Artist’s rendering of Punta Gruesa battle, 1879. The wreck of the Independencia at Punta Gruesa, oil by Thomas Somerscales.
Artist’s conception of the Chilean battle fleet at Angamos, October 8, 1879, when they took the then-Peruvian ironclad Huáscar (foreground). In this rendering, the Chilean gunners have not yet found the range and begun meting out punishment to the Lairds-built Peruvian ship. Her captain was killed by a shell that swept the bridge clean. After fighting to the last shell, the decimated Peruvian defenders were too weak to resist boarding parties, and their attempt to scuttle was foiled.
After the downfall of the Argentinian dictator Rosas in 1852, the next disruption to the peace of South America originated in, of all places, Paraguay, which emerged as a self-confident country under the dictator Carlos Antonio Lopez. After friction with Britain and France over the treatment of their subjects in Paraguay, Lopez closed the Paraguay and Parana rivers to foreign warships. Enforcing this policy, in 1855 his troops fired on the American naval steamer Water Witch, which had ascended the Parana on a mapping expedition. Commodore Shubrick led a forceful (if delayed) American response, sailing up the Parana late in 1858 with a squadron led by the 50-gun frigates Sabine and St Lawrence. Lopez apologized, paid an indemnity, and allowed the mapping expedition to proceed; by the following year the United States had two steamers, two small sailing warships, and two auxiliaries on the rivers of Paraguay.
The outbreak of the American Civil War forced the US navy to withdraw its warships from the waters of Latin America. Of the three wars fought in the region during the 1860s, two were sparked by European powers taking advantage of the temporary paralysis of the United States. In Mexico, France supported conservatives in a war to establish a monarchy under the protection of Napoleon III (1862-67), while Spain’s quest to settle old scores led to a war against a Peruvian-Chilean alliance (1864-66). Only Paraguay’s war against its larger neighbors (1865-70) did not stem from European machinations.
The crisis in Mexico began in July 1861, when the liberal regime of Benito Juarez defaulted on its international debts shortly after winning a bitter civil war against conservative forces. Spanish, British, and French squadrons anchored off Veracruz in support of the claims of their nationals. The Spanish and British soon left, but Napoleon III gradually increased French involvement in Mexican affairs. Early in 1862 troops were landed, the first of 40,000 eventually ferried to Mexico by the French navy. In June 1863 the French took Mexico City, and four months later a French-backed delegation of anti-Juarez conservatives offered an imperial Mexican throne to Archduke Ferdinand Max, younger brother of Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria and, since 1854, commander of the Austrian navy. The archduke resigned his post to become Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, arriving in the New World in May 1864. Distracted by serious resistance from republican forces loyal to Juarez, Maximilian had to abandon pet projects including the creation of an imperial Mexican navy. The French fleet filled the void, blockading the gulf and the Pacific coasts of Mexico. In the gulf, French warships supported Maximilian mostly by interdicting arms shipments bound for supporters of Juarez. On the Pacific coast, where the cities and towns were out of reach of French troops moving overland, the navy secured Acapulco, Mazatlan, and other ports for the imperial government. The end of the American Civil War marked the beginning of the end of the Mexican empire, as the United States reasserted the Monroe Doctrine. Content at having looted £2.2 million in Mexican silver during their intervention, the French agreed to leave. In March 1867 their last warships steamed away, leaving an Austrian naval steamer at Veracruz as Maximilian’s only means of escape. He refused to abandon his adopted country and three months later was captured and executed at Queretaro. During its five-year campaign in Mexican waters the French navy had no opposition at sea; in 1862-63 the armored frigate Normandie, the first ironclad to cross the Atlantic, reinforced the squadron off Veracruz, not because it was needed but to prove that the voyage could be made. The 750-ton screw gunboat Amphion, wrecked off Veracruz in April 1866, was the only French warship lost in the Mexican operation.
