Sunset and evening star
* * * * *
And after that the dark.
The Glasgow would also have been lost had she not been a new ship with speed and commanded by a man with the moral courage to use it in order to preserve his vessel and her crew for the further service of their country. Von Spee, who had the mastery of manœuvre, brought Cradock to action when and how he pleased, and emphasised for the hundredth time in naval warfare that speed and striking power and squadron training will win victory certainly, inevitably, and almost without hurt to the victors. Like the Falkland Islands action of five weeks afterwards, that off Coronel was a gun action. No torpedoes were used on either side. Probably it was one of the last purely gun actions which will be fought in our time.
At the end of October the British and German squadrons were near to one another, though until they actually met off Coronel the British commanders did not know that the concentrated German Squadron was off the Chilean coast. Von Spee knew that an old pre-Dreadnought battleship had come out from England, though he was not sure of her class. He judged her speed to be higher than that of the Canopus, which, though powerfully armed, was so lame a duck that she would have been more of a hindrance than a help had Cradock joined up with her. Von Spee had an immense advantage in the greater handiness and cohesiveness of his ships. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were sisters, completed in 1907, and alike in all respects. Their shooting records were first-class; they were indeed the crack gunnery ships under the German ensign. Their sixteen 8.2-inch guns—eight each—fired shells of 275 lb. weight, nearly three times the weight of the 100-lb. shells fired from the 6-inch guns which formed the chief batteries of their opponents the Good Hope and Monmouth. They were three months out of dock but they could still steam, as they showed at Coronel, at over twenty knots in a heavy sea. The light cruisers Dresden, Leipzig and Nürnberg were not identical though very nearly alike. Their armament was the same—ten 4.1-inch guns apiece—and their speed nearly the same. The Dresden was the fastest as she was the newest, a sister of the famous Emden. None of the German light cruisers was so fast or so powerful as the Glasgow, but together they were much more than a match for her, just as the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau together were more than a match for the Good Hope and Monmouth. When, therefore, von Spee found himself opposed to the British armoured cruisers he was under no anxiety; he had the heels of them and the guns of them; they could neither fight successfully with him nor escape from him. The speedy Glasgow might escape—as in fact she did—but the Good Hope and the Monmouth were doomed from the moment when the action was joined.
I have dwelt upon the characteristics of the rival squadrons at the risk of being wearisome since an understanding of their qualities is essential to an understanding of the action.
On October 31st, the Glasgow put into Coronel, a small coaling port near Concepcion and to the south of Valparaiso, which had become von Spee’s unofficial base. He did not remain in territorial waters for more than twenty-four hours at a time, but he got what he liked from German ships in the harbour. The Glasgow kept in wireless touch with the Good Hope and Monmouth, which were some fifty miles out at sea to the west, and von Spee picked up enough from the English wireless to know that one of our cruisers was at Coronel. At once he despatched the Nürnberg to shadow the Glasgow, to stroll as it were unostentatiously past the little harbour, while he with the rest of the squadron stayed out of sight to the north. In the morning of November 1st out came the Glasgow and made for the rendezvous where she was to join the other cruisers and the Otranto, an armed liner by which they were accompanied. The wireless signals passing between the watching Nürnberg and von Spee were in their turn picked up by the Good Hope, so that each squadron then knew that an enemy was not far off. Cradock, an English seaman of the fighting type, determined to seek out the Germans, though he must have suspected their superiority of force. Neither side actually knew the strength of the other. Cradock spread out his vessels fan-wise in the early afternoon and ordered them to steam in this fashion at fifteen knots to the north-east.
