[HN Gopher] Thomas Cochrane
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Thomas Cochrane
Author : neural_thing
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-01-02 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sergey.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sergey.substack.com)
| stnmtn wrote:
| 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
| dash2 wrote:
| Or look further and try the Hornblower books? Less naval
| terminology, sharper characterization.
| marcpaq wrote:
| O'Brian & Forester wrote fun adventures in the golden age of
| sailing.
|
| You can look a little further still to check out Dudley
| Pope's Ramage series.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I like the naval terminology, even though I don't understand
| most of it.
|
| Not having read the Hornblower books since adolescence, I
| can't compare them, but on "characterization" : sorry, bro.
| O'Brian's the master of it. Two very good actors took on Jack
| and Steven (Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany) and made a
| classic movie.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Unfortunately the movie oversimplified the characters. Jack
| in the books is a complex guy, who has besides his good
| traits some unpleasant parts (his obsession with making
| money with get rich quick schemes on land which often land
| him in debt, and his obsession with taking "prizes" at sea
| for personal gain more than duty). Crowe's Jack is just a
| generic hero. And Stephen is a complex guy too, who is an
| intelligence agent in addition to being a doctor and
| naturalist. Bettany's Stephen ignores this whole part of
| his character.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Ok. But you're criticizing the movie, not the books.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I don't think that's fair at all. My advice to people
| struggling with the naval stuff in Master and Commander is to
| keep reading. The important stuff gets explained in plain
| language to the perpetually lubberly Maturin, presumably for
| the benefit of the reader.
|
| Aubrey and Maturin are two of my favorite characters in all
| of literature. The depth of their motivations, their
| relationship, and their own personal wants are at the heart
| of the series. The best parts of the entire series are
| frequently their adventures on land rather than the purely
| naval parts.
| weard_beard wrote:
| The hornblower books are for folks getting bored on their
| 3rd or 4th read through of the Aubrey/Maturin series :-)
| legitster wrote:
| I absolutely adore the Hornblower books. Almost anything by
| CS Forester, really.
|
| Patrick O'Brien's books are too dry for me. There's lots of
| characters stopping and explaining naval terminology to each
| other, or long conversations about feelings and posturing and
| etc.
|
| In comparison, Forester writing really captures the adventure
| and gives you the spirit of the era in much less verbose but
| sharper prose.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| My suggestion would be to try the audiobooks instead (the
| ones narrated by Patrick Tull).
| iam-TJ wrote:
| A couple of Robert Brightwell's (Thomas) "Flashman" series*
| have the eponymous hero as a shipmate of Cochrane - first in
| the Mediterranean in "Flashman and the Seawolf" [0] and later
| in South America in "Flashman and the Emperor" [1]
|
| Both are great rollicking action adventures.
|
| * Thomas is the uncle of the more famous Sir Harry Paget
| Flashman, V.C., whose memoirs are edited by George MacDonald-
| Fraser.
|
| [0] https://robertbrightwell.com/my-books/flashman-and-the-
| seawo...
|
| [1] https://robertbrightwell.com/my-books/flashman-and-the-
| emper...
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Horatio Hornblower is a lot of fun as well. It's fiction but
| based on a lot of Cochraine's ruses. It's both a highly rated
| TV miniseries (inexplicably unavailable on any streaming
| service in the US) and a series of books.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Jack Aubrey was very consciously modeled on Cochrane according
| to O'Brien. The general arc of his naval career pretty closely
| follows that of Cochrane's.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| In case anyone's interested:
|
| there is an interview with O'Brian on YouTube.
|
| (Don't ask for a link. Just search.)
| n4r9 wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| +1 to that. tl;dr
|
| This needs a whole series of novels. Oh wait. There already is
| one:
|
| https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/the-real-jack-aubre...
| usrusr wrote:
| So that's where both Stephenson and Disney got the first name
| of their concurrently written Jacks from (I assume that both
| Shaftoe and Sparrow were already public when BBC writers
| created Harkness who is basically the same character as the
| other two)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Jack" - a great name for a pirate or sea captain.
|
| "Morris", "Herman", "Nigel", "Cuthbert" - not so much.
|
| Follow me for more fiction advice.
| webel0 wrote:
| > all of the above is sourced from Cochrane: Britannia's Sea
| Wolf by Donald Thomas
|
| Thats pretty much what they did. I do sort of like the idea of
| sharing less-than-perfectly-polished writing. But it does make
| for an odd read.
| macintux wrote:
| FWIW, I found the layout entertaining.
| usrusr wrote:
| I think it's a really nice example of form matching content:
| a very long list of roughly equally improbable events. No
| prose could ever express the sheer _quantity_ of it all like
| that seemingly endless list of bullet points. I kind of
| expected the last bullet point to be "wrote and published
| his own own biography, few other sources remain"
| paxys wrote:
| It's sadly becoming more and more common because too many
| people aren't used to reading stuff longer than a Tweet at a
| time. Put a regular paragraph of text in from of them and they
| will just close the browser tab and move on.
| Hedepig wrote:
| I mentioned in another comment, I enjoyed the structure and
| found it much easier to process. This is despite mostly
| reading long form articles and never having been a huge
| twitter user.
| awei wrote:
| 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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| and for follow-on history to the Reform Act of 1832:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833#:~:...
| tbm57 wrote:
| love that he helps win the war against napoleon only to try to
| break him out of exile a few years later
| toyg wrote:
| It's like athletes hating each other on the pitch/court, but
| being friends outside of it - because, in the end, they have
| more in common between themselves than with the outside world.
|
| That was particularly true in the reactionary environment of
| the 19th century, when traditional hierarchies were fighting
| hard against "uppity" upstarts who did not fit conventions.
| foldr wrote:
| There's an entertaining fictionalised account of some of his
| antics in _Sharpe's Devil_ :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpe%27s_Devil
| flobosg wrote:
| Several streets in Chile bear his name.
| benrules2 wrote:
| 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.
| cpp_frog wrote:
| He is known by all members of the Chilean Navy [1], he is not
| obscure in this part of the world. By the way, I am chilean and
| lived most of my childhood just a block away from Lord Cochrane
| street [0], in downtown Santiago, which is one the busiest
| places in the whole country (and those adjacent blocks have
| seen some history).
|
| [0]
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lord+Cochrane+1-99,+Santia...
|
| [1] https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-726.html
| (documents, images and more)
| benrules2 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I'll pass this along to my family.
| They'll be interested to learn he is known in Chile.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Maybe he is mine as well. Also, not mentioned, is that one of
| his descendants, Zefram Cochran, will be the inventor of warp
| drive.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _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?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| The guns were so small, that a single firing (so 14 guns
| shooting once simultaneously) could be loaded with a mass of
| balls that easily fit a man's pockets.
| patrickmay wrote:
| That being said, 14 four pound balls weigh 56 pounds (yes,
| you're welcome for me doing the difficult math), so they
| might fit in your pockets but you'll need a sturdy belt.
| aimonster2 wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one who went down that path...
| elnatro wrote:
| > started (legally) pirating left and right
|
| This made me chuckle.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.)
| paxys wrote:
| - 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
| Hedepig wrote:
| On the contrary, I have never been a heavy twitter user, yet I
| would dearly love all articles I read to be broken down like
| this. I definitely find it easier to process a list structure
| like this.
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(page generated 2024-01-02 23:00 UTC)