In March 1866—more than 30 years before the Spanish-American War—the United States and the Spanish Empire came perilously close to a naval clash of arms off the thriving Chilean port city of Valparaiso. Since the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the possibility of such a showdown had been imminent in the waters of the Western Hemisphere.
The possibility became more of a probability as a Spanish task force, headed by Admiral Casto Méndez Núñez and boasting the formidable armored frigate Numancia in the vanguard, began bombarding undefended port towns in a mid-century Spanish attempt at power projection. Spain’s assertiveness had forced an unintended result, galvanizing a military alliance between Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. And as Admiral Núñez set his sights on Valparaiso, it became clear that to attack the city would entail serious international ramifications, thanks to the presence there of French, British, and American citizens and property.
Into this powder-keg scenario steamed the double-turreted U.S. Navy ironclad Monadnock, en route to San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. Armed with 15-inch smoothbores firing 450-pound solid shot, the Monadnock dropped anchor at Valparaiso Harbor and prepared, if necessary, to enforce international neutrality. The two rival ironclads, the Numancia and the Monadnock, were, in a sense, the sharp points of two swords: one of the Old World, one of the New; the past vs. the future.
“If my path is dangerous I shall not fall for want of looking round,” wrote U.S. Navy Commodore John Rodgers, the Civil War veteran in command of the Monadnock. “I have been frank, consistent, and I think cautious.”1 Either the Spanish admiral would see reason and yield, or the American commodore would force him to. Either way, hundreds might die within minutes. And this was only the beginning. The United States and the Spanish Empire might at last consummate a maritime war. “I have no wish to mix myself up in affairs which are not my business,” avowed Rodgers. “If however the [U.S.] government would like the Numancia taken the Monadnock can accommodate it.”2 A naval showdown, however, would not settle a local peace but trigger a much wider war. With both ironclads glaring at one another across the bay, diplomats furiously set to work. Neither power really desired a conflict. But in March 1866 it suddenly seemed inevitable.
Unless somebody blinked.
Old Empire, New Ambitions
The origins of the Valparaiso naval standoff were both politically complex and brutally simple. In 1859 the Spanish government of Queen Isabella II embarked on an imperial campaign in Morocco, while assisting a French invasion of Indochina that same year, followed by intervention alongside French and British forces in Mexico in 1862. In the meantime, Spanish forces were embroiled in new revolutionary struggles for the fate of the Dominican Republic, and then also Haiti. When a violent quarrel broke out in 1863 between Spanish merchants and locals in Peru, an imperial squadron cruising the west coast of South America eventually made it a pretext for demanding exorbitant reparations and—when Spain’s proud, formerly colonial subjects refused to pay—for “revindicating” the nearby Chincha Islands, rich in the guano that dominated Peru’s export economy.
By 1864 the coast of Peru was under blockade from Spanish naval reinforcements, including the brand new iron-hulled broadside ironclad Numancia, built by the Société Nouvelle des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée at La Seyne, outside Toulon. When Peru’s president at length agreed to terms dictated by Madrid, he was deposed on a wave of nationalistic fervor in November 1865. To make matters worse, Chile managed to offend the Spaniards, first by claiming neutral status and denying them coal, then by refusing to salute the imperial flag. The replacement Spanish vice-admiral on the scene, José Manuel Pareja, was the former Minister of Marine and himself born in Peru—the son of a royalist general killed in the South American wars of independence. Although he was sent armed with wide discretionary powers to finally settle affairs with Peru, he proved more high-handed than his predecessor. Even before the Peruvians threw away their treaty with Spain, Chile had declared war rather than submit to Pareja’s peremptory blockade of Valpariso as well. Soon Peru and Chile were forming a military alliance, with Bolivia and Ecuador joining by the spring of 1866.
In this contest the Spanish fleet enjoyed supremacy. Chile’s navy was even smaller than Peru’s, and Valparaiso had no harbor defenses to speak of. None of the South American republics alone could defy the Numancia, which bristled with 40 68-pounder smoothbores behind 4½ to 5½ inches of iron armor plating. Though agents had been rushed abroad to purchase warships for the allied republics, none would be ready to save them now, and even those already contracted would likely be confiscated. The London Times had proclaimed, “Our duty is simply to act up to our own professions, and to guard against abuses of our own neutrality.”
