Manco Cápac (ship)
The Manco Cápac was a warship of the Peruvian Navy of the Monitor type , which was named after the mythical first ruler of the Inca of the same name .
history
The ship was built by the shipping company Alex Swift & Co. in Cincinnati and had two smooth-barreled 380 mm Dahlgren cannons . The launch took place on May 21, 1864.
Shortly after the end of the American Civil War , the monitor was completed in terms of equipment and delivered to the US Navy on June 10, 1865 under the name Oneota , but never put into service. On April 13, 1868, the monitor was bought back by the shipping company Alex Swift & Co. This in turn sold the warship to Peru in 1868 , although this violated a treaty between the USA and Spain.
At the beginning of the Saltpeter War, the Manco Cápac anchored together with a second monitor, the Atahualpa , in the port of Callao . On May 21, 1879, Chilean ships approached Callao to attack the Peruvian fleet that the Chileans suspected there. When it was found that the seaworthy Peruvian warships, including the Huáscar , had sailed south, the Chilean ships turned back without an exchange of fire.
In the naval battle of Angamos , the Chileans captured the Huáscar and then used them against the Peruvians. From November 1879 the Huáscar blocked the last remaining Peruvian port of Arica and regularly fired at the fortifications. The fighting off Arica was observed from a safe distance by the German armored corvette Hansa and some British warships, because they hoped to gain strategically interesting information about the effects of a bombardment from sea. On February 27, 1880 there was a naval battle between the Huáscar and the Manco Cápac , in which the Swedish-born Chilean commander of the sea blockade, Manuel Thomson, fell on deck by a direct hit. Otherwise the battle ended unsuccessfully and the Chilean fleet continued the bombardment of Arica until the city was captured by the Chilean army on June 7, 1880, whereby the first phase of the saltpeter war was victorious for the Chileans. Then the Peruvians put the Manco Cápac on the ground themselves so that it would not fall into the hands of the Chileans.
Web links
- Page about the Manco Cápac (English)