But to return to the coast. It was upon this melancholy seaboard, the coast of Tarapacá, that a sea-fight, classic in the annals of South America, and indeed one of the very earliest of battles between ironclad ships, took place—an engagement which has rendered the names of Pratt and Grau, the Chilean and the Peruvian admirals, immortal in the memory of their respective countrymen.
Peru and Chile were engaged in life and death struggle with each other on land and sea. Iquique, then a Peruvian port, was blockaded by Chile. Grau, having sailed from Callao for Arica with the Huascar and Independencia, which vessels practically constituted the Peruvian Navy, heard of the blockade, and proceeded to Iquique to engage the enemy. The day was breaking as the Peruvian vessels arrived off the port. The approach was seen by the Esmeralda and the Covadonga, two Chilean ships, and Captain Pratt, on board the Esmeralda, decided to give battle, notwithstanding that the Peruvian vessels were ironclads, whilst his own commands were unarmoured. It was a brave resolution, but the Chileans were born sea-fighters.
The Huascar was a turret-ship, built at Birkenhead in 1866, but of only 1,130 tons, armed with Whitworth and Armstrong guns, but with armour-plating incapable of resisting any heavy cannonade. The Independencia was an older type ironclad, of 2,000 tons, built in London in 1865.
The Esmeralda was a wooden corvette, and the Covadonga a wooden gunboat which had been captured from the Spaniards in the expedition sent by Spain against Chile and Peru in 1866. They carried Armstrong and Nordenfelt guns. The Chileans had some powerful ironclads, as we shall see later, but they were investing Callao at the moment.
Thus unequally armed, the contestants began the engagement. The Huascar opened fire upon the Covadonga and the Independencia strove to ram her. The Huascar then turned her attention to the Esmeralda, and so the battle proceeded for a space. At length, the Esmeralda, feeling the inferiority of her structure, adopted the ruse of steaming into shoal water, hoping to draw her antagonist of greater draught ashore. But ill-fortune frustrated this attempt. There was a loud explosion on board, and it was found that a boiler had burst, crippling her. The Huascar rapidly closed in to 1,000 yards, and at this range the two vessels continued to bombard each other in a struggle to the death, Chilean and Peruvian each serving their guns with equal valour. The noise of the cannonade resounded over the crisp waves of the Pacific and rumbled far inland over the desolate wastes of Tarapacá.
Fortune was against the Chilean. A shell struck her, set her on fire, killing a number of her crew and practically putting her out of action. But the gallant Pratt was not of the stuff that surrenders, notwithstanding the condition of his ship—littered with dead and wounded and in imminent danger of sinking. He would not strike his flag, whilst the Araucanian blood of his sailors, which never gives way, would first go down to death, and the vessel continued her now enfeebled fire.
The Huascar, protected by her armour, was little injured, and Grau, to end the struggle, determined to ram. The ironclad rushed in upon the wooden hull of her victim, ramming her on the port side. Seeing that all was lost and determined at least to sell his life dearly, Captain Pratt leapt from his own craft upon the Peruvian's deck. But a single man had time to follow him before the ships separated again, and "Surrender! surrender!" the Peruvians shouted. For reply, Pratt rushed along the deck, attacked all who opposed him, and, engaging a Peruvian officer, slew him. But so unequal a contest could not last, and, pierced by a dozen bullets, the gallant Pratt fell dead.
But the Esmeralda refused to strike her flag, the standard of the single star, which still waved proudly from her peak. Her second in command swore he would follow the example of his chief, and so it befel. The vessels closed again, the beak of the Peruvian ramming the Esmeralda on the starboard bow, opening a breach. The waters rushed in, the furnace fires were extinguished, the seamen were killed at their posts, but ere they separated, the commanding officer and a sailor leaped upon the Huascar's deck and died fighting, falling as Pratt had fallen. Again the Huascar rammed, simultaneously discharging her guns into the bowels of the doomed corvette. It was the end; the Esmeralda went down, carrying with her to a sailor's grave all but fifty of her crew of two hundred souls. As for the Covadonga, she fled into shoal water, and the Independencia following, ran aground on the rocks, a total wreck, and the Covadonga opened fire upon her.
Notwithstanding this loss, Grau harassed the enemy for months with his single ironclad, until excitement in Chile caused the dispatch of the Chilean fleet, which, having been overhauled, was sent to hunt down this brave and persistent unit to the death.
A misty morning off the coast of Tarapacá. Two Peruvian war vessels, the Huascar and the Union, are steaming quietly to the north. The mist lifts, and to the east disclosed the sandy desert shore and the far, faint, grey range of the Andes. To the west, what? Three lines of smoke from as many hostile funnels. The Union was an indefensible vessel, and Grau signalled her to escape. And now on the north-west three other ominous trails of smoke appear—smoke from the Chilean vessels—the Almirante Cochrane, so named after Lord Cochrane, the Englishman famous in Chilean history; the O'Higgins, named after the Irish President of Chile; and the Loa.