The Ten Centavos War

The War of the Pacific was popularly dubbed the “Ten Centavos (cents) War.” In 1877, after a devastating tidal wave destroyed much of the port of Antofagasta, the municipal council there passed a reconstruction tax. In 1878, President Hilarión Daza and the Bolivian Congress approved the modest 10¢ tax on every 100 pounds of nitrates exported from Bolivian territory. This law directly violated the 1874 treaty, and the Chileans and foreign investors were outraged. The British and Chilean–owned Nitrates and Railroad Company of Antofagasta refused to pay the tax, and tensions mounted.

At first, cooler heads prevailed. President Daza temporarily suspended the tax, and the company agreed to an annual voluntary contribution. But then Daza ended the moratorium and demanded that the tax be paid retroactively. Once again, the foreign company refused to comply. The Chileans responded with gunboat diplomacy, and anchored an ironclad in Antofagasta harbor and mobilized their entire fleet.

This time, President Daza refused to back down. With Bolivian sovereignty seemingly besmirched, Daza canceled the mining contract of the British-Chilean consortium. On February 14, 1879, Chile occupied Antofagasta—home to 5,000 Chileans and fewer than 600 Bolivians— and issued an ultimatum: Bolivia had 48 hours to accede to international arbitration of the dispute. President Daza ignored the deadline and insisted that the port first be liberated. He also withheld news of the Chilean landing for a week until after the conclusion of the popular carnival festivities then under way.

In no mood for more wrangling, Chile occupied Bolivia’s Antofagasta province and the entire Pacific coast south of the 23rd parallel in March. On March 14, Bolivia announced a formal declaration of war, but war still might have been averted if Peru’s last-minute conciliatory diplomacy had succeeded, or if Peru had not honored its defensive alliance with Bolivia. By this time, however, word of the Bolivian declaration of war had reached Santiago, and therefore, on April 5, Chile formally declared war against Bolivia and Peru.

Defeat and Loss of the Seacoast

Bolivia was totally unprepared for war, especially one so distant from its population centers and resource base, and suffered from grossly irresponsible leadership. Despite his patriotic bluster, President Daza was inept in the military campaign. On the battlefield, he proved cowardly, self-motivated, and (according to some accounts) often drunk. Daza withdrew his crack Bolivian regiments from the field and left the allied forces to be defeated by the Chileans in the Battle of San Francisco. Although the remaining allied forces were victorious days later in the indecisive Battle of Tarapacá, President Daza’s desertion became a great national embarrassment to Bolivia.

Historians have argued that Daza wanted to protect his prized regiments as a hedge against coup attempts, but on December 27, 1879, in a clever and meticulously timed plot, officers at the front and Colonel Eliodoro Camacho, the chief of staff, overthrew Daza, and the expresident fled into exile in Europe.

In January 1880, General Narciso Campero, a distinguished career officer and division commander, was appointed Bolivia’s provisional president and assumed command of the allied forces in the field as by then both the Bolivian and the Peruvian presidents had effectively deserted command of their armies. Campero’s Bolivian-Peruvian force was decisively defeated by the Chileans in May, and Campero and his exhausted troops retreated toward La Paz. At the head of one column of survivors, Campero was met with the news that the National Assembly had formally elected him president on May 31. As the marauding horde of desperate soldiers approached the Bolivian border, a cavalry force from La Paz intercepted and forcibly disarmed them. The government feared violence when the wounded and exhausted returnees learned that they would not receive the back pay owed them. For Bolivia, the shooting war was over, although hostilities between Peru and Chile continued for three more years while Bolivia watched from the sidelines, hoping for a favorable resolution.

On April 5, 1884, Bolivia signed the Truce of Valparaiso, which gave Chile control, but not permanent transfer, of Bolivia’s coastal territory. A peace treaty was finally signed in 1904, whereby Chile formally annexed Bolivia’s Atacama province (called Antofagasta today). Bolivia was guaranteed the right to import and export its goods through the ports of Arica and Antofagasta and to set up customs stations. Duties on imports were to be divided, providing Bolivia 75 percent and Chile 25 percent.

Thus, with the stroke of a pen, Bolivia lost a fourth of its territory and became the landlocked nation that it is today. The War of the Pacific was officially over, but not Bolivia’s relentless quest to regain a seacoast.

