Méndez Núñez was a Spanish Navy wooden-hulled armored corvette converted from the 38-gun screw frigate Resolución. As Resolución, the ship was commissioned in 1862 and participated in the Chincha Islands War of 1865–1866, taking part in the , the bombardment of Valparaíso, and the Battle of Callao. Damage she sustained during the war and a subsequent circumnavigation of the world to return to Spain required major repairs, prompting the Spanish Navy to convert her into an ironclad warship between 1867 and 1870 and rename her Méndez Núñez in 1870. Captured by Cantonalist forces of the Canton of Cartagena during the Cantonal Rebellion of 1873—1874, she participated in the Battle of Portmán against a central government squadron in 1873 before she was returned to central government control after the Canton of Cartagena surrendered in January 1874. She was disarmed in 1880, decommissioned in 1886, stricken from the Navy List in 1888, and broken up in 1896.
Resolución Characteristics Resolución was a screw frigate with a wooden hull. She had three masts and a bowsprit. She displaced 3,200 tons. She was long, in beam, in depth, and in draft. She had a John Penn and Sons steam engine rated at a nominal that generated , giving her a speed of . She could carry up to 350 tons of coal. Her armament consisted of fifteen 68-pounder (31 kg) smoothbore guns and twenty-six 32-pounder (14.5 kg) guns as well as two howitzers for disembarkation and use in her boats. She had a crew of 500 men.
Construction and commissioning Resolución′s construction was authorized on 14 September 1859. Her keel was laid at the Reales Astilleros de Esteiro in Spain, on 22 September 1859. She was launched on 19 September 1861 and commissioned on 28 April 1862. Her construction cost was 3,661,741 pesetas.
Service history 1862–1865 Resolución′s first assignment was to the Training Squadron, which was under the overall command of Contralmirante (Counter Admiral) Luis Hernández-Pinzón Álvarez. The squadron was dissolved in June 1862, and Resolución and her sister ship were assigned to the Pacific Squadron. The two screw frigates entered the Arsenal de La Carraca at San Fernando to fit out for their deployment to the southeastern Pacific Ocean.
Resolución and Nuestra Señora del Triunfo departed Cádiz on 10 August 1862.Almagro, p. 8. Under the command of Pinzón, who flew his flag aboard Resolución, the two ships had both the political-military task of demonstrating a Spanish presence in the Americas and a scientific research mission and had three zoologists, a geologist, a botanist, an anthropologist, a taxidermist, and a photographer aboard. The two screw frigates stopped at the Canary Islands and Cape Verde and then crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil before arriving at the Río de la Plata (River Plate), where they rendezvoused with the screw corvette .
The screw schooner soon joined the expedition at the Río de la Plata as well. The four ships got underway from Montevideo on 10 January 1863Almagro, p. 34. and proceeded down the coast of Patagonia, passed the Falkland Islands, rounded Cape Horn on 6 February 1863,Almagro, p. 35. and entered the Pacific Ocean. They then stopped at the Chiloé Archipelago off the coast of Chile before continuing their voyage up the coasts of South America and North America, stopping at several ports before calling at San Francisco, California, in the United States from 9 OctoberAlmagro, p. 70. to 1 November 1863. They then headed southward and arrived at Valparaíso, Chile, on 13 January 1864.Almagro, p. 72.
At the time, Spain still had not recognized the independence of Chile and Peru from the Spanish Empire, and the presence of the Spanish warships on the Pacific coast of South America – especially in the aftermath of Spain's annexation of the First Dominican Republic in 1861 and Spanish involvement in a multinational intervention Mexico in 1861–1862 – raised suspicions in South America as to the intentions of the Spanish government. In retaliation for various hostile actions against Spanish citizens and property in Peru, Pinzón's squadron seized the Chincha Islands from Peru on 14 April 1864 without authorization from the Spanish government, taking several Peruvians prisoner. With tensions spiking between Spain and Peru, Resolución and Nuestra Señora del Triunfo covered an operation in which many of the Spaniards in Peru embarked on the steamer at Callao and Virgen de Covadonga towed Heredia out of the harbor under the guns of Peruvian Navy warships that were ready to open fire. Spain and Peru avoided war, but Pinzón resigned his command on 9 November 1864 because he felt that the Spanish government had not supported his actions, and Vicealmirante (Vice admiral) José Manuel Pareja took charge of the Pacific Squadron.
