Battle of Vuelta de Obligado, 1845: chains across the Paraná

Argentina celebrates a battle it lost. On 20 November 1845 the soldiers of the Argentine Confederation tried to stop a British and French squadron on the Paraná with chains, boats and shore batteries, and the squadron broke through. Yet the historian Felipe Pigna calls it a military defeat but a political victory, and the British naval officers who fought there wrote with admiration of the men who stood by their guns.²

Background: a blockade and a closed river

In the 1840s the Argentine Confederation was led in its foreign affairs by Juan Manuel de Rosas, the governor of Buenos Aires, who ruled from 1835 to 1852 with dictatorial powers. His government barred foreign ships from the inland rivers, shutting European merchants out of the trade of the Paraná and the provinces upstream.³

Britain and France wanted to trade directly with those provinces without passing through Buenos Aires, and they pressed Rosas to end his war with Uruguay. In 1845 the two powers intervened. They blockaded Buenos Aires, seized the Argentine squadron of Admiral William Brown that August, and resolved to force open the Paraná. Giuseppe Garibaldi, then in the service of besieged Montevideo, commanded a flotilla on the Allied side.⁴

The aim, as Unidiversidad and the Presidency's account both put it, was free navigation of the river: to support Corrientes, a province hostile to Rosas, and to let Montevideo trade with Paraguay and the river provinces.⁵

Armies and commanders

Rosas gave the defense to General Lucio Norberto Mansilla. Mansilla chose Vuelta de Obligado, a sharp bend in the San Pedro district of Buenos Aires province, about 18 kilometers north of the town, where the river narrowed. He stretched three heavy chains from bank to bank, held up by 24 boats, and placed four batteries on the bluffs of the right bank.⁶

William Laird Clowes, the British naval historian, counts about thirty guns in the four batteries, with field guns in the wood behind them, and above the barrier the schooner Republicano and two gunboats; fire ships waited in the river. One battery was commanded by Eduardo Brown, the younger son of Admiral Brown, another by the naval officer Juan Bautista Thorne.⁷

The squadron that came up the river was commanded by Captain Charles Hotham for Britain and Captain François Tréhouart for France, with Commander Bartholomew Sulivan leading one of its divisions. The sources differ on its size: Clowes lists eleven British and French warships in the attack, the Argentine Army counts fifteen, and the account of the Archivo General de la Nación quoted by Unidiversidad gives 22. Merchant ships waited to follow it upstream.⁸

The night before the battle Sulivan and the French Lieutenant Mazères rowed up with muffled oars and sounded the river close to the chains and the batteries. Plans were made to attack in two divisions under sail, with the three paddle steamers held back in reserve until the chains were cut.⁹

The battle in phases

The opening fire. On the morning of 20 November the Allied ships moved up toward the barrier. The first Argentine battery opened fire at about ten to ten, and in the light breeze and strong current the sailing ships struggled to reach their positions. The British Dolphin ran ahead up the middle of the river and for a time drew the batteries' fire.¹⁰

The San Martín. Tréhouart then took his brig, the San Martín, ahead of her into the most exposed place in the line, raked by three batteries and by the guns of the Republicano. The Argentine Army's account says the defenders cut the flagship's anchor and she drifted out of the fight. Clowes and Sulivan tell it differently: she was disabled and her cable shot away, but Tréhouart brought her up again and kept his station, losing a large part of his crew.¹¹

Fire ships and steamers. At about ten to eleven the Argentines let loose ten fire ships, which drifted past the Allied vessels without harm. The steamers came up earlier than planned to help the San Martín. Argentine guns were silenced and their crews replaced again and again.¹²

Turning point: the chains are cut

Around noon the crew of the Republicano set her on fire and abandoned her, and at a quarter past twelve she blew up. The chains still held. Captain James Hope of the steamer Firebrand volunteered for the work. He took three boats to the barrier, picking up the Dolphin's armorers, who had practiced chain-cutting, and while one party under Hope himself cut the chain cables on the deck of one hulk, the others, under Lieutenant William Webb, the mate Frederick Nicholson and the midshipman John Commerell, sawed through the mooring cables of three more. Clowes and Sulivan say that in four minutes, under fire from every gun that could bear, the three boats swung out of the line and left a gap nearly a hundred yards wide. The Argentine Army's account has the chains broken with hammer blows on an anvil and the boats that held them burned.¹³

The steamers passed through and raked the batteries from above, and Hotham landed British seamen, marines and a small French detachment below the batteries. Sulivan entered one battery and spiked its guns, and the lower batteries were taken. The Manuelita battery kept its flag flying until dark and was occupied only the next day. Unidiversidad and the Presidency's account both put the length of the fighting at seven hours.¹⁴

Aftermath: losing the battle, winning the peace

The losses were very unequal. The Argentine Army's account gives the attackers 26 killed and 86 wounded; Sulivan counted 36 British and 60 French killed and wounded, most of the French on the San Martín. The Argentine losses, the Presidency's account notes, were ten times greater.¹⁵

In the days after the battle the Argentines tried to save the schooner Chacabuco and other vessels by towing them upstream with horses. When the British pursued them, they blew up the Chacabuco themselves.¹⁶

The squadron then convoyed a large number of merchant ships some eight hundred miles up the Paraná to Corrientes, to carry up manufactured goods and bring down the produce that had piled up in the inland provinces. Part of it reached Corrientes on 20 January 1846, but the voyage was harassed by new Argentine batteries along the banks, at San Lorenzo, Tonelero and elsewhere, which fired on every ship that passed. The commercial venture fell far short of what the merchants had hoped for.¹⁷

The peace treaties that followed, among them the Arana–Southern treaty with Britain, returned Brown's squadron and the island of Martín García, recognized the Confederation's sovereignty over its inland rivers and, the Army's account adds, had the Allied fleets salute the Argentine flag with 21 guns. For Pigna the two treaties were very good for the country and established the respect owed to every sovereign state.¹⁸

The two navies saw the day differently. In France Tréhouart was promoted rear admiral for the action, and the battle was painted and engraved for the French public. British accounts are more muted, and they give the defenders their due: Sulivan wrote that the enemy “certainly behaved well,” and Clowes that the Argentine gunners called up fresh crews time after time.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

In 1974 the Argentine Congress made 20 November the Day of National Sovereignty in memory of Obligado, by Law 20.770, on the proposal of the historian José María Rosa. Official Argentine accounts tell the day as a heroic defense, the Presidency's own retelling going so far as to say that the soldiers repelled the invasion.²⁰ › Battle of the Riachuelo, 1865