Thomas, Lord Cochrane, a Scottish aristocrat and heir to the title Earl of Dundonald, was one of the great British naval heroes of the nineteenth century. Having made his fame in command of ships of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, Cochrane returned home to be a member of Parliament and a knight of the Order of Bath. Disaster struck in 1814 when he was implicated in fraud in a stock swindle engineered by his uncle. He was tried and briefly imprisoned, but more important, he was dismissed from the Royal Navy and lost his knighthood and his seat in Parliament. In serious need of employment, Cochrane accepted the offer of the newly independent republic of Chile in 1818 to command the navy it was creating. With its independence hanging by a thread and threatened by the Spanish vice-regal armies of Peru, Chile desperately needed to drive the Spanish navy from the Pacific in order to guarantee its own independence and to pursue the master plan of José de San Martín to liberate Peru.

This is one of the great adventure tales of nineteenth-century Latin American history. Cochrane's achievements were spectacular. He seized Valdivia; captured the Spanish flagship at Callao; transported San Martín's army to Peru; and cleared the Pacific of naval threats to Chilean and Peruvian independence. Vale endorses Maria Graham's view that in his time as commander of the Chilean navy Cochrane ‘had taken, destroyed, or forced to surrender every Spanish naval vessel in the Pacific’ (p. 208). Leaving Chilean service to take command of the navy of newly independent Brazil in 1823, he had the same dramatic impact in assuring the security of Brazil. In his third great adventure in support of a liberal independence cause – commanding the navy of Greece in its struggle for independence from Turkey – he was far less successful.

Brian Vale, a naval historian and former Assistant Director General of the British Council, narrates the history of Cochrane's years in the Pacific in clean, direct prose. The book is highly readable and thoroughly enjoyable. Vale's object, using documents and archival sources, is to counter the misconceptions in the literature based on Cochrane's memoirs and the contemporary accounts written by his close personal friends William Bennet Stevenson, Maria Graham and John Miers. Vale adopts the assessment of a contemporary opponent, Admiral Lord St. Vincent, who described Cochrane as ‘mad, romantic, money getting and not truth telling’ (p. 28). Throughout his lifetime, Cochrane sought favour, wealth and advancement. Georgian England and especially Victorian England adopted him as a national hero and believed, based largely on the testimony of Cochrane himself and his supporters, that he had not been justly treated by the South Americans. Vale argues, however, that he was not cheated or defrauded of his just rewards by the Chileans or anybody else, but rather that Cochrane made inappropriately high demands on the governments he served. When Cochrane came to Chile, for example, he brought with him his own prize agent to pursue the substantial percentage of the prize money from captured ships and property that British naval practices, largely adopted by Chile, awarded to the commander, captain and crews of naval vessels. The Chilean government gave Cochrane ‘all he craved for in terms of recognition, reward and approval’, (p. 79) including doubling his salary and prize money, awarding him an estate of 20,000 acres and many honours. Yet, for the rest of his life Cochrane complained of being deprived of adequate reward, and in his eighties he was still pursuing his claims against the Chilean, Brazilian and Greek governments. Vale sums it up by referring to Cochrane's ‘vividly misremembered grievances’ (p. 202).

Cochrane also pursued vendettas against his own officers and against members of the Chilean government. Though brilliant and brave in military command, he was always suspicious and spiteful. He was distrustful of every member of the Chilean government. Only Bernardo O'Higgins, Supreme Director of Chile, escaped Cochrane's wrath. Cochrane quarrelled with San Martín over military tactics, political theory, and, as always, money. Among the officers and crews of his naval squadron there was much infighting, while Cochrane favoured some officers and plotted against others. He also cheated some of them out of their full shares of prize monies. San Martín's entourage nicknamed Cochrane ‘el metálico lord’ for his constant pursuit of money. James Paroissien, a friend of Cochrane's, wrote of him: ‘He appears only to be anxious about making money. Avarice and selfishness do certainly appear to form the groundwork of his character’ (p. 145). Although Cochrane made his fortune many times over, his extravagant spending, or that of his family, always forced him to seek more.

This unflattering image of Cochrane, so contrary to the glowing accounts he and his friends wrote, and which primarily influenced the historiography, is the point of Vale's book. Vale frequently mentions historical distortions that Cochrane's complaints and criticisms introduced into the literature, especially Cochrane's autobiography, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chile, Peru and Brazil, written in 1859 by a ghost writer. Cochrane's views were self-serving and erroneous, and the great contribution Vale makes is to set the record straight. Based as it is on documents from the National Archives of Scotland, the naval archives of Chile and Spain, and others, Vale's account carries great weight, particularly because he does not impugn Cochrane's tactical genius and daring. Vale's assessment goes a long way to counteracting the defamations Cochrane and his supporters hurled against the leaders of the independence movements and early governments in Peru and Chile, which have generally been adopted in the secondary literature without independent confirmation. This is high quality and well researched revision, and long overdue.