Tsunami narratives seldom mention the results of a sizeable vessel's encounter with one of the seismic sea waves. Among the U.S. warships that have endured such experiences, the story of the USS Wateree stands alone, for she is the only one to have served as useful a life ashore as she did afloat.
A two-masted side-wheeler, the iron-hulled gunboat was at anchor in the port of Arica in present-day Chile on 13 August 1868. About 1705, she began to vibrate violently. Rushing on deck, her crew saw a great cloud of dust overlaying the town and the ground literally rippling in waves. Arica was being laid waste by an earthquake, which was later estimated to have been 8.5 magnitude on the Richter scale.
The double-ender's captain, Commander James H. Gillis, reported: "I proceeded on deck, and, while standing there, looking at the city, I observed the buildings commence to crumble down, and in less than a minute the whole city was but a mass of ruins, scarcely a house being left standing." Knowing giant waves could follow, Gillis prepared his ship for the worst: "I immediately gave orders to secure the battery, have the second anchor ready to let go, chain ready to veer, and the hatches battened down." As the sea did not seem to be running in, at 1720 he took a boat ashore, with orders for the ship's other boats and crewmen to follow as soon as possible to provide what relief they could for survivors.
Twelve minutes later the sea level suddenly rose. Where moments before people could be seen crowding a pier, now there was no one; all were swallowed up. Over the next half hour the sea ebbed and flowed several times until sometime after 1800, when, the captain reported,
another tremendous rising of the sea, and as it receded the ship was swung violently seaward, and, after holding on for about a minute, the deck stoppers parted, the chain flew rapidly out of the hawse pipes, tearing away compartments between the lockers, and, being both shackled together, brought on the light underneath upper deck. The ship now commenced to drift rapidly seaward, passing very near Alacran island, but clear of it, when the sea very suddenly commenced to rush in again.
The Wateree was free and adrift with the currents carrying her faster than she had ever moved under her own power.
According to paymaster, and future rear admiral, Lieutenant Luther G. Billings, the Wateree's ordeal began when:
The sea drew back from the land until we were stranded. The bottom of the sea was exposed, so that we saw what had never been seen before, fish struggling on the seabed and creatures of the deep aground. The round-hulled vessels in the area rolled over on their sides. The Wateree sat on her flat bottom. When the sea came back, not really as a wave but rather as a huge tide, the others turned turtle while ours rose unhurt in the churning water.
After the ship was pitched in different directions by the rapidly changing currents, Billings looked out to sea and saw the approaching tsunami, which he described as:
a strange kind of mirage that seemed to rise higher and higher into the air. Its crest topped by the baleful light of [a] phosphorescent glitter, showed frightful masses of black water below. Heralded by the thunder of thousands of breakers all crashing together, the tidal wave we had dreaded was upon us.
With a terrific din, our ship was engulfed, buried under a half-liquid, half-solid, mass of sand and water for a suffocating eternity. Then, groaning in all of its timbers, the Wateree pushed its way to the surface. A few men were seriously hurt, none was killed, and no one was missing. It was a miracle.
Commander Gillis reported that his ship was "among the breakers" at 1855. "Several heavy seas broke over her," he wrote, "but did no other injury than throwing the vessel nearly on her beam ends, (she quickly righted again,) breaking paddle-box, bending portion of rim and braces of starboard wheels, jamming the wheel itself against the side, and carrying away store-rooms on the guard forward, and part of starboard hammock netting."
The captain returned to the Wateree at 0200 the next day. Daylight revealed she had been carried about 470 yards from, and 12 feet above, the high-water mark. Gillis reported to the commander of the South Pacific Squadron, Rear Admiral Thomas Turner, on board the USS Powhatan: "I have had the height to which the solid sea wave rose measured, and find that it is 42 feet and 5 inches, and the wash is from 10 to 15 feet higher."
The iron-hulled Wateree survived the tsunami's onslaught, but not so the vessels around her. The store ship USS Fredonia was completely broken up, only five of her 32-man crew surviving. The Peruvian corvette America lay upright at the waters edge, her masts and spars carried away. And a British merchantman, the Chanarcillo, was on her beam ends, her three masts, upper decks, and cargo ripped from her hull. She was wrapped tightly in her anchor chain, its full length wound around the hull, a sign of how many times she had been rolled over and over by the sea.
Arica was gone, and in its stead was desolation. The town's upper part had, according to Admiral Turner's report, "not a house or wall standing." Its lower part "is literally as perfectly swept away, even the foundations, as though they had never existed."
The Wateree lost only one of her crew, the coxswain of the ship's boat, which first brought the captain ashore. The ship herself had come through the ordeal surprisingly well. But stranded high, dry, and inland as she was, the vessel could not be moved back to the water. For some months she stayed put, serving as a Navy-operated disaster relief station for locals. Then she was sold and became a hotel and later a hospital. Another tsunami, in 1877, moved the ship to the water's edge and destroyed her. All that remains today are her boilers, maintained by Chile as a national monument.