Master and Commander

There has been a lot of publicity about the film of the book by Patrick O’Brian called Master and Commander.

But have you read the book about the real-life Captain Jack Aubrey?

Like Frederick Marryat’s Captain Savage and Forester’s Hornblower he was based on Captain Thomas Cochrane, who was probably Britain’s greatest sea-captain, a Radical MP, defender of the oppressed and a prodigious inventor. He was also a Lord in his own right, liberated South America from the Spanish and played a major role in the Greek war of independence.

If they wrote what he did as fiction no-one would believe it!

The book is called Cochrane: The Life and Exploits of a Fighting Caption by Robert Harvey.