Bolivia - On the Eve of the Great Pacific War

No war breaks out over guano, of which little remains. It is saltpeter that throws the Chilean army into the conquest of the deserts, against the allied forces of Peru and Bolivia. Eduardo Galeano (1987, 218)

 The War of the Pacific was a war over resources, although territorial rivalry was its most immediate cause. The conflict also involved geopolitics, economic rivalry, greed, corruption, and personal ambitions. Indeed, the basic ingredient of the war—rivalry for power and economic dominance—first came into play with Bolivian independence. Because of this endemic regional rivalry, some historians have argued that the War of the Pacific was inevitable.

In the 1870s, the conflict of national interests and increasing disparities in economic and political power among the three neighboring South American countries of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru reached a critical climax. The new power distribution greatly favored Chile, and Chilean statesmen seized this opportunity to consolidate and further expand their nation’s influence and control along the Pacific coast.

Since its founding as a sovereign nation, Bolivia’s survival had been tentative. At first, Lima and Buenos Aires considered Bolivia’s very existence suspect. Bolivia, after all, had been capriciously carved out of the colonial audiencias that they had jealously controlled. Once established, Bolivia was troublesome and unstable. The new country seemed unable to rule itself, much less populate and effectively administer its vast and dispersed territory. Bolivia’s rich natural resources were the constant envy of its more powerful and aggressive neighbors in the Southern Cone. Debilitated by corruption and instability, Bolivia dismally failed to preserve its territory and resources when challenged by Chile.

In great part Bolivia’s geopolitics and unique national conditions facilitated this disastrous war and the loss of its Pacific seacoast. As late as the 1880s, the altiplano region remained the geopolitical center of the shaky new republic. The majority of the country’s territory, however, was neglected and isolated from the highland by formidable natural barriers—impassable and hostile mountain ranges, rivers, deserts, and jungles. Bolivians in these frontier regions were forced to fend for themselves. Moreover, Bolivia’s population was largely indigenous with only a thin upper crust of Spaniards and other Europeans. Neither social group had the necessary mobility or motivation to migrate to the less hospitable parts of the country.

These factors had a devastating impact on settlement of Bolivia’s Atacama province. Even after the discovery of guano and nitrate deposits in the Atacama Desert, which stretched from Peru in the north to Chile in the south, the Bolivian government was unable to incorporate and fortify this distant, sparsely populated coastal province. The unexpected bonanza in natural fertilizers brought a sudden influx of new settlers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs to the region; however, this population increase only compounded Bolivia’s problems since Bolivian citizens were now outnumbered 10 to one by Chileans and other immigrants, including thousands of Chinese coolies brought here by Peru and Chile as cheap, captive laborers.

With other nations and foreign firms competing for the profits from the bird droppings and saltpeter, Bolivia’s share of the bonanza steadily shrank. The remainder was squandered by the corrupt caudillos on profligate living and ill-advised foreign concessions and loans. Bolivian entrepreneurs’ resources were depleted or invested elsewhere, primarily in the highland silver mines. As a last resort, with the economy stagnant and the country heavily indebted, Bolivian governments permitted and encouraged British and Chilean capital to exploit the desert windfall on their behalf. In short, Bolivia’s inherent political and economic weaknesses directly contributed to the outbreak of the war.

Chile, on the other hand, stood in a position of relative strength. Unlike Peru or Bolivia, Chile’s exceptional political stability and economic growth since 1830 had helped make it the dominant power in the region. Chileans held regular elections for civilian governments and enticed foreign investors by the credibility of their sound political and financial systems. Chile’s cities were modern, and its people were mostly European immigrants, rather than Indians. Its economy was more diversified, and its territory was more integrated and cohesive. Chile had what both Peru and Bolivia lacked. Indeed, one Chilean president boasted in 1858 that the country had “the honor to have proved to the world that the Spanish American people can govern themselves by their own unaided efforts and can continue to prosper” (Bader 1967, 25).

This is not to say that all was well in Chile at the time. The country had its share of shortcomings and crises, and it was precisely a national crisis—the depression of 1878—that pushed Chile closer to war. By the mid-1870s, Chilean progress had come to a halt. Chilean exports had declined and the foreign debt had skyrocketed at the same time that droughts and diseases ravaged the country. Upward of 50,000 Chileans—mostly rotos, or landless peasant farmers of European descent—were forced to emigrate. Many would slave in the grueling guano and nitrate operations in Bolivia’s Atacama Desert.

