The Chilean Navy (Spanish: Armada de Chile) is the naval warfare service branch of the Chilean Armed Forces. It is under the Ministry of National Defense. Its headquarters are at Edificio Armada de Chile, Valparaíso.
Origins and the Wars of Independence (1817–1830)
The origins of the Chilean Navy date back to 1817, when General Bernardo O'Higgins prophetically declared after the Chilean victory at the Battle of Chacabuco that a hundred such victories would count for nothing if Chile did not gain control of the sea.
This led to the development of the Chilean Navy, and the first legal resolutions outlining the organization of the institution were created. Chile's First National Fleet and the Academy for Young Midshipmen, which was the predecessor of the current Naval Academy, were founded, as well as the Marine Corps and the Supply Commissary.
The first commander of the Chilean Navy was Manuel Blanco Encalada. The British naval officer Lord Cochrane, who formerly had been a captain in the Royal Navy, was hired to organize and command the Chilean navy. Cochrane recruited large numbers of British, Irish and American sailors to crew the navy. He became a key figure in the war against Spanish forces in Peru, and was instrumental in taking control of the fortresses of Valdivia, though he failed in his attempt to conquer Chiloé Island.
In March 1824, the Chilean Navy and Army undertook an expedition to expel the Spanish from Chiloé Archipelago. An expedition was dispatched to Chiloé Island, but it ended in failure when the Chilean Army led by Jorge Beauchef was defeated at the Battle of Mocopulli. Only after Ramón Freire's Chiloé expedition in 1826 did the royalist forces at Chiloé, under the command of Antonio de Quintanilla, surrender and Chiloé joined the new Chilean nation.
Age of exploration, territorial expansion, and wars (1830–1885)
After the wars of independence, a series of conflicts demonstrated the importance of the navy to the nation. First of these conflicts were the War of the Confederation (1836–1839), the Chincha Islands War (1864–1866), and the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). The founding of Fuerte Bulnes in the Strait of Magellan marked the starting point of a series of Chilean Navy explorations, led by navy hydrographers, such as Francisco Vidal Gormaz and Francisco Hudson, in the unknown zone between the Strait of Magellan and Chiloé. To deal with this new area of activity, the navy founded in 1874 the Hydrographic Office, whose first director was Francisco Vidal Gormaz.
Chilean war hero and martyr Arturo Prat is regarded as the ultimate example of the commitment of the navy to its country, after his death while leading a boarding party onto the enemy ironclad Huáscar at the naval battle of Iquique on 21 May 1879, during the War against Peru and Bolivia. The anniversary of this battle is celebrated every year as a public holiday called Día de las Glorias Navales. Prat is also considered to be one of the co-founders of the Naval Seaman Training School in 1868, which began operating a year later, and was one of the Naval Academy's finest graduate officers that in 1943 it became the National Naval School "Arturo Prat" in his honor.
The navy further distinguished itself during the Battle of Pisagua in 1879, led by both the Navy and the Marine Artillery Groups and Marine Infantry, the world's first modern military landing operation, that resulted in Chilean victories in other parts of Peru's Tarapacá region, and resulted to its annexation by Chile.
After navy visits to Easter Island in 1875 and 1887, Chilean navy officer Policarpo Toro managed to negotiate an incorporation of the island into Chile with native Rapanui in 1888. By occupying Easter Island, Chile joined the imperial nations.
With the Peruvian Navy destroyed, Bolivia becoming a landlocked country, and Argentina having only a brown-water navy, the Chilean Navy had a regional hegemony in the years following the War of the Pacific. To secure this advantage and not let new Argentine acquisitions challenge Chilean naval power, the Chilean government decided to modernize its navy. The modernization plan included the ordering of two cruisers and two torpedo boat destroyers, and the modernization of two armoured ships in English docks.
Civil war and arms race (1885–1902)
A new predreadnought battleship, Capitán Prat, was ordered under the new construction program in 1889. The advent of the 1891 Chilean Civil War had a breach between the two branches of the Chilean armed forces, while the bulk of navy sided with the congress side, the majority of the Chilean Army remained loyal to José Manuel Balmaceda. When the majority of the national congress broke relations with the government, Jorge Montt took control of the fleet at Valparaíso and with notable politicians, such as Ramón Barros Luco, on board, the fleet sailed north to the nitrate-rich Tarapacá area, which Chile had seized from Peru 10 years earlier. Tarapacá was, by that time, Chile's richest region in terms of natural resources and was without the fleet practically out of reach for the Chilean Army. From here, the navy organized an army made of nitrate miners, whom they armed and trained to face the 40,000-men-strong Army of Chile. In August 1891, the new army was disembarked in Quintero and defeated the Chilean Army at the Battle of Concón and the Battle of Placilla before the presidential faction disbanded and the Congressional side took power. On the elections of October 1891, Jorge Montt was elected president.
Not all navy officers sided with the congress. Some like Juan Williams Rebolledo, Juan José Latorre and Policarpo Toro remained on the presidential side and Francisco Vidal Gormaz declared his neutrality. After the war these officers were removed from their offices. In contrast to these officers whose career or influence in the navy was truncated by the war, the 1891 Chilean Civil War served as a starting point of a successful career in the navy for a generation of young officers like Francisco Nef and others who sided with the Congressionals who won the war.
After incidents with Chile in 1872, 1877, and 1878, Argentina had decided that a brown-water navy, even if modern, was not enough to back up its ambitions in Patagonia and the South Atlantic. Both countries were distracted in the next few years by Argentina's internal military operations against natives and Chile's War of the Pacific against Bolivia and Peru, but by 1890, a full-fledged naval arms race was underway between the two. The Boundary treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina had been a major success in laying the groundwork for nearly all of Chile and Argentina's 5,600 kilometres (3,500 mi) of shared borders, but the drawing of boundaries in the largely unexplored inland Patagonia soon became a major source of territorial disputes. Over the 1880s and 1890s, Chile and Argentina engaged in an arms race fueled by nationalistic rhetoric and tax income from their blooming economies. Both countries signed a treaty in 1902 to end the arms race.
During the 1890s, the Chilean Navy carried out many hydrographic surveys in the Patagonian channels aimed to improve navigation, and explored the river basins of Patagonia. A German geographer, Hans Steffen, led navy explorations to western Patagonia, laying the groundwork for colonization of what would be Aisén Region years later. The navy occasionally collaborated with European naturalists such as Carl Skottsberg in their surveys of Chilean territory.
Depression and mutiny (1902–1950)