Just as France flouted the Monroe Doctrine in pursuing its Mexican policy, Spain took advantage of the American Civil War first to re-annex the Dominican Republic in 1861-62, then to demand repayment of Peruvian debts dating from colonial times. When Peru refused to comply, in April 1864 landing parties from a Spanish squadron occupied the Chinca Islands, source of half of the guano which provided the Peruvian government with most of its income. In a show of solidarity, Chile joined Peru in declaring war on Spain, but their combined sea power paled in comparison to that of the Spanish squadron. Admiral José Manuel Pareja commanded a force including the first ironclad to circumnavigate the globe, the armored frigate Numancia, supplemented by five unarmored frigates and two gunboats. In comparison, the most formidable allied warships were the Peruvian frigates Apurimac and Amazonas and the Chilean corvette Esmeralda, screw-propelled steamers built in European shipyards in the 1850s. Spain’s overwhelming naval superiority made it unnecessary to send the armored frigates Tetuan (6,200 tons, launched at Ferrol in 1863) and Arapiles (5,700 tons, Blackwall, 1864) to the war zone. The conflict quickly stalemated, as Spain dominated the sea but did not attempt to land troops on the mainland. The allies sent agents to European shipyards in search of unsold warships originally laid down for the Confederate states; Peru purchased two screw corvettes in France, and Chile, one in Britain. The Peruvian vessels made it to Latin American waters but the Chilean Pampero, a composite (wood-and-iron) hulled vessel, was captured by the Spanish screw frigate Gerona while en route to the war zone and subsequently joined the Spanish fleet under the name Tornado. In November 1865 the allies claimed their only success of the war when the Chilean Esmeralda, under Captain Juan Williams Rebolledo, captured the Spanish navy screw gunboat Covadonga off Papudo. Humiliated by the loss of one of his ships, Admiral Pareja committed suicide; Captain Casto Méndez Nuñez of the Numancia, promoted to rear admiral, succeeded him.
With the arrival of the Peruvian purchases and the captured Covadonga the joint Peruvian-Chilean squadron grew to include eight steamers, a force still too small to challenge the Spanish. Under the command of Williams Rebolledo and, eventually, 77- year-old Admiral Blanco Encalada, the squadron stayed close to its base on the island of Chiloé, well down the Chilean coast. Shortly after the end of the American Civil War, pressure from the United States prompted Spain to withdraw from the Dominican Republic; early in 1866, as France abandoned Mexico, Spain likewise broke off its campaign against Peru and Chile. Having seized and sold enough guano to cover the cost of the two-year operation, the Spanish squadron steamed for home in early May 1866, but not before Méndez Nuñez carried out bombardments of Callao and Valparaiso. The latter was practically undefended, but the shore batteries of the former inflicted serious damage on the Spanish screw frigate Resolucion. During the war Peru ordered two ironclads in Britain, the 3,500-ton armored frigate Independencia and the 2,030-ton turret ship Huascar. Launched in August and October 1865, they departed for the New World early in 1866 but did not reach the allied base on Chiloé until June, one month after the Spanish squadron left South American waters. Because Spain did not agree to a truce until 1871, Peru feared a renewal of the fighting and in April 1868 further strengthened its navy by purchasing the single-turret monitors Atahualpa (ex- Catawba) and Manco Capac (ex-Oneota) from the United States.
Thus by the end of the decade the Peruvian navy had four ironclads, including the two most formidable in American waters, yet in overall numbers of armored warships Brazil took the early lead in the regional naval race, building six small ironclads in Britain and France between 1864 and 1866, in the early years of a war against Paraguay. As the naval action of the war was confined to the Parana and Paraguay rivers, these ironclads all were small enough to be suitable only for river or coastal operations. The same was true of three single-turret monitors assembled in Brazil and commissioned in 1868. The 1,520-ton Brasil, which arrived from La Seyne in July 1865, was the first Brazilian armored warship and also the largest of the lot. During the war Paraguayan President Francisco Solano Lopez, son of the previous dictator, countered by ordering five small ironclads in Europe, but by the time the war ended in 1870 his defeated country could not afford to pay for them, and all five ended up in the Brazilian navy. This more than compensated Brazil for the only armored warship lost in the war, the Rio de Janeiro, which sank in September 1866 after striking mines in the Paraguay River.
Argentina was an ally of Brazil in its war against Paraguay but, like Chile, had no armored warships in the 1860s. Argentina and Chile each ordered two ironclads in the early 1870s. Meanwhile, the Spanish navy continued to expand, and by 1870 had seven ironclads built or building. After the war against Peru and Chile, the wooden screw frigate Resolucion was rebuilt as a 3,380-ton central battery ironclad and launched in 1869 as the Méndez Nuñez, in honor of the hero of the recent conflict. That same year Spain launched the 7,350-ton wooden-hulled armored frigate Sagunto, converted on the stocks at Ferrol after having been laid down as a screw ship of the line. By then the original Spanish ironclads had been joined by the armored frigates Vitoria (7,135 tons, launched at London in 1865) and Zaragosa (5,530 tons, Cartagena, 1867).