Chile’s economic decline was an incentive to resolve the territorial dispute with Bolivia aggressively. Chile saw in the great riches of the coastal desert an immediate solution to the 1878 financial crisis and reliable long-term financing for the national debt and future commercial and territorial expansion. Decades later, Chile’s foreign minister, Abraham Köning, dissected Chilean motivations succinctly: “The area is rich and worth many millions” (Siles Guevara 1960, 68). Indeed, in the 20 years from 1880 to the end of the century, the gross value of the nitrate exports from the conquered regions reached nearly 3 billion pesos. On the eve of the war, corruption in Peru and Bolivia and the economic crisis in Chile had diminished the military preparedness of all three future belligerents. Chile, nevertheless, was relatively more prepared. For several decades Chile had been locked in a fierce military and commercial rivalry with Peru and had competed fiercely over control of the western seacoast. Now, Peru, like Bolivia, was virtually bankrupt, in political chaos on the eve of the war, and outclassed militarily by Chile. War decided this rivalry and assured Chilean hegemony on the Pacific coast.

The Uncouth General Daza

Bolivian historians have bestowed on Hilarión Daza the epithet “el soldado mandón” (the imperious soldier). According to historian Humberto Vázquez Machicado, Daza was born in the constitutional capital of Sucre around 1840 the illegitimate son of an itinerant Italian snake-oil salesman named Grossolín. As a child, Daza had difficulty pronouncing his father’s surname, and from these attempts he received the ludicrous nickname of “Chocholín.” Not pleased, he started to use the surname of his mother.

Daza received his limited education on the tough streets of Sucre as a small-time crook and con artist and in the rough barracks of the army. He showed a talent for being in the right place at the right time and rapidly rose in the military ranks with Mariano Melgarejo, whom in the end he betrayed for 10,000 pesos. Daza was overthrown in 1879, while at the battlefront in Tacna, and headed for Europe. There, he lived the good life until the enormous fortune that he had pilfered became depleted. He returned to Bolivia intent on heading another military coup but was killed in 1894.

Bolivia: The Last 19th-Century Caudillo

The presidency of Hilarión Daza was landmark in Bolivian history. During his administration, the legislature approved the historic Liberal Constitution of 1879 (the county’s ninth since independence), which remained, with slight modifications in 1880, Bolivia’s fundamental governing charter until the 1930s. It protected private property rights and the economic concerns of Bolivia’s Big Silver industrialists and their Chilean interests.

General Daza’s rule, however, figures most tragically in the nation’s collective memory because it marked the loss of Bolivia’s access to the Pacific Ocean. His government and Congress of 1878 passed the infamous 10¢ tax on the nitrates exported by the British-Chilean Nitrates and Railroad Company of Antofagasta. This tax, which the bankrupt Bolivian treasury desperately needed, provided Chile with the perfect pretext to occupy Bolivia’s seacoast and launch a war with its neighbors.

President Daza cannot be blamed entirely for the war and the loss of the seacoast. Years before his government, Chilean, British, and U.S. capital had extended financial tentacles into virtually every profit-generating enterprise available to Bolivia: guano, nitrates, borax, even silver. The economic concessions of the Bolivian Litoral province produced an estimated 28 million pesos annually, according to historian José Fellman Velarde. By his calculations, this bonanza exceeded 14 times the Bolivian budget and eight times that of Chile at the time. This appropriation and Bolivia’s semicolonization by domestic and foreign capital caused the War of the Pacific as much as the incompetence and venality of Daza and earlier Bolivian regimes did. Already, on the eve of Daza’s military coup of May 1876, Chile in effect controlled the bulk of Bolivia’s coastal assets demographically and financially. By the time General Daza was overthrown in December 1879, the Chilean forces had also militarily occupied the entire Bolivian Litoral.

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Pirate Huáscar

HMS Shah and Amethyst in Action against the Peruvian Renegade Huascar, 29 May 1877 (NMM)

