High on the poop deck of the eighty-gun HMS Tonnant, fifty-six-year-old Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Forrester Inglis Cochrane, his hair turned white, looked older than his years. His courtly manner revealed his pedigree: he was a younger son of an earl. Though softened by age—round through his middle, jowls overhanging his high collar—Cochrane revealed a steelier side. As one of the admirals in his command remarked, Cochrane was “a rough, brutal, and overbearing officer.”
