Thomas Cochrane and Newfoundland in the 1820s

when Thomas Cochrane (1789-1872) arrived in St. John's on 11 october 1825, he was a 36-year-old widower, a member of a large family of impoverished but ambitious Scottish aristocrats, and he had already seen nearly 30 years of naval service.Having entered as a "volunteer" at the age of seven under the command of his father, Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, the younger Cochrane rose quickly through the ranks.He assumed his first command when barely 17, a career trajectory that the naval historian John Knox Laughton (writing in the original Dictionary of National Biography), considered a particularly "flagrant" example of the "gross jobbery" 5 then pervading the navy.yet notwithstanding the many question marks that there might have been about Cochrane's dazzling professional ascent, he came to Newfoundland with a long and varied service career behind him, having fought in the Napoleonic wars and the war of 1812 and, in the years that followed, having served as a commander in the west Indian and North American stations.whether the appointment to the governorship of Newfoundland marked yet another advance in Cochrane's remarkable career, however, might have been a matter of debate.Nobody who had been paying attention to the relatively few appearances Newfoundland made in the British press during the 1810s and 1820s would have thought the island a particularly easy or pleasant posting.Almost all of the coverage of St. John's during the decade before Cochrane's arrival was of the fires that had ravaged the city in 1816, 1817, and 1819, with accounts in the Times offering highly charged pictures of "naked" victims "shivering in the storm and snow" and of thousands of desperate, homeless people facing a winter "more searching and rigorous than any thing with which we are acquainted in europe, south of the Arctic Circle." 6 In the summer of 1817, British readers were told that Newfoundlanders were in "the greatest possible distress . . .for want of the common necessaries of life"; a few months later, there was a report that the "starving population" of St. John's had transformed the city into a den of "lawless banditti." 7 At least some of the officers and civil servants stationed in Newfoundland might have agreed with this picture of it as a uniquely miserable and unwelcoming part of the British world; an undated letter in Cochrane's correspondence, from a Mr. Ayre, pleads for Cochrane's help in finding a post off the island."I would, " Ayre declares dramatically, "prefer being a Thomas Cochrane and Newfoundland in the 1820s 121 Chimney Sweep, almost, in england, or any temperate climate to any thing that would be given me here." 8 Indeed, Cochrane himself, in his official and quasi-official reports on Newfoundland to his superiors in Britain, was hardly any rosier in his views than the unhappy Mr. Ayre.writing to the politician Thomas Hyde Villiers a year after his arrival, Cochrane lamented that even though Newfoundland was "the oldest Colony in the King's possession" and ranked as high as fourth or fifth "in a commercial point of view, " it "remained in a perfect state of nature absolutely as if the whole population had just fallen from the clouds . . .without public buildings . . .without civil institutions . . .and I may further add almost without laws." His opinion did not appear to have improved some two years later when, in an october 1828 letter to Sir George Murray, he complained that the "bad climate, and long and dreary winters, and other causes" meant that even the colonial elite in Newfoundland faced extreme "privations." 9 yet the journal presents a rather different picture of elite life in 1820s Newfoundland than Cochrane offers in his more public writing.There are, of course, a number of complaints about the unpleasant or inconvenient aspects of daily life, ranging from a drunken cook to the bone-chilling cold.even so, St. John's appears from the beginning to have been something of a pleasant surprise, very far from the desolate, hardscrabble outpost that Cochrane was apparently expecting after having heard it "so ill spoken of." After attending morning services on his first Sunday in the city, he noted in his journal on 11 october 1825 that, with its "many well dressed females" and its "very respectable preacher, " the "Church and congregation much surpass[ed] my expectations." He also approved of the "picturesque" landscape and was "astonished to find so good a street as the main street, " with its large "quantity of very good shops." Later, he presents St. John's as the site of reasonably elegant social pleasures, as he turns his attention to his "rural" retreat at Virginia Cottage, where he spent much of his time during his first spring and summer in Newfoundland.His accounts of entertaining his lady visitors by arranging for a military band to provide music for them "among the trees" (26 June 1826), or of lazy afternoons of angling and wandering through decorative walks, verge on a pastoral fantasia at odds with the rough, lawless world depicted in his official correspondence.of course, the social world of St. John's was not the only aspect of Newfoundland to attract Cochrane's attention: during the period covered in these selections he also made two tours of the more remote settlements, in September 1826 travelling through Conception and trinity Bays and around Random Island and then in the summer of 1827 around Placentia Bay, the Burin Peninsula,

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