Nine minutes. That was all it took to change naval warfare on the morning of April 23, 1891. In the sheltered waters of Caldera Bay, on the arid coast of northern Chile, two small torpedo boats crept toward the armored frigate Blanco Encalada before dawn. By the time the engagement ended, 182 men were dead, the frigate was settling on the bay floor, and navies around the world had learned a lesson they would spend the next two decades absorbing: even the most heavily armored warship could be destroyed by a weapon costing a fraction of its price.
Chile's 1891 civil war grew from a constitutional crisis. President Jose Manuel Balmaceda refused to sign the national budget passed by Congress, then dissolved the legislature altogether. The split fractured both the army and navy, with some forces loyal to the president (Balmacedists) and others to Congress. The Congressional faction controlled the armored frigate Blanco Encalada, while the Balmacedists held two modern torpedo boats, Almirante Lynch and Almirante Condell. Each vessel carried five Whitehead torpedoes alongside guns and machine guns. When Balmacedist commanders learned that Blanco Encalada would anchor in Caldera Bay on April 22, escorting troop transports to seize the railroad and nearby Copiapo, they proposed an attack. The government approved.
Blanco Encalada arrived at Caldera Bay on the evening of April 22 under Captain Goni. Troops disembarked and captured the railroad and town. Although Goni knew enemy torpedo boats were in the area, the Congressional command believed the Balmacedists would not risk attacking their transports. It was a fatal miscalculation. Torpedo nets, designed specifically to stop the weapon that would destroy them, were left onshore. Watertight bulkheads that could have compartmentalized a hull breach sat open. Only seven men stood guard aboard the frigate. At 4:00 a.m. on April 23, the two torpedo boats set out from their position, the armed steamer Imperial trailing behind to provide escort on the return. They entered Caldera Bay at approximately 3:30 a.m.
Almirante Condell attacked first, firing her bow torpedo. It missed and landed onshore, unexploded. Commander Moraga turned directly into the frigate's gunfire and launched both starboard torpedoes. One struck but failed to detonate. The other passed under the hull entirely. But every gun on Blanco Encalada was now fixed on Condell, and nobody noticed Almirante Lynch approaching from the opposite direction. Commander Fuentes fired his bow torpedo and missed. Then he executed a turning maneuver and released his forward starboard torpedo. It struck Blanco Encalada, blasting a hole in the hull. The ship sank in two minutes. Of 288 men aboard, 182 died. Among the survivors who clambered from the cargo hold was Captain Goni himself, who stayed afloat by clinging to livestock, including a llama and a cow. As the frigate went down, the torpedo boats turned their Hotchkiss guns on men struggling in the water, killing roughly forty more.
Blanco Encalada holds a grim distinction: it was the first ironclad warship in history sunk by a self-propelled torpedo. The implications rippled through admiralties worldwide. If two small, inexpensive torpedo boats could destroy a heavily armored capital ship in minutes, the calculus of naval power had changed. Navies accelerated production of torpedo boats and the new class of vessels designed to hunt them, torpedo boat destroyers, soon shortened to simply destroyers. Ships began carrying torpedo nets for use when moored in port. Torpedo tubes were fitted to surface combatants as standard armament. By the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, more than 300 self-propelled torpedoes were fired in combat, and torpedo boats sank armored cruisers and destroyers alike. The age of the torpedo, and the submarine that would carry it into the next century, had begun in a Chilean bay most of the world had never heard of.
The Chilean civil war ended four months later when Congressional forces defeated the Balmacedist army at the Battle of La Placilla on August 28, with the Balmacedist forces losing nearly 1,000 men killed before Congressional troops marched into Santiago. Blanco Encalada remained on the floor of Caldera Bay for over sixty years. Attempts to refloat her after the war failed, and the wreck lay undisturbed until 1954, when construction of a new bridge required her demolition. The Chilean government launched a new warship named Blanco Encalada, a cruiser, in 1894, as if to close the circle. Today Caldera Bay is a quiet coastal town, its harbor giving little sign that beneath these waters, the rules of modern naval combat were rewritten in the time it takes to boil an egg.
Caldera Bay is at 27.06°S, 70.83°W on the northern Chilean coast, approximately 65 km west of Copiapo. The bay is easily identifiable from the air as a sheltered inlet along an otherwise exposed coastline. Desierto de Atacama Airport (SCAT) near Copiapo is the nearest field. The surrounding terrain is stark desert meeting the Pacific. Clear conditions prevail most of the year.