Loopholes in Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act, exposed during the recent Civil War in America, had led to the construction of the Confederate raider Alabama in Liverpool, for example—which had then escaped to ravage the Yankee merchant marine worldwide. Now the British were being presented with claims for damages by the United States. So enough was enough, even though it was “not to be disguised that in the quarrel between Spain and her former Colonies the feelings of the English as well as of the American public have been in favour of the latter.”3
The South Americans were on their own, and at the mercy of a Spanish admiral riding high behind a wall of iron.
Enter the Numancia
Yet Pareja had his own problems. He had no troops with which to fight on land, and the Chileans offered him no targets at sea. Worst of all, the Pacific ports were now closed to him; coal, fresh provisions, and replacements had to be ferried back and forth through the Strait of Magellan. Valparaiso and Peru’s chief port, Callao, could be blockaded with the ships at his disposal, but trade was rerouting through scores of lesser harbors along the coast. The morale of his squadron was sinking to dangerous levels with each passing week, while the queen and her ministers—also under increasing pressure—demanded results. Something had to be done quickly. When one of his gunboats was ambushed and captured by a plucky Chilean corvette on 26 November 1865, the proud Spaniard retired to his cabin and, in full dress uniform, blew his brains out.
Núñez subsequently became the third Spanish admiral in charge of the imperial task force, and inherited all of its troubles. With his line of supply and communications stretching all the way to Spain and vulnerable to enemy cruisers, he twice tried to force an action against allied warships sheltering among the treacherous reefs and coves of the Chilean coastline. The brief exchange of fire at Abtao on 7 February 1866 was indicative of the stalemate whereby heavy Spanish frigates could not come to grips with an enemy in shallow waters, backed by gun emplacements on shore.
Orders came through from Madrid, where officials were enraged by the recent setbacks, to proceed with the Numancia and her escorts back to Valparaiso and bombard the undefended target of 80,000 civilians if the peace terms Núñez presented were not accepted by 31 March. This was not only a display of raw power and aggression, but also a naked admission by Spain that it was as helpless in the matter as its victim. It was not a war that Spain expected, nor was it the right type of victory. And things were about to get much worse.
‘The Peril of Attempting Any Aggression’
By the close of the American Civil War, the U.S. Navy had resolved to dispatch one of its newest ironclad monitors, the twin-screwed Monadnock, to San Francisco via Cape Horn. A lone monitor was protecting California, and the United States wanted to augment its force at the Mare Island Navy Yard. Faced with postwar cutbacks, the Department of the Navy likewise wanted to bolster its image by successfully deploying its most expensive and controversial armored warships, far and wide if need be. The ironclads’ main proponent, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, had been eager to display them abroad for years. The Monadnock class of monitors would at last fulfill this role. In fact the Monadnock, in company with the single-turret, iron-hulled Canonicus, already had steamed to Havana in June 1865 to intercept the foreign-built Confederate ironclad ram Stonewall.
Such ironclad muscle-flexing spelled doom for the presence of France in Mexico. Indeed, famed Monitor designer John Ericsson noted, “the peril of attempting any aggression on this side of the Atlantic. . . . It would be simply a mechanical question—the power of 15-inch shot against the thin armor of the French iron-clads.”4 By September, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote Fox that warships would need “to stop for a time . . . off Chile or Peru on account of troubles with Spain.” Welles was convinced “the appearance of the Monadnock will . . . have a good effect there.”5
When his squadron departed Hampton Roads, Virginia, two months later, Rodgers reminded his ship commanders that “No one either at home or abroad feels any special interest for a wooden ship: but this voyage for an ironclad excites the most lively attention both in our country and in Europe.”6 The trip itself proved uneventful, except for the wild publicity generated everywhere the Monadnock dropped anchor. Her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Francis M. Bunce, later reported:
Many of the residents of the ports at which we stopped, and officers of nearly all the principal naval powers of the world, have visited the ship. The objects which have received the most attention, and have seemed to excite most the interest of these visitors, apart from the ship itself, have been the XV-inch navy guns, with the means of working them, and the main engines, which have been much admired for their compactness.7
More to the point, Rodgers wrote to his wife, Anne, was the reaction of the Minister of War of Uruguay, at Montevideo: “He said he was glad to see the Monadnock and this squadron—that it would show the nations of Europe that they must not interfere with the weaker powers on this continent; and that they looked to their stronger brother for protection.” Indeed, the ironclad was producing “a moral sensation wherever she goes—and creating a profound respect for the flag.” In Rodgers’ opinion, this was precisely what U.S. foreign policy needed, since “right without might avails little.”8
After safely rounding the Horn, the Monadnock dropped anchor at Valparaiso on 1 March—in the middle of a war. Soon afterward, the Numancia and the rest of the Spanish fleet also arrived from the south, having failed in their attempts to engage the allied navy and now obliged to devastate the city before them. The sight of a strange yet burly American ironclad in the harbor must have been an unwelcome surprise.
