John Dundas Cochrane (1793–1825)

John Dundas Cochrane (1793-1825) was a Royal Navy officer and the cousin of the more famous Thomas Cochrane, 'The Sea Wolf'. Without any chance of a sea command at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, John Dundas Cochrane persuaded the Navy to grant him two years leave on half pay and set of to walk......around the world. His eventual journey, 1820-1823, took him across Europe, into and across Russia, as far as the Kamchatka peninsula. There he found and married a local girl, returning with her to the UK, via St Petersburg. This book is the account of "A Pedestrian Journey", describing the considerable hardships of a remarkable journey. Not an enthralling account but the scale of the undertaking is admirable. After publishing this account, John set off on another adventure to South America but succumbed to a fever shortly after landing in Colombia, in 1825.… (mer)