Capture of Valdivia

The Chilean struggle for independencefrom Spain was a decade old in 1820, but despite significant rebel victories and disarray among their various factions, the Royalists continued to mount determined resistance . In the service of the Chilean rebels and personally recruited by Bernardo O’Higgins, maverick British Admiral Thomas Cochrane carried out an attack—one that he himself described as “madness”—on the royalist naval base at Valdivia on February 3–4, 1820.

Valdivia, in southern Chile, occupied a natural defensive position in a narrow-mouthed inlet whose approaches were guarded by seven separate fortresses, with 120 cannons and a garrison of 1,600 soldiers. Cochrane had a small squadron with only a single effective warship—a frigate—and 300 men.

Lord Cochrane’s career with the British Royal Navy had ended shamefully after a stock-market fraud, but the Scottish adventurer certainly lacked neither seafaring skills, experience in command, nor courage. He devised a plan for taking Valdivia, the “Gibraltar of Chile,” from the land. Late at night on February 3, 1820, his landing party disembarked on the coast south of the fortifications. They rushed one installation, the “English Fort,” taking its garrison completely by surprise, before pushing rapidly on to take two further forts in the confusion that ensued.

Cochrane’s daring—he served as a model for both C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey—and the defenders’ demoralization conjoined in bringing success to what should have been an impossibly ambitious plan. The rebels’ position, despite their early success, was extremely vulnerable once dawn broke on February 4, but Cochrane called on his tiny squadron to approach the bay. The boats had been left with only skeleton crews, but the boldness of their coming now in broad daylight convinced the Spanish garrisons that a new wave of attackers was arriving. The royalists deserted in droves, sacking the city before fleeing to the island of Chiloé, the last remaining Spanish stronghold in Chile.

Losses: Spanish, 100; Republican, 7.