The dilemma of how to protect British interests overseas and police the world’s sea lanes without armored warships became apparent off the west coast of South America in May 1877, where the 6,250-ton Shah, iron-hulled but not armored, served as Pacific flagship at a time when Britain temporarily had no ironclads in the Pacific Ocean. On 7 May naval officers sympathetic to a Peruvian coup seized the 2,030-ton armored turret ship Huáscar. After leaving Callao, the Huáscar stopped at least four British merchant steamers on the high seas, stealing coal, taking mail addressed to the government of Peru, and taking some passengers prisoner. These violations of international law were brought to the attention of the British navy, and on 29 May the Shah and its escort, the 1,970-ton wooden screw corvette Amethyst, intercepted the Huáscar in the bay of Pacocha. During two hours of combat the Shah alone fired 237 rounds and the two British ships together registered more than 50 hits on the Huáscar, without seriously damaging it. The Shah also fired the first self-propelled torpedo ever used in a naval action, which missed its target. The Huáscar carried two 10-inch muzzle-loading rifles in a Coles turret protected by 8-inch wrought iron armor, but because its gunners were inexperienced and its turret had to be cranked by hand (with sixteen men manning the levers, it could make one revolution in fifteen minutes), it fired only a half-dozen rounds and registered no hits. That night, the Huáscar escaped Pacocha under cover of darkness and steamed for Iquique, where it surrendered to Peruvian authorities the following day. The incident demonstrated that even a lone relatively antiquated ironclad could defy the will of the world’s greatest naval power if the latter had no armored warship in the area. Britain responded by sending two ironclads to the Pacific, and after 1881 maintained at least one there.

Chilean Navy in the War of the Pacific

Rear-Admiral Patricio Lynch

After opening the War of the Pacific by using the casemate ships Cochrane and Blanco Encalada and the screw corvette O’Higgins to help secure Antofagasta, squadron commander Rear Admiral Williams Rebolledo landed troops north of the 23rd parallel at the smaller ports of Cobija and Tocopilla, and on 23 March 1879 took Calama, Bolivia’s last outpost on the Pacific Ocean. By early April, after Peru committed its army and navy to the defence of Bolivia, Williams moved up the coast to blockade Iquique, main port of the Peruvian province of Tarapacá. The two navies spent the first month of the war convoying troops, the Chileans from Valparaíso north to Antofagasta, the Peruvians from Callao to Arica, main port of the province of Tacna and their southernmost unblockaded port. Meanwhile, Chilean warships continued to blockade Iquique in between. After escorting troops to Arica, the Peruvian ironclads Independencia and Huáscar continued south to challenge the Chilean blockade of Iquique, then the landings at Antofagasta, en route passing (without encountering) most of the Chilean squadron, which Williams took north to disrupt the Peruvian convoys between Callao and Arica. Off Callao Williams learned that Peru had already transported its army to Arica and had sent the Independencia and Huáscar down the coast to Iquique, where he had left his oldest operational warships, the screw corvette Esmeralda and screw gunboat Covadonga, to maintain the blockade. Williams took his squadron back down the coast at full steam but was still en route on 21 May, when the two Peruvian ironclads fell upon the Esmeralda and Covadonga at Iquique.

On the morning of 21 May 1879 the Esmeralda (Captain Arturo Prat) held its station at Iquique and engaged the Huáscar (Rear Admiral Miguel Grau) for three hours and forty minutes, taking a beating in order to enable the Covadonga (Captain Carlos Condell) to escape to the south, with the Independencia (Captain Guillermo Moore) giving chase. For much of the morning Prat positioned the Esmeralda between the Huáscar and the waterfront of the Peruvian city, forcing the ironclad’s gunners to be extraordinarily careful in order to avoid killing their own countrymen with missed shots. Prat’s strategy worked, at least until Peruvian forces ashore began peppering his ship with artillery and rifle fire. When the crossfire began to take its toll among his men, Prat made the fateful decision to leave his position, even though he had no hope of successfully breaking out of the harbour. Grau promptly closed with the Huáscar and rammed the Esmeralda three times, sinking it just after noon. In arguably the greatest act of bravado in a naval battle since John Paul Jones captured hms Serapis from the stricken Bonhomme Richard a century earlier, Prat responded by ordering his crew to board the Huáscar from the deck of his sinking ship. He was killed on the deck of the Peruvian ironclad alongside a seaman who scrambled aboard with him; when Grau rammed the Esmeralda again, Lieutenant Ignacio Serrano and a second wave of a dozen borders met the same fate. Prat’s second-in-command, Captain Luis Uribe, subsequently refused to strike his flag, and the Esmeralda sank with its colours still flying. Midshipman Enrique Riquelme continued to work one of the old corvette’s guns until the very last, and was among those who perished with the ship. While the Huáscar lost just one of its crew in the battle, 148 of the Esmeralda’s 198 officers and seamen were killed; Uribe was among those pulled from the water, taken prisoner aboard the Huáscar, then turned over to the Peruvian garrison of Iquique. During the same hours an equally compelling drama unfolded down the coast from Iquique, as the Covadonga steamed toward Antofagasta with the Independencia in hot pursuit. In the early afternoon off Punta Gruesa, the shallow-draught steamer passed safely over uncharted rocks, which trapped the much heavier Peruvian frigate. With the Independencia hard aground, Condell doubled back and placed the Covadonga across its bow, out of reach of its broadsides, and raked it repeatedly. The Peruvians returned fire with their deck rifle, but once its ammunition was exhausted Moore struck his flag. While the Esmeralda, an unarmoured ship whose captain refused to surrender, lost three-quarters of its crew that day, the Independencia, an ironclad that did haul down its colours, suffered just 5 killed and 18 wounded out of a crew of 300. The Covadonga lost 4 killed and 3 wounded out of 116. Shortly thereafter the Huáscar arrived to chase off the Covadonga, salvage the Independencia’s heavy guns and rescue the survivors. The battles of 21 May reduced by half the armoured strength of Peru’s navy, while the valiant fight of the Esmeralda made Prat a national hero.