The showdown had begun.
‘Upon the Perilous Sea of Politics’
Actually, three fleets were present. British interests in the area were represented by Rear Admiral Joseph Denman, with two heavily armed steam frigates that Rodgers described as “beautiful” and “formidable.” The Spanish force also included four steam frigates and a corvette, mounting a total of 243 guns, the vast majority of them 32-pounders.9 On board HMS Sutlej, Admiral Denman informed Rodgers that Valparaiso might be attacked even sooner by Núñez, who had threatened an instantaneous and overwhelming retaliation if the Chileans attempted to use mines (“torpedoes”) against his vessels. That was unacceptable to the British admiral, since any sudden bombardment would surely maximize the loss of life and property there—much of which was British, French, and American. But what about the Numancia? It was worse than futile to intervene, whether on a point of humanity or national interest, if the Spanish were not completely defeated.
Rodgers took the hint. As he recounted in a letter to his father-in-law later that night, “I listened quietly and made no reply. I thought the situation over, which was new.” His patriotic instincts recoiled at the Spanish crown “pitching into a war with Peru and San Domingo at a time when our people were struggling for national life.” He suspected, moreover, “the [French] Emperor’s hand stirring this soup.” The great houses of Europe were clearly making themselves at home in the Americas. Isabella II and her sister were connected to the Bourbons by marriage, and supported the Hapsburg Maximilian as “Emperor of Mexico”—whose wife in turn was the daughter of Leopold I, King of the Belgians, and a first cousin to Queen Victoria. Rodgers found the whole attitude of Spain in the affair atrocious, “travelling outside of the laws of modern warfare in going back to the days of the Buccaneers for her model.” Spain’s blockade was reportedly a farce, while “the Chilean flag flies within reach of their guns, and bugles blow cavalry calls at them all day.”10
Hence, while “scrupulously abstaining from any mention of the Monroe Doctrine,” he returned to inform Denman that he would assist him in stopping Núñez. The Numancia would not be a problem. Indeed, Rodgers was quite certain the Monadnock would leave “only the trucks of the Spanish vessel’s masts . . . above water, thirty minutes after the firing had commenced.” Rodgers knew what he was talking about. He had seen much ironclad combat during the Civil War. He had felt the effects of plunging fire while on board the weakly armored Galena at Drewry’s Bluff in 1862; he had led monitors in their attack on Charleston’s combined defenses the following year; and it was his monitor, the Weehawken, that, with two decisive blows from a 15-inch gun, had compelled the surrender of the strongly armored Confederate ram Atlanta. He also had seen the same armor plates manufactured by Petin and Gaudet for the Numancia thoroughly smashed by such weaponry in target tests conducted during the war. The balance of power in the Pacific, Rodgers argued, had shifted. The Englishman could only agree.11
But as much as he relished the thought of sinking a European broadside ironclad with an American monitor, for all the world to see, Rodgers admitted he was drifting “upon the perilous sea of politics” without official orders to do so, and certainly with no diplomatic experience on which to draw. He therefore refused to act alone, reminding Denman that Britain (and France) had much greater trading interests tied up in Chile than did the United States, and that he would not be made “a cat’s paw to rake their chestnuts out of the fire, and then have them laugh over my singed paws.”12
At any rate, he reasoned, Spain would do more damage to herself by disrupting English commerce along her own coasts in the event of war. By writing petitions now, the neutral consuls at Valparaiso could mobilize international sentiment to pressure Madrid to rethink its policy. It was well known that Núñez had full plenipotentiary authority to negotiate peace on the spot with the South American republics banded against him. If he could be convinced of the hopelessness of his position, the town might be spared. Thus Rodgers and Denman agreed that intervention could only be justified if Núñez commenced a bombardment without several days’ notice—an important qualification that would be exploited later.
