Who, believing that he sailed to find a dead man, was now in mid-Atlantic, on a Spanish frigate, sailing to a corrupt colony, and bearing an Emperor’s gift.
The talk on board the Espiritu Santo was of victories to come and of the vengeance that would be taken against the rebels once Colonel Ruiz’s guns reached the battlefields. It was artillery, Ruiz declared to Sharpe, that won wars. “Napoleon understood that!”
“But Napoleon lost his wars,” Sharpe interjected.
Ruiz flicked that objection aside. The advance in the science of artillery, he claimed, had made cavalry and infantry vulnerable to the massive destructive power of guns. There was no future, he said, in pursuing rebels around the Chilean wilderness; instead they must be lured under the massed guns of a fortress and there pulverized. Ruiz modestly disclaimed authorship of this strategy, instead praising the new Captain-General, Bautista, for the idea. “We’ll take care of Cochrane in exactly the same way,” Ruiz promised. “We’ll lure him and his ships under the guns of Val-divia, then turn the so-called rebel Navy into firewood. Guns will mean the end of Cochrane!”
Cochrane. That was the name that haunted every Spaniard. Sharpe heard the name a score of times each day. Whenever two Spanish officers were talking, they spoke of Cochrane. They disliked Bernardo O’Higgins, the rebel Irish General and now Supreme Director of the independent Chilean Republic, but they hated Cochrane. Cochrane’s victories were too flamboyant, too unlikely. They believed he was a devil, for there could be no other explanation for his success.
In truth Lord Thomas Cochrane was a Scotsman, a sailor, a jailbird, a politician and a rebel. He was also lucky. “He has the devil’s own luck,” Lieutenant Otero, the Espiritu Santos First Lieutenant, solemnly told Sharpe, “and when Cochrane is lucky, the rebellion thrives.” Otero explained that it was Cochrane’s naval victories that had made most of the rebellion’s successes possible. “Chile is not a country in which armies can easily march, so the Generals need ships to transport their troops. That’s what that devil Cochrane has given them—mobility!” Otero stared gloomily at the wild seas ahead, then shook his head sadly. “But in truth he is nothing but a pirate.”
“A lucky pirate, it seems,” Sharpe observed drily.
“I sometimes wonder if what we call luck is merely the will of God,” Otero observed sadly, “and that therefore Cochrane has been sent to scourge Spain for a reason. But God will surely relent.” Otero piously crossed himself and Sharpe reflected that if God did indeed want to punish Spain, then in Lord Cochrane He had found Himself a most lethal instrument. Cochrane, when master of a small Royal Naval sloop, and at the very beginnings of the French wars when Spain had still been allied with France, had captured a Spanish frigate that outgunned and outmanned him six to one. From that moment he had become a scourge of the seas, defying every Spanish or French attempt to thwart him. In the end his defeat had not come at the hands of Britain’s enemies, but of its courts, which had imprisoned him for fraud. He had fled the country in disgrace, to become the Admiral of the Chilean Republic’s Navy and such was Cochrane’s reputation that, as even the Espiritu Santa’s dofficers were forced to admit, no Spanish ship dared sail alone north of Valdivia, and those ships that sailed the waters south of Valdivia, like the Espiritu Santo herself, had better be well armed.
“And we are well armed!” the frigate’s officers liked to boast. Captain Ardiles exercised the Espiritu Sanfo’s gun crews incessantly so that the passengers became sick of the heavy guns’ concussion that shook the very frame of the big ship. Ardiles, perhaps enjoying the passengers’ discomfort, demanded ever faster service of the guns, and was willing to expend powder barrel after powder barrel and roundshot after roundshot in his search for the perfection that would let him destroy Cochrane in battle. The frigate’s officers, enthused by their reclusive Captain’s quest for efficiency, boasted that they would beat Cochrane’s ships to pulp, capture Cochrane himself, then parade the devil through Madrid to expose him to the jeers of the citizens before he was garotted in slow agony.