Having secured a clear advantage at sea, Chile set about transporting more troops to the north for an eventual march on Lima. The war and navy minister, Sotomayor, appointed Rear Admiral Patricio Lynch to co-ordinate the effort, which the Peruvian navy sought to disrupt by using the Huáscar as a raider. Sometimes cruising alone, sometimes with the screw corvette Unión, the Huáscar could strike with impunity as long as neither of the two Chilean ironclads was in the vicinity. Admiral Grau developed an uncanny ability to evade them but had an early brush with disaster on the night of 9–10 July in the harbour at Iquique, where he had hoped to sink the Chilean navy’s coaling barque Matías Cousiño. He found only the screw corvette Magallanes (Captain Juan José Latorre) maintaining the blockade there but, unfortunately for Grau, Latorre sought to emulate the earlier heroism of his old classmate Prat and duelled with the Huáscar for 45 minutes, closing to within 300 metres, even though his own ship had the speed to flee. The Matías Cousiño escaped, and Latorre’s bold action detained the Huáscar long enough for the casemate ship Cochrane (Captain Galvarino Riveros) to reach the scene, turning the tables and forcing Grau to flee. In the weeks that followed the Huáscar enjoyed its greatest success, destroying a number of small cargo vessels and, on 23 July, capturing the Chilean transport Rimac off Antofagasta. This setback prompted Sotomayor to sack Williams, elevate Riveros to rear admiral and squadron commander, give Latorre the vacated command of the Cochrane, and get personally involved in formulating a plan to trap the Huáscar. In the process they all but ignored the Unión, which in August ranged as far south as Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan in a futile attempt to interdict merchantmen carrying arms shipments to Chile from Europe. The Chilean navy waited until after the threat of the Huáscar was removed before it launched a similar mission against merchantmen carrying weapons to Peru from the United States; eventually, over the summer of 1879–80, the Amazonas and later the corvette O’Higgins ranged as far north as the coast of Panama but had no luck in their efforts.

For the purposes of hunting down the Huáscar the Chilean squadron was split into two divisions, one consisting of Riveros’s flagship Blanco Encalada, the screw schooner Covadonga and the coaling barque Matías Cousiño, the other of Latorre’s Cochrane, the screw corvette O’Higgins (Captain Jorge Montt) and the armed transport Loa. Meanwhile Grau remained bold in his use of the Huáscar, on 28 August bombarding Antofagasta in broad daylight and engaging the Chilean warships there – the screw corvettes Abtao and Magallanes – before Riveros arrived with the Blanco Encalada to chase him off. On the morning of 8 October Latorre’s division finally spotted the Huáscar steaming with the Unión off Punta Angamos, north of Antofagasta. Grau immediately sent away the unarmoured Unión, prompting Latorre to send the O’Higgins and Loa to chase it, leaving the two ironclads to duel alone. The ensuing battle featured the first use of armour-piercing Palliser shells, which the 9-inch Armstrong guns of the Cochrane fired with deadly accuracy as the range fell to 2,000 metres and less. Riveros arrived with the Blanco Encalada some 45 minutes after the fighting began, but Latorre’s ship continued to dominate the action. By the time the Huáscar surrendered another 45 minutes later, the Chileans had recorded perhaps the best gunnery performance in the history of modern naval warfare, impressing British observers with an amazing 27 hits on 76 rounds fired. Of the 205 men aboard the Huáscar 61 were killed, including Grau. The guns in the turret of the Huáscar (which had to be cranked by hand until the installation of its steam winch in 1885) managed just three hits against the two Chilean ironclads, killing none and wounding seven aboard the Cochrane, and causing no damage to either ship. Unlike the Independencia, the Huáscar was not damaged beyond repair, and a boarding party led by Lieutenant Juan Simpson foiled the crew’s efforts to scuttle the ship. Recommissioned within weeks, it saw its first action under Chilean colours in February 1880.

