Under the Chilian Flag: A Tale of War between Chili and Peru

by Harry Collingwood

Now the little steamer was quite close to the Peruvian monitor, and in a few seconds more the blow would be struck which would send a warship and her entire crew to the bottom. Oh, the fools! he thought to himself, not to take more care of their ship. They were doomed; nothing could now save them; success was within his grasp. Five seconds more—then three—then two. Now the spar with its deadly torpedo was almost touching the Huascar’s side—

Crash!

A rending sound of ripping and tearing timber and another awful crash came immediately afterward, and every man in the Blanco Encalada’s launch was hurled off his feet, and thrown either into the bottom of the boat or overboard, while the little steamer’s bows rose bodily out of the water until her keel reached an angle of almost forty-five degrees, and there she stuck, still quivering in every timber from the shock.

In a second Jim realised the terrible truth. By some means or other the Peruvians had got wind of the intended attack, and had placed a stout boom of timber all round the ship, and it was upon this obstacle that the Chilian launch had charged at full speed, running right up on to it with the force of the blow, and remaining there immovable and almost a wreck.

Jim’s first thought was of how to warn the people in the other two launches, for if the enemy had been prepared for attack in one quarter, he would certainly have taken the same precautions in the other. Ah, yes! There were several blue rockets in a locker in the stern-sheets; these would serve to show that something had gone wrong, and might perhaps save the others from a similar mishap.

Jim scrambled out of his seat and was just raising the locker lid when a long streak of flame burst from the Huascar’s side. There was a deafening, thudding roar, and a stream of machine-gun bullets screeched and hummed over their heads. They had indeed walked right into a cunningly contrived trap, and the Peruvians had been on the watch for them the whole time.

The next minute there was a dull roar away to starboard, and Jim saw, out of the corner of his eye, a huge column of water leap up, with something dark poised upon the top of it. In a second he realised that one at least of his consorts had been successful and had torpedoed her prey; but even before the column of water had subsided, there broke out a crash of musketry aboard the second monitor, and sparks of fire sprang up in different parts of her, which quickly brightened into a lurid glare and showed that her people were lighting beacon-fires, the better to see who their attackers might be and their whereabouts.

Truly it was the Chilians who had been taken by surprise, not their enemies! And what a mess they had made of it all, too!

But there was no time now to think about the other launches; they would have to look after themselves; for Jim’s whole energies were now directed toward the saving of his own boat’s crew. After the first volley of machine-gun fire from the ship which he had attacked, the Peruvians got their aim right, and sent a perfect hail of Gatling, Nordenfeldt, and rifle-bullets hurtling into the wrecked launch, so that her men began to fall in all directions. Beacon-fires were also lighted in bow and stern and at amidships, so that the vivid red glare shed a lurid radiance over everything within a hundred yards. And by their light Douglas saw that the ship which he had attacked was not the Huascar at all; neither was the craft lying close to her the Union! They were a pair of old hulks, roughly metamorphosed so as to resemble the warships, and heavy barriers of floating timber had been thrown out all round them, while they had been armed with machine-guns and crowds of riflemen. The monitor and the corvette had escaped out of Arica harbour to continue their depredations elsewhere, and the Pilcomayo had probably gone with them. The Chilians had walked into a cleverly set trap and were paying dearly for their mistake.

Jim quickly recovered his presence of mind, and springing out of the launch while the bullets whistled about his ears, started to examine the boat in order to ascertain whether she were still seaworthy. He soon discovered that although there were numerous holes in her planking, they were all above the water-line, as luck would have it, and although a long piece of her keel was gone, it had not started the boat’s timbers so far as he could see.