It broke all the rules of naval warfare. Chased by a 32-gun Spanish frigate in the seas off Barcelona in May 1801, a little 14-gun sloop called Speedy should have done anything to avoid confrontation with the superior vessel. Instead, she went alongside El Gamo in broad daylight. Then the British crew of fifty-five boarded the enemy vessel with her 319 men and captured them, an action that turned the Speedy’s commander, 25-year-old Thomas Cochrane, into a celebrity. 

Cochrane, the subject of Peter Moore’s gripping new biography and the model for C S Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, was the epitome of the dashing naval hero, putting his timid superiors to shame and striking hard and decisively at England’s enemies wherever he found them. Without giving up his naval commission, he became an MP, delivering stirring speeches in the Commons in which he tore into senior government figures and attacked the Admiralty for corruption. 

On one fact-finding mission to Malta, he earned the hostility of the Maltese Admiralty Court by taking an official table of fees which he found in a private chamber and which by law should have been displayed in the court chamber. The authorities accused him of theft, and he spent