Battle of Angamos, 1879: the end of the Huáscar and Admiral Grau

For five months one small ship kept a whole navy at bay. The Huáscar raided the Chilean coast, sank a Chilean corvette, captured a troop transport and drove Santiago into political crisis. On a calm October morning off a desert headland she was finally caught between two ironclads. In ninety minutes her admiral was dead, her deck was a slaughterhouse, and Peru's most dangerous warship had changed flags.²

Background: a war decided at sea

The War of the Pacific grew out of a quarrel between Chile and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama coast. When Bolivia raised taxes on a Chilean nitrate company and threatened to seize its property, Chilean troops occupied Antofagasta on 14 February 1879. Peru was bound to Bolivia by a secret treaty of 1873, and on 5 April Chile declared war on both.³

It was a war of deserts and long coasts, where armies could only be moved and supplied by sea. Markham, writing in 1882, put it plainly: an invader who held the sea could choose his point of attack, and the conquest of the coast was then only a matter of time. Chile had two new English-built ironclads; Peru had the old turret ship Huáscar, the broadside ironclad Independencia and a few wooden ships.⁴

On 21 May 1879, at Iquique, the Huáscar under Miguel Grau rammed and sank the Chilean corvette Esmeralda, whose commander Arturo Prat died leaping onto the Huáscar's deck; the same day the Independencia ran aground chasing the gunboat Covadonga and was lost. From then on the Huáscar was the Peruvian navy, and the Chilean fleet's main target.⁵ › Battle of Callao, 1866

Armies and commanders

The Huáscar was a single-turret ram built by Laird Brothers at Birkenhead in the mid-1860s, of about 1,130 tons, with two 10-inch, 300-pounder Armstrong rifles in a turret turned by hand and armor no more than 4.5 inches thick on her side and 5.5 inches on the turret. Her chief engineer, Samuel Mac Mahon, wrote that with a fouled bottom she could make no more than 11 knots, where with a clean hull she might have made 12 or more.⁶

Her captain was Miguel Grau, promoted rear admiral for the summer's raids. Through July and August he struck along the Chilean coast, took the transport Rímac with a cavalry regiment aboard and tied the Chilean navy down to guarding its ports; Mason, the American naval officer who studied the war, noted that he did all this without a single illegal or cruel act. In Chile there were protests in the streets and in Congress, and the cabinet was censured. Admiral Juan Williams Rebolledo was replaced by Commodore Galvarino Riveros, and Captain Juan José Latorre took over the ironclad Cochrane.⁷

The Chilean ironclads Almirante Cochrane and Blanco Encalada were sister ships built at Hull in 1874 to 1875 to designs by Sir Edward Reed: some 3,560 tons, six 9-inch Armstrong rifles in an armored central battery, armor up to nine inches thick at the waterline, and twin screws. Both were cleaned and refitted for the hunt. On 1 October the Chilean squadron sailed north to find the Huáscar.⁸

The battle in phases

The trap

Riveros split his force. The slower division, the Blanco Encalada, the gunboat Covadonga and the transport Matías Cousiño, patrolled close to the coast between Mejillones and Antofagasta; the faster one under Latorre, the Cochrane, the corvette O'Higgins and the transport Loa, cruised offshore. The Huáscar and the corvette Unión, coming back north after a raid, looked into Antofagasta in the small hours of 8 October and found nothing. At about half past three in the morning they sighted the first division some six miles off. The Blanco and the Covadonga gave chase, but the Peruvians drew away easily.⁹

At 7:15 or 7:30 three more columns of smoke rose to the northwest: the Cochrane, the O'Higgins and the Loa, steering to cut across the Peruvians' bows. Grau ordered full steam. The faster Unión crossed to the Huáscar's other side and escaped north; the monitor could not.¹⁰

The shell in the conning tower

The accounts of the opening differ. Mason and Markham have the Huáscar firing first at 9:25, at about 3,000 yards; the report of her surviving officer, Lieutenant Pedro Gárezon, says 9:40, at about 1,000 meters. All agree that the Cochrane held her fire until she was close, and that her first hits did terrible work: a shell pierced the armor by the turret, burst inside and put a dozen men out of action, and another damaged the steering, so that the Huáscar had to be steered with tackles.¹¹

