Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/362



332 A VISIT TO THE GRAN CHACO.

ceive his letters from Europe ; they were detained in the Consular Post-office at Buenos Aires.

Mr. Maxwell and I landed with Lieutenant-Commander Bushe in the Gran Chaco to inspect the site of the much talked-of chain. Thrown over the stream where it narrowed to 800 metres,, it was a twist composed of one large (1*75 inch) and six smaller diameters (1'25 inch)^ and it rested upon three chatas (barges), which were soon sunk by the Brazilian guns. The heavy obstacle then sank below the surface with a deep sag, and as there was no donkey-engine to tighten it, the Monitors might have passed safely over the bend. But it lay at the point where all the battery-fires converged, and no attempt was made either to blow up the chain-house, to remove it with gunpowder, or to cut the obstacle with cold chisels, as an active enemy would have done. More- over, the Paraguayans — who knew that no fort can hinder the transit of wooden vessels, even at the slowest speed, unless the channel be perfectly obstructed by scuttled craft or sunken cribs of stones, or unless the ships be detained under a heavy fire by chains or cables, booms, barriers, or similar obstructions — had provided it with those " mischievous things/^ torpedoes. They were coarse frictional affairs ; the employment of electricity as an igniting agent being un- known. One ironclad, however, had already been suc- cessfully torpedoed, and in the Brazil, as elsewhere, even disciplined men feel a natural horror of, and are easily de- moralized by, hidden mysterious dangers so swiftly and com- pletely destructive. At last, on February 18, 1868, when an unusual flood of nine feet quite submerged the chain, the ironclad squadron took heart of grace, ran, without suffering material damage, the gauntlet of the Humaita and Timbo guns, and anchored off Tayi up stream. Thus the chain proved useless.

The narrow spit of ground which the Gran Chaco here