Ironclad Diplomacy
In the meantime, the American commodore set out to apply a blend of psychological warfare against the Spanish admiral. “We shall be as amiable as invincible,” Rodgers wrote to his wife. On 16 March he invited Núñez to a hospitality tour of the monitor, followed by a lavish banquet adorned with Chilean “flowers and fruits” and “many excellent wines” on board his flagship, the paddle-steamer Vanderbilt. The facts of the case were then laid out: Spain
was in a false position . . . too far from her base for successful operations—that she had used an unfortunate word in her diplomacy, “revindication”; that this word had united all the states against her from the Equator to Patagonia; that the work shops of Europe were open to the Spanish Americans. These were clubbing together: one putting in a dollar and another two dollars; their aggregate resources were too many for the Spaniards at this distance.13
Politically speaking, the Spanish queen and her advisers had made an error in “seeking external development rather than internal growth,” while the United States, by contrast, was growing at a fantastical rate, the 1860 Census suggesting a population of 100 million by 1900. Spain in the New World was now “a stranger in a crowd.” Peace with honor was not only still possible, it was necessary. Otherwise an unfortunate chance event might see the Monadnock opening fire.
Even so, as cordial, sympathetic, and frank as he was with a brother naval officer, Rodgers could not realistically expect his efforts to succeed. Just as he was risking his career by negotiating without mandate, Núñez was bound by direct command. He agreed to negotiate terms brokered by the neutral diplomats, but whatever arrangement was made must satisfy Spanish dignity—or at least provide his government with an acceptable back door out of its predicament. Even an exchange of national salutes would be acceptable, provided that Chile offered hers first. As far as the immediate supremacy of the Monadnock was concerned, he could not possibly back down to a challenge of strength any more than Rodgers would, gallantly announcing that “Spain, the Queen and I prefer honor without ships than ships without honor.” He would at least take many of the American and British wooden ships down with him. Even Rodgers later confessed that the Vanderbilt was “a magnificent tea-kettle where somebody would be apt to get scalded in a fight.” Against the Spanish fleet the Anglo-Americans floated only 150 guns; and although “the 4 XV inch guns of the monitor would have brought us out all right at last,” Rodgers wrote, “there would probably have been heavy loss.”14
Indeed, it was the presence of the Monadnock that helped ruin the subsequent negotiations, and helped push Valparaiso toward her fiery fate in 1866. The Chileans saw in her a friendly ironclad champion behind which they could rally; much of their merchant fleet huddled in the harbor naturally assumed her protection. Their response to Spain’s proposal for a national salute was practically arrogant. Why should they give in now? The Spaniards were suffering from fatigue and scurvy. The press of all the major foreign powers was on their side. Peruvian ironclads, built in England before the war commenced, were on their way. It didn’t matter that the Chincha Islands had been handed back to Peru before their war had begun, or that Spain obviously wasn’t planning a new empire in South America. The whole affair had come down to who was originally right and who was admittedly wrong—a perfect recipe for war, not peace.
Consequently, as the days and weeks of March dragged on, with diplomatic trains and telegraphs—offer vs. counter-offer—racing back and forth between Valparaiso and Santiago, it became increasingly evident that neither the Spanish nor the Chileans would blink.
The first to give way, in fact, were the British. The Foreign Office in London was adamant that the strictest neutrality was to be maintained, never mind the horror of a bombardment without warning. Once this was confirmed by the British consul, William Thomson, Denman was compelled to retract his earlier pledge of support to Rodgers, who, while “absolutely pleased to have the shooting commence tomorrow,” was by that time stewing in his own doubts as well. Many of his officers were opposed to bloody murder off the coast of Chile, equally far from home.15 This was not their fight, yet they were certain to get the lion’s share of it.
At the same time Rodgers and Núñez had formed a deep mutual respect, as the only actors on the stage with real parts to play, everyone else bowing out as spectators.16 Together with the American minister to Chile, former Union cavalry Major General Judson Kilpatrick, the eagerness to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in a dramatic show of force was giving way to frustration with European imperial intrigues and “disgust” with Chilean politicians who “did not care for peace” yet “feared to make war.”17
On 27 March, once it was obvious the British and American fleets would not interfere after all, Núñez sent a final proclamation recounting Her Majesty’s grievances—and giving neutrals and noncombatants four days to evacuate Valparaiso. Because the republican allied fleet “hid itself in out-of-the-way holes and corners” and the government of Chile denied her “just redress,” Spain was given “the painful but imperative duty of inflicting upon her enemy that punishment so richly due to a nation which absolutely ignores . . . the duties imposed upon the civilized nations of the world.” A last-minute proposal by the Chileans—for a naval duel between strictly wooden men-of-war to decide the issue—was rejected by the Spanish admiral. “It sounded very finely to these people,” Rodgers wrote to his wife, “but was childish of course to ask the Spaniards to throw out part of their means of overcoming in battle. The Queen of Spain would not be particularly pleased I presume at paying an enormous sum for an ironclad of 7,000 tons burden, sending her this enormous distance—supporting her at an enormous expense, and then committing the enormous folly of not employing her in battle.”18
Bombardment = Chastisement
After months of tension and wild speculation, the three-hour barrage of Saturday, 31 March, was as limited and as precise as could be hoped for: Only the Custom House, the railway station, government buildings, and the old fort were targeted. On the request of Núñez, white flags indicated hospitals and churches. The Chileans, watching from the surrounding hillsides, made sure not to fire a single shot in return. Poor Spanish marksmanship saw several houses destroyed, and the resulting fires spread enough to rack up a total of some $14 million in damage, though with only a few casualties. Núñez then assured Rodgers that no further attacks would take place—Chile had been sufficiently “chastised”—and quietly withdrew his forces to the north to operate against Peru.
