The battle happened largely by accident, the product of garbled orders and crossed wires that read, in hindsight, like a tragedy waiting for a stage. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock had been sent to find von Spee's squadron along South America's west coast, but the ships promised to reinforce him kept being recalled and reassigned. His flagship, the elderly armoured cruiser Good Hope, was crewed largely by reservists. His one modern asset, the battleship Canopus, was so slow he left her behind to escort his colliers. Cradock had a friend then awaiting court-martial for declining to engage a stronger enemy, and colleagues said he was "constitutionally incapable of refusing action." Leaving the Falklands, he posted a letter to be opened only upon his death. He did not expect to come home.

Both sides spent the afternoon believing they were chasing a single isolated cruiser. When the full squadrons sighted each other at last, von Spee held every advantage and used the sky itself as a weapon. His armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were faster, newer, and famous throughout the fleet for their gunnery. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the British ships to the west were thrown into hard silhouette against the dying light, while the German ships melted into the darkening coast behind them. Von Spee simply refused to close until the moment favored him completely. At 18:50 the sun set. He turned in, opened fire at 12,000 yards, and the trap shut.

It was less a battle than an execution by mathematics. The Germans could bring sixteen heavy guns to bear; Good Hope answered with two of comparable range, and the high seas flooded the casemates of the smaller British guns whenever their crews tried to fire. Cradock did the only thing left to a man with no good options: he steered straight at the enemy, trying to close the range so his lighter guns could reach. The German fire only grew more accurate as the burning British ships became beacons in the night. At 19:50 the forward magazine of Good Hope exploded, tearing the bow from the ship. She broke apart and sank in the dark with no one to witness it.

There were no survivors. Not from Good Hope, not from her sister Monmouth, which the cruiser Nürnberg found later still afloat, listing, and refusing to surrender before she too was sent down. Roughly 1,600 British officers and men died that night, Admiral Cradock among them, lost in the cold of the Humboldt Current. Among the dead were four young Canadian midshipmen, the first casualties of the newly formed Royal Canadian Navy, and twenty-six stokers recruited in the West Indies who never saw the islands again. These were reservists and recruits, many of whom had been civilians weeks earlier. In 1989 the people of Coronel raised a memorial to them in the town square, honoring sailors of an enemy navy who died in their waters.

Von Spee won, and knew it would kill him. His easy victory had burned nearly half his irreplaceable ammunition, fired into the dark at ships he could not resupply against. Shock in London produced exactly the response he feared: the Admiralty detached two modern battlecruisers and flung them south. On 8 December, at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, those ships destroyed von Spee's squadron and killed the admiral along with most of his men, including his two sons. The flowers he had refused proved prophetic. Coronel and the Falklands are remembered together now, two halves of a single grim arithmetic, the only victory the German cruiser raiders ever won at sea and the price that came due for it.