Taking full advantage of Chile’s command of the sea, Rear Admiral Lynch orchestrated the transport of 9,500 troops from Antofagasta northward to Pisagua, where they were put ashore unopposed early in November 1879 after Latorre’s division, consisting of the Cochrane and three unarmoured warships, shelled the landing site. Meanwhile, Riveros took the Blanco Encalada and the rest of the squadron farther north to blockade the harbour of Arica, where he captured the screw gunboat Pilcomayo on 18 November. After escorting the convoy to Pisagua, Latorre added his division to the blockade at Iquique, where the Peruvian garrison surrendered on 23 November, finally freeing Uribe and other survivors of the Esmeralda who had been held prisoner there since May. Over the same weeks, the Chilean army marched inland from Pisagua, and on 27 November defeated a joint Peruvian-Bolivian army at Tarapacá, securing for Chile the southernmost Peruvian province of the same name. Thereafter, the action centred around Arica, principal seaport of Tacna, the neighbouring province to the north. On 27 February 1880 the old Peruvian monitor Manco Capac, anchored there as harbour watch, exchanged fire with the Huáscar when the latter arrived to shell the port. Riveros and Latorre soon arrived with the rest of the squadron, which joined in the bombardment. Army units put ashore in early March subsequently laid siege to Arica from the land side. The Peruvian garrison held out for three months, but on 6 June, sensing the end was near, the naval detachment blew up the Manco Capac to keep it out of Chilean hands. The following day Chilean troops stormed the city and forced its surrender.

In April 1880, after the initial bombardment of Arica, Riveros left Latorre’s division behind to blockade the port while he took the Blanco Encalada, the Huáscar and the rest of the squadron north to blockade Callao, in preparation for the final Chilean assault on Lima. Following the capitulation of Arica, Latorre brought the Cochrane and its unarmoured escorts to join him. Against this overwhelming force the Peruvians deployed a flotilla of torpedo boats, some improvised, others purchased in Britain over the past several months. Copying tactics used by the Russian Black Sea fleet against the Ottoman navy in the recent Russo-Turkish War (1877–8), they managed to sink the armed transport Loa in July and the screw gunboat Covadonga in September. Thereafter, fears of losing a larger or more significant warship prevented Riveros from maintaining a tighter blockade. Chile soon deployed its own torpedo boats, and the rival torpedo flotillas subsequently dominated the action in and around Callao harbour, with each losing one boat.

Because Rear Admiral Lynch’s performance as co-ordinator of troop transports in 1879 had given him such valuable expertise in the logistical side of amphibious operations, the war and navy minister, Sotomayor, appointed him to command the army’s expeditionary force for the final strike against Lima. His forces embarked from Arica and in November 1880 landed up the coast at Pisco. From there, Lynch began his march on Lima, staying near the coast so that Riveros’s squadron could provide covering fire as he advanced. The navy’s heavy guns supported the army in its decisive victory at Chorrillos (13 January 1881), which forced the Peruvians to abandon their capital. Three days later the Peruvian navy scuttled its last ironclad, the immobile Callao harbour watch Atahualpa, then surrendered. Over the following months the Chilean navy took the surrender of the smaller Peruvian ports north of Callao; the capitulation of Paita to the Huáscar in June 1881 left the entire coast of Peru in Chilean hands. The end of the campaign at sea did not bring an end to the war, since neither Peru nor Bolivia would agree to terms. After occupying Lima, Lynch co-ordinated the fight against Peruvian resistance in the interior for another two and a half years. In October 1883, three months after the fighting ended, Peru formally ceded to Chile the provinces of Tacna and Tarapacá with the ports of Arica and Iquique. At the same time, Bolivia refused to acknowledge the Chilean conquest of its Pacific coastal province and port of Antofagasta. An invasion from Peru by Lynch’s army led to a truce in April 1884, finally ending the fighting, but Bolivia was never occupied by Chilean troops and waited until 1904 to sign a formal peace treaty.