General Kilpatrick, for one, found it difficult to reconcile a modern war that targeted civilian property in wanton disregard of “international law.” That reaction, noted The New York Times, was ironic coming from the former “raider of the Shenandoah [Valley]” and the commander of Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s cavalry in his infamous March to the Sea during the Civil War.19 Meanwhile, the unwillingness of Britain to directly protect its own interests had seemed inexplicable to Rodgers, along with a delegation of English and French merchants at Valparaiso who found themselves abandoned. Yet when the matter arose that May in the House of Lords, Parliament confirmed that not only had Denman also been given clear instructions by the Admiralty to maintain impartiality in the conflict, but that the Anglo-American warning had probably succeeded in deterring a bombardment without warning and thus had saved lives. Given the British rear admiral’s awkward diplomatic position, the First Lord of the Admiralty added that “there could have been no use in sending out an iron-clad ship to Denman unless new instructions were sent to him at the same time.” It was never an issue of regional ironclad strength, but of international relations.20
Likewise, the squaring off of the Spanish Numancia and American Monadnock in 1866 rather proved that in the calculation of war or peace, it was rarely a “simple mechanical question” after all. Honor, pride, and ignorance were as potent and maybe even predictable factors in decision-making as armor, guns, and tactics. Politics, indeed, trumped them all. Such considerations of national and naval power had to be made from the top down, beginning to end, and were best left out of the hands of sailors with better things to do.
1. John Rodgers to father-in-law William L. Hodge, 2 March 1866, Rodgers Family Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Collection, Washington, DC, Box 26.
2. Ibid., 1 March 1866.
3. London Times, 29 January 1866.
4. Army and Navy Journal, 10 June 1865.
5. Gideon Welles to Gustavus Fox, 6 September 1865, Fox Papers, New York Historical Society, New York City, Box 10. Rear Admiral Francis Gregory had recommended the Monadnock for the proposed voyage; see Gregory to Welles, 20 July 1865, National Archives, Record Group 19, Entry 1236.
6. Rodgers to squadron commanders, 2 November 1865, Rodgers Papers.
7. Francis M. Bunce to Rodgers, 24 June 1866, in “Voyage of the Monadnock to San Francisco, and the Miantonomoh to Europe,” Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 3 December 3 1866, pp. 743–734.
8. Rodgers to Anne Rodgers, 21 January 1866, Rodgers Papers.
9. Undated Rodgers memo, “Estimated Guns of the Spanish Fleet,” Rodgers Papers.
10. Rodgers to Hodge, 1–2 March 1866, Rodgers Papers.
11. Rodgers to Anne Rodgers, 5 March 1866, Rodgers Papers. For the capture of the Atlanta, see “Report of Captain Rodgers, U.S. Navy, commanding U.S.S. Weehawken,” 17 June 1863, Richard Rush et al., eds., Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894–1914), series 1, vol. 14, pp. 265–6. For armor target-trials, see U.S. National Archives, Record Group 74, Entry 98.
12. Rodgers to Hodge, 2 March 1866, Rodgers Papers.
13. Rodgers to Anne Rodgers, 16 March 1866, 18 March 1866, Rodgers Papers.
14. Ibid., 29 March 1866; 20 April 1866.
15. Ibid., 5 March 1866; Rodgers to Hodge, 2 March 1866, Rodgers Papers.
16. Rodgers to Anne Rodgers, 27 March 1866, Rodgers Papers.
17. Robert Ervin Johnson, Rear Admiral John Rodgers, 1812–1882 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1967) p. 287.
18. Rodgers to Anne Rodgers, 31 March 1866, Rodgers Papers.
19. “Central and South America,” The New York Times, 2 May 1866.
20. Official Report of Parliament, 15 May 1866, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (London: T.C. Hansard, 1866), vol. CLXXXIII, pp. 955–959.