On 12 January 1839 four privateers sailing for the Peru-Bolivian Confederation attacked three Chilean warships under Robert Simpson in Casma Bay, on the coast of northern Peru. The Chileans beat off the attack and kept one of the privateers. Eight days later the Chilean-led army won the Battle of Yungay, and the Confederation was dissolved.
Battle of Casma
12 January 1839 · 187 years ago
A war over the Confederation
The Bolivian leader Andrés de Santa Cruz had joined Peru and Bolivia in the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Chile saw the new state as a threat to its trade and its position on the Pacific coast, and went to war against it. In 1838 Chile sent its army into Peru under General Manuel Bulnes.1
At sea Santa Cruz tried to rebuild the Confederation's naval power with privateers. Their commander was a man named Blanchet, whom the Chilean Navy describes as a captain of French origin.2
The fight in the bay
Simpson's three ships, the Confederación, the Valparaíso and the Santa Cruz, lay in Casma Bay, on the coast of northern Peru. Four privateers came in to attack them: the Edmond, the Arequipeño, the Mejicana and the Perú. They meant to take the Chilean ships by boarding and came in to close range.3
The boarding attempts failed. The privateers broke off and fled, leaving the Arequipeño in Chilean hands. The most detailed account, by the Chilean historian Gonzalo Bulnes, whose history of the campaign appeared in 1878 and drew on Simpson's report and an eyewitness letter, says the fight lasted about an hour and a half and that Blanchet was killed.4
The result
Casma cost Santa Cruz control of the sea. The Chilean National Library's history portal counts the loss of his ships among the reasons his army was short of equipment when it made its stand at Yungay. For more fights at sea, see our guide to the greatest naval battles.5
Yungay and after
On 20 January 1839 Bulnes's army defeated Santa Cruz at Yungay. Santa Cruz went into exile, and the Confederation was dissolved.6 › Battle of Yungay, 1839
Simpson, the Chilean commander, was English by birth.7
Also on this day
Sicilian revolution of 1848
12 January 1848 · 178 years ago
A popular rising broke out in Palermo against the absolutist rule of Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, the first of the European revolutions of 1848. After days of fighting the royal troops left the city, and Sicily then lived as a self-declared kingdom for 16 months.