Grau tried to ram, and the twin-screwed Cochrane turned away. Then a shell struck the conning tower, from which he was directing the ship, and burst inside. Mason puts it at 9:45, Markham at 9:55, Gárezon about ten minutes after the first hits. Grau was blown apart; only part of a leg was ever found. His aide, Lieutenant Diego Ferré, died with him.¹²

The Blanco joins

Command passed down a list of dying officers. Lieutenant Commander Elías Aguirre took over and was killed; Commander Manuel Melitón Carbajal was wounded; Lieutenant José Melitón Rodríguez was killed looking out of a gun port; Lieutenant Enrique Palacios was badly wounded. In the end the ship was fought by Lieutenant Pedro Gárezon, her fourth officer when the action began. The Blanco Encalada came up shortly after ten. The Huáscar turned to ram her and missed, and the Blanco poured fire into her at close range.¹³

By now the Huáscar was little more than an armored target. Her steering had been shot away three times, her turret was jammed and one gun disabled, Chilean marksmen and machine guns had swept her decks, and shells had set her on fire in many places. At one point her flag came down with its halyard shot through; it was hoisted again and the firing resumed.¹⁴

Turning point: the valves

With no way left to hurt the enemy, Gárezon and the three remaining officers decided to sink the ship rather than surrender her, and sent Ensign Ricardo Herrera below to tell the engineers to open the valves. To flood her the engines had to be stopped, and that let the Chilean boats come alongside. Lieutenant Simpson of the Cochrane reached the engine room revolver in hand and made the engineers close the valves; there were already three to four feet of water in the hold. The boarders put out the fires and took off the prisoners and the wounded.¹⁵

The sources disagree on the end too. Gárezon says the Chilean guns fell silent at 10:10, the Peruvian navy's account quoted by BioBioChile gives 10:55, and Markham has the flag hauled down at eleven. Gárezon insisted that the flag was never struck: when the boarders came aboard it lay on the deck because its chain halyard had been shot away. Mason and Markham, for their part, write that it was hauled down at the end.¹⁶

Aftermath

The cost was heavy. Mason counts 28 killed and 48 wounded out of a crew of about 200; Markham, 64 killed and wounded out of 193. That afternoon the Huáscar was taken into Mejillones under her captors. She was repaired at Valparaíso and was back in service under the Chilean flag by December, or, as the historian Rafael Mellafe puts it, after work that lasted into January 1880.¹⁷

With the Huáscar gone, Peru had lost the sea. Britannica counts Angamos, with Iquique, among the naval victories that gave Chile control of the sea approaches to Peru. A Chilean army invaded Peru, Tarapacá was taken before the end of the year, and in January 1881 Chilean troops occupied Lima. The Huáscar herself fought on under her new flag: on 27 February 1880 off Arica her captain, Manuel Thomson, was killed in a duel with the Peruvian monitor Manco Cápac, and in April she joined the blockade of Callao.¹⁸ › Battle of Arica, 1880

Legacy and memory

Both foreign chroniclers of the war wrote of Grau with admiration: Markham predicted that he would be known in history as the Hero of Angamos, and Mason judged that in any navy he would have been an honor to the naval profession. They disagree on where his remains were first laid: Markham says they were buried at Mejillones with twenty-five of his men, Mason that they were interred at Santiago with full military honors.¹⁹

The Huáscar survives. The Chilean Navy has restored her as she looked before the war and keeps her not as a trophy but as a memorial to the Chilean and Peruvian sailors who died aboard her, Prat and Grau among them.²⁰

Visiting today

The Huáscar lies at Talcahuano, the naval port near Concepción in southern Chile, where visitors can go aboard and see her restored engines and turret.²¹

The Peruvian officers who survived closed their report by writing of the profound grief caused by the death of the brave rear admiral and of the subordinates they had seen fall doing their duty to the last.²²