Battle of Angamos

For six months the Peruvian monitor Huascar had made a nonsense of Chilean control of the sea, raiding convoys, cutting cables and escaping every attempt to corner her, which mattered because the whole war was a fight over a coastline with no roads behind it. On 8 October 1879 two Chilean divisions closed from opposite directions off Punta Angamos and left her nowhere to run. Grau was killed early in the action by a shell that struck the conning tower. The Huascar fought on under a succession of officers until she was boarded with her steering gone and her crew trying to scuttle her. With the Peruvian navy finished, Chile could land armies wherever it chose, and did.

Grau is venerated in Peru as the Caballero de los Mares and respected in Chile too, largely because he had stopped to rescue survivors earlier in the war and had sent the fallen Chilean captain Arturo Prat's sword and effects to his widow with a letter both countries still print; after Angamos, Chilean officers wrote their own condolences to Grau's widow. The war's settlement left Bolivia without a coastline and the resulting maritime claim was litigated at the International Court of Justice as recently as 2018, so this is nineteenth century history with live diplomatic consequences. The Huascar herself is the sharpest version of that: preserved at Talcahuano by the Chilean navy, honoured by Peruvian visitors, and periodically the subject of calls for her return. Naval historians read Angamos as one of the clearest demonstrations that the monitor type, for all its armour, could not survive being outnumbered and outpaced.