A few weeks ago, I told half of the story about the loss of the Spanish ship San Telmo. Now, I want to recount the other half of the story.
When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, it set off a chain reaction across Europe and the Americas. The resulting Peninsular War lasted for six long years leading to the abdication of Napoleon and start of wars for independence for most of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Thought Spain would not formally admit the loss of their colonies for years, by the time the Spanish monarchy was restored to the throne, it was almost impossible for Spain to stop the revolutions in Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico, but Spain was desperate to retain Peru and the silver mines that furnished a third of the royal Spanish income.
By 1819, the Spanish situation was critical. In a desperate last-ditch effort to squash the revolutions in Chile and Peru, Spain sent a fleet of warships under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier to Peru with the mission of holding on to the mines and the important seaports in Chile and Peru. While the flagship of the squadron was the San Fernando, among the ships of the convoy was the ill-fated San Telmo, a second-rate ship of the line.
This was the golden age of sailing ships, when warships were rated primarily by their size, how many gundecks, and the total number of cannons on those decks. Large scale sea battles, like the Battle of Trafalgar were carried out by the largest ships, usually first and second rate ships of the line. A first-rate ship of the line had three decks and might carry as many as 130 large cannons. A second-rate ship of the line, the true workhorses of a navy, had two decks and carried 70-80 cannons.
If you are familiar with the movie Master and Commander, the ship used was the HMS Surprise, a frigate and 5th rate ship of the line. If such a ship was to do battle with either a first- or second-rate ship, it would be roughly equivalent to a nine-year-old having a fist fight with the heavy weight champion of the world. The child might be able to outmaneuver the boxer for a while, but the fight would be over as soon as soon as the boxer successfully landed his first blow. Similarly, a single broadside from a second-rate ship of the line would destroy a smaller frigate.
Sailing southwestward from Spain, the ships had to sail around the southern tip of South America, the dreaded Drake Passage, where some of the most violent storms imaginable occur frequently, particularly in winter. Even today, with modern steel ships and weather forecasts supplied by satellites, ships still suffer accidents in these water, though thankfully they are usually minor.
The San Telmo, a second-rate ship with 74 large guns on two decks was an older ship and was a poor choice to make the difficult voyage. Launched in 1788, the San Telmo was reaching the end of her useful life. While the ship had never been involved in a major fleet action, she had been sent several times to the ‘Spanish Main’, the Caribbean, where wooden ships quickly became damaged due to the warm humid climate and the sea worms that burrowed into the hull.
The fleet arrived in the Drake Passage on September 1, just barely out of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. In good weather, the San Telmo could have made it through the Drake Passage in nine days. Unfortunately, the small fleet of ships found anything but good weather. While ships of the early 19th century carried a weather glass (a crude form of barometer), they had no way of recording accurate weather conditions. From the descriptions later given by sailors on the surviving ships, it is likely that the fleet sailed directly into full hurricane conditions.
The San Telmo, fifty feet wide and two-thirds the length of a football field, carried a crew of 644 men. On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer. While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed. The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.
More likely, the ship would have hauled in her main sails and unfurled smaller triangular storm staysails. These sails were just large enough to enable the ship to head into the crashing waves, reported by other ships to be as high as 65 feet. If the ship couldn’t maneuver and turned sideways to the waves, the ship would quickly founder. At left, is an image of a ship with storm staysails set.
Meanwhile, in Peru, when word of loss of the ship reached Peru, the revolutionaries quickly took advantage of the situation. Lord Thomas Cochrane, the daring British sailor who would become the model for the Horatio Hornblower series of books and movies as well as the Jack Aubrey novels, had left England to offer his services to the revolutionaries of Chile and Peru. (Actually, Cochrane was in disgrace, falsely accused of crimes that he would later, in a typically courageous style, receive a pardon and return to England as a hero.)
Valdivia was one of the most fortified locations in South America, with a series of heavily armed forts guarding its approach by sea. Known as the "Key to the Pacific," it was vital for Spain's control of the region. The fortress was considered impregnable, with strong natural defenses and a heavily armed garrison. The long-range guns of the fort were capable of destroying an approaching vessel long before an enemy ship could enter the harbor and turn to fire a broadside. If troops were landed on shore, there were a series of small defensive forts surrounding the fortress. Any attacking forces, denied a dock to unload, would only be able to land small cannons, no match for the powerful cannons in both the forts and the main fortress.
Cochrane approached the port in darkness, using captured Spanish flags to disguise his ships as friendly. Using signal flags, Cochrane claimed his ship contained reinforcements from the San Telmo. Under cover of night, he landed his small force of marines far from the main fortress, marching them overland to launch a surprise assault on the least-defended positions.
Cochrane's men attacked the outermost forts one by one, moving swiftly to overwhelm the defenders. Their element of surprise and disciplined aggression allowed Marines to capture each of the small forts before the Spanish could organize a counterattack. Once all the outer defenses fell, Cochrane’s forces moved on the central fortress, which surrendered after realizing resistance was futile.
The loss of Valdivia was a major loss to the Spanish government and helped pave the way for Chilean Independence, after which the forces in Chile moved northward to help secure Peruvian Independence. Linking up with the army of Simon Bolivar as he moved southward from Columbia and Venezuela, Spain eventually would lose Peru, too.
Like dominoes falling one by one, the loss of the San Telmo led to the loss of the Valdivia, which led to the loss of Chile and later Peru. With the loss of the silver mines of South America, Spain, once the most powerful nation in Europe, was no longer even a second-rate power. Though it would take another 80 years for the United States to deliver the final blow, the Spanish Empire was over.
My wife's sudden burst of creativity has now extended to AI. She's created a lot of really nice pictures with it, but there are certain things it won't do and certain things it ought not do. Computers are not actually intelligent. They do what is programmed into them but still aren't able to make creative leaps. I've been watching for years (since the first Terminator movie) waiting for the subtle signs that Skynet is rising; that someone has programmed their own prejudices and propaganda devices into the AI, Googles ill-fated Gemini AI release revealed the problem with trying to make AI "woke". In some ways the British and Spanish navies demonstrated what can go wrong with a system that is based on rigid obedience and top down authoritarian leadership. Captains like Lord Nelson and Cochrane were highly successful because they were able to think outside the rigid box of standard naval practice. AI's tools are similarly rigid. Insert pesky humans into the process, asking questions and making demands that don't mesh smoothly with an AI's programming and as you found out, they simply cut you off for violating "community standards" (or British naval standards for that matter.) That's why communist/socialist states eventually become virtually immobile and someone revolts and knocks down the entire ossified edifice. It also explains why Gemini AI, on misrendered code instruction, deleted white folks from history. The organic brains of humans have the capacity to take chaos and form it into organized and useful forms. The trick is knowing when to stop adding too many rigid rules or you wind up with Fascist Germany, The Soviet Union, Communist China and other such nations finally grew so rigid that a sudden wind threatens to take them down.
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