Battle of Vuelta de Obligado, 1845: chains across the Paraná

Argentina celebrates a battle it lost. On 20 November 1845 the soldiers of the Argentine Confederation tried to stop a British and French squadron on the Paraná River with chains, boats and shore batteries. The squadron broke through. Yet the historian Felipe Pigna calls it a military defeat but a political victory, and 20 November is the country's Day of National Sovereignty.²

The blockade

In the 1840s the Argentine Confederation, led in its foreign affairs by Juan Manuel de Rosas, the governor of Buenos Aires, banned foreign ships from its inland rivers. That shut European merchants out of the trade of the Paraná and the provinces upstream. On 2 August 1845 Britain and France imposed a blockade on the Río de la Plata, halting trade at every port of the Confederation. They seized the Argentine squadron under Admiral William Brown, and a flotilla from Montevideo under Giuseppe Garibaldi took the island of Martín García.³

The aim, according to Unidiversidad, was to force free navigation of the Paraná, to supply Corrientes, a province opposed to Rosas, and let besieged Montevideo trade with Paraguay and the river provinces. According to the Presidency, the Anglo-French warships, escorting about 100 merchant ships, began to move up the Paraná on 17 November 1845.⁴

Chains at the bend

Rosas gave the defense to General Lucio Norberto Mansilla. Mansilla chose Vuelta de Obligado, a sharp bend about 18 kilometers north of San Pedro where the river narrowed to 700 meters. He stretched three heavy chains from bank to bank, held up by 24 boats, and placed four batteries with thirty guns on the bluffs of the right bank. The British naval historian William Laird Clowes likewise describes twenty-four hulks held by three chain cables, four batteries on the right bank and the schooner Republicano guarding the barrier, where the river was about half a mile wide.⁵

The sources differ on the size of the force coming upstream. The Argentine Presidency counts fifteen warships; the account of the Archivo General de la Nación quoted by Unidiversidad gives 22. Both agree that the attackers were far stronger in numbers and modern equipment. Clowes lists eleven British and French warships in the squadron that forced the passage.⁶

The battle

The fight began on the morning of 20 November. According to the Presidency, the squadron bombarded the batteries with heavy fire and Congreve rockets, and the Argentine guns had shorter range, less accuracy and much slower loading. Even so, the Presidency's account says, they put two brigs out of action, forced another ship back and cut the anchor of the flagship, which drifted downstream out of the fight. Clowes tells it differently: the British ships, he writes, went up the river without a single rocket on board, and the French flagship San Martín, though disabled and with her cable shot away, was brought up again and kept her station.⁷

The Presidency's account continues: after more than two hours the defenders were running out of ammunition and their fire slackened. The attackers landed two battalions against the southern battery. Mansilla led a bayonet charge and fell, badly wounded in the chest by grapeshot; Colonel Thorne took over the artillery. As the firing died down the attackers cut the chains with hammer blows on an anvil and burned the boats that held them. Landing parties took the battery and its 21 guns; Colonel Ramón Rodríguez's cavalry drove them back to their boats once, but gave ground to a second attack. In Clowes's version, boats under Captain James Hope of HMS Firebrand cut the cables of three of the hulks and opened a gap about a hundred yards wide, and British seamen and marines with a small French detachment then landed and took the lower batteries. The Argentine ship Republicano was blown up by her own side when she could no longer be defended. Unidiversidad's sources put the fighting at seven hours.⁸

Losing the battle, winning the peace

The Presidency's account gives the Argentine losses as 250 killed and 400 wounded, against 26 killed and 86 wounded among the attackers. The squadron had suffered so much damage that it lay almost immobile in the delta for urgent repairs before going on upstream. Mansilla set up mobile batteries along the river, and the squadron was harassed all the way to Corrientes, where it managed to sell only a few weapons. On its way back, on 4 June 1846, the Presidency adds, Mansilla intercepted it again at the Angostura del Quebracho.⁹ › Battle of the Riachuelo, 1865

The diplomatic outcome was very different. According to the Presidency, after long negotiations Argentina recovered Brown's squadron and Martín García, and Britain and France recognized its sovereignty and its exclusive rights over navigation on its inland rivers, saluting the Argentine flag with 21 guns. Unidiversidad points to the Arana-Southern treaty, under which, it says, the powers had to accept the Confederation's sovereignty over its inland rivers. Pigna's verdict: the two treaties were very good for the country and established the respect owed to every sovereign state.¹⁰