochrane: entrepreneurial engineer

By Desmond Thomas, Volunteer, National War Museum

The idea that a great naval hero such as Admiral Cochrane could simultaneously be the type of man who might work by flickering light on some far fetched idea in his garden shed was one that greatly intrigued me. So, when Stuart Allan approached me last year and requested that I research the creative element of Cochrane’s life, I instinctively accepted, having very little idea of what I would uncover in the process.

My main port of call for primary source material was the National Records of Scotland (formerly the National Archives of Scotland), whose collections feature the current exhibition Admiral Cochrane, The Real Master and Commander.

It was at times a difficult process trying to piece together the material relating to his various engineering projects and patents into one coherent chronological list. Although many books have been written about Cochrane, the majority have naturally tended to focus on his naval and political career, with only scant mention of his engineering endeavours.

Those familiar with Admiral Cochrane will be aware of his ‘secret war plans’ which advocated the use of chemical warfare against Britain’s enemies but the wide range of subject matter his projects touched upon proved surprising. Some of the things he worked on included street lighting, rotary steam engines, practical uses for bitumen, air compression in tunnel construction, pipe laying, smoke/gas extracting machines and screw propellers.

Plan for temporary mortars by Admiral Cochrane. Click on the image to see a larger version.

As a general picture of the type of work Cochrane had been getting involved with began to emerge, the next difficulty presented itself. Attempting to actually understand and interpret the often rather technical notes and diagrams that accompanied Cochrane’s many projects was not a straightforward  task for either myself or Stuart (both of us being military history types with questionable scientific knowledge!).

This is where National Museums Scotland colleagues such as Alex Hayward, Alastair Dodds and Klaus Staubermann from the Science & Technology department came into the picture and really helped us out. They allowed us to not only very quickly put Cochrane’s work into context but also to accurately categorize him not as an inventor but more as an entrepreneurial engineer who, in many ways, was not that unusual for his time. This perfectly illustrated to me the very real benefits of what a multi-disciplinary organization such as National Museums Scotland can bring to such a project.

Throughout my research my main concern was perpetually wondering whether we were getting the fullest overview of Lord Cochrane’s engineering curriculum vitae. Needless to say, when you are working with historical records you often have to work with what you can find at the time and simply get on with it. This certainly turned out to be the case, but despite this I feel we touched upon and discovered the vast majority of projects Cochrane had been involved in throughout his lifetime.

It is difficult to say with any degree of certainty what his greatest engineering achievement is. None of his ideas created the vast fortune he had hoped for during his lifetime (one feels he would have been persistently rejected on Dragons’ Den) but some of his ideas did see use in the years and decades following his death. His ideas on the use of air compression in the construction of tunnels, for example, can probably be viewed as one of his most successful, as it was influential in the building of the Hudson tunnel in the United States.

What proved most surprising to me in the course of researching Admiral Cochrane’s engineering interests was that most of the ideas he worked on had a civilian application rather than a military or naval one. The sheer breadth of the subject matter his projects covered was also impressive. I believe these elements will also surprise and interest visitors to the exhibition and at the same time illustrate what a unique and intriguing character Admiral Cochrane was. As this was the very first exhibition I have ever contributed to, I obviously learnt a lot in the process and am just fortunate that Stuart Allan was kind enough to give me the opportunity to assist and help out. Conducting research is by its nature a solitary activity but it was made all the easier in this case by the constant support and advice I received from Stuart from start to finish.

Admiral Cochrane, The Real Master and Commander runs at National Museum of Scotland until 19 February 2012.

 

My Darien Chest Adventure

By Anita Briggs, Digital Media Content Creator

Whilst browsing the Edinburgh International Festival website the other day, I noticed that there was a play production coming up called Caledonia.  My inside out lateral thinking got the better of me and I quickly discovered that there was a direct connection with this play to an object in our collection – the Darien Chest at the National Museum of Scotland.  This is where my Darien Chest adventure begins…

Caledonia is on at the King's Theatre Edinburgh from 21-26 August as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.

I wondered if there was a useful connection to be made with Caledonia, which documents the Darien Scheme to start  a Scottish colony on Darien, Panama, in Central America and turn Scotland into an imperial power. William Patterson devised the Darien Scheme and he invited the public to invest. And they did – in a big way. Within weeks a vast proportion of the nation’s wealth had been subscribed. The Darien Chest was used to store money and documents associated with the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, a trading company set up to facilitate the colonisation.

The Darien Chest, Level 1, National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1JF

Contact was soon made with Colin Clark, Web Editor at National Theatre of Scotland, who was delighted with the connection with the Darien Chest.  The result is a Darien page on National Theatre Scotland’s website has been created and we have a featured the play on our Darien Chest collections highlights page. If you are in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh International Festival why not go and see Caledonia at the Kings Theatre and visit to the National Museum of Scotland to see the Darien Chest in the flesh!

The moral of my Darien Adventure is that working with the National Museums Scotland’s collection makes your mind work in mysterious ways…