Chilean Downtime
110 years ago this week, 3 November 1914. Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s victorious German East Asia Squadron (Ostasiengeschwader) basking at anchor in Valparaiso, Chile just a few days after the Battle of Coronel, which delivered the Royal Navy its first major naval defeat at sea via surface engagement since the War of 1812 (when the 20-gun brig USS Hornet under the command of James Biddle captured the 19-gun brig-sloop HMS Penguin off Tristan da Cunha after a well-fought battle on 23 March 1815).
U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph NH 59638
The German ships are in the distance, with the 13,000-ton armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the lead, followed by the 4,900-ton Königsberg-class light cruiser Nürnberg. Watchful Chilean Navy warships in the middle distance include (from left to right): cruisers Esmeralda, O’Higgins, and Blanco Encalda along with the old (commissioned 1890) ironclad battleship Capitan Prat.
November 4, 1914. Valparaiso. Scharnhorst 3 days after the Battle of Coronel. She is taking on provisions
While Von Spee could take on water and limited provisions and patch their damage from the running fight at Coronel, they could never replace the shells they expended in the scrap with RADM Sir Christopher Cradock’s outclassed and out-fought squadron.
The light cruisers SMS Leipzig and Dresden are not present in the above photos of Von Spee’s force. Post-Coronel, they had escorted the Ostasiengeschwader’s collier train to remote Mas a Fuera (Alejandro Selkirk Island) in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, where the squadron would gather on 6 November.
The decrepit Bussard-class light cruiser SMS Geier, too slow to tag along with Von Spee’s force was already long out of the game. After surviving 11 weeks on the run as an independent unit she had been interned under American guns at Hawaii on 17 October.
Likewise, the hilfskreuzer Cormoran, which was the captured 3,400-ton Russian freighter SS Ryazan with a crew from the old Bussard-class cruiser SMS Cormoran and the stricken survey ship SMS Planet, was quietly poking around the Western Pacific and would eventually present herself to American custody at Guam on 14 December 1914.
Dresden’s sister, SMS Emden, is also missing from the above images. She was just six days away from her final engagement with the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, some 9,500 miles away off the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. But that is a whole different story.