Thomas Cochrane and the prizes of war in Guayaquil and Brazil

Abstract

At the beginning of 1822 the Captain of the Spanish Navy José Villegas Y Córdoba surrendered, delivering in the Free Province of Guayaquil three ships under his command: the Frigates Prueba and Venganza and the Corvette Emperador Alejandro. This surrender came after an insistent persecution, which had lasted for some months, initiated by Vice Admiral Thomas Cochrane, commander of the Chilean naval forces. However, Peruvian authorities present in Guayaquil managed, through negotiations, to have the three ships taken over by the Peruvian Navy, which generated a series of conflicts between Thomas Cochrane and the Peruvian authorities. A little less than a year after this episode, Cochrane would command the Naval Force of the Brazilian Empire in its struggle for independence from Portugal. With a successful naval campaign, the First Admiral Thomas Cochrane, commanded the seizure of more than 80 Portuguese merchant ships and warships, however, again his interests related to prizes of war were thwarted by conflicting decisions from the Brazilian imperial government, triggering a long legal dispute between the Scottish naval chief and the Brazilian government that spanned five decades. The purpose of this article is to draw a parallel between the demands for prizes of the naval war made by Cochrane in relation to the Spanish ships that surrendered in Guayaquil in 1822, and the Portuguese ships arrested by him in 1823 during the Brazilian independence campaign.