An accidental fire destroyed Nuestra Señora del Triunfo on 25 November 1864, but Pareja's squadron received reinforcements on 30 December 1864 when the screw frigates , , and joined it. Tensions with Peru remained high, and a member of Resolución′s crew was killed while on leave at Callao. Pareja attempted to settle affairs with Peru by signing the Vivanco–Pareja Treaty with a Peruvian government representative aboard Villa de Madrid (Pareja's flagship), but the Peruvian Congress viewed it as a humiliation and refused to ratify it, and the failed treaty instead sparked the outbreak of the Peruvian Civil War of 1865 in February 1865. In May 1865 the armoured frigate and the transport Marqués de la Victoria. arrived to reinforce the Pacific Squadron.
Chincha Islands War The political situation in the southeastern Pacific further deteriorated during 1865 when Pareja steamed to Valparaíso to settle Spanish claims against Chile. When Chile refused to settle, Pareja announced a blockade of Chilean ports, and the Chincha Islands War broke out between Spain and Chile on 24 September 1865. The blockade spread the Pacific Squadron thinly along the Chilean coast. Resolución took on the responsibility of blockading the Bay of Concepción, and in the a Chilean tug captured one of Resolución′s boats, armed with two of her guns, off Tomé as it tried to interdict ship traffic in the bay. This action and other early setbacks in the war culminating in a humiliating Spanish naval defeat in the Battle of Papudo on 26 November 1865, in which the Chilean Navy corvette captured Virgen de Covadonga, prompted Pareja to commit suicide aboard Villa de Madrid off Valparaíso, shooting himself in his cabin on 28 November 1865 while lying on his bed wearing his dress uniform. He was buried at sea.Farcau, p. 17.
Arriving from Callao, Numancia rendezvoused with Villa de Madrid and Berenguela at Caldera, Chile, on 12 December 1865. Learning of Pareja's death, Numancia′s commanding officer, Contralmirante (Counter admiral) Casto Méndez Núñez, took charge of the Pacific Squadron that day and transferred to Villa de Madrid. After meeting with the commanding officers of the squadron's ships, Méndez Núñez concentrated his squadron off Valparaíso, where Resolución and Vencedora joined it on 19 December 1865. A few days later, Méndez Núñez limited the blockade to Valparaíso and Caldera. After bringing aboard supplies from a newly arrived Spanish frigate, Méndez Núñez's squadron began operations to find and recapture Virgen de Covadonga. The squadron first searched the Juan Fernández Islands and then Puerto Inglés on Chiloé Island in the Chiloé Archipelago off Chile without finding her.
Peru and Ecuador joined the war on Chile's side in January 1866. In February and March 1866, Méndez Núñez made two unsuccessful attempts – the first by Reina Blanca and Villa de Madrid and the second by Numancia and Reina Blanca — to destroy the combined Chilean-Peruvian squadron in the waters off Chile. Bolivia joined the war against Spain on 22 March 1866, closing all the Pacific ports of South America south of Colombia to Spanish ships. Under orders to take punitive action against South American ports, Méndez Núñez selected undefended Valparaíso as his target,Scheina, page not specified. although he found the idea of attacking an undefended port repugnant. On the morning of 31 March 1866 his squadron arrived at Valparaíso. Numancia fired two shots at 08:00 to signal the rest of the squadron to open fire, then withdrew offshore and took no further part in the bombardment, instead standing by to intervene if foreign warships gathered at the entrance to the harbor attempted to interfere. Facing no opposition, Resolución, Reina Blanca, Villa de Madrid, and Vencedora began a three-hour bombardment of Valparaíso at 09:00 while Berenguela and the sidewheel paddle steamer Paquete de Maule stood by offshore to guard against any attempt at escape by Chilean merchant ships. By the time it ended at 12:00, the bombardment had killed two people, injured 10, and sunk 33 merchant ships in the harbor, destroying Chile's merchant fleet.New York Times staff, 6 May 1866. It inflicted US$10 million (equivalent to about US$224 million in 2011) in damage.
Méndez Núñez chose the heavily defended port of Callao, Peru, for his next attack. He divided the squadron into two divisions, the first made up of Berenguela, Numancia, Reina Blanca, Vencedora, and three auxiliary steamers and the second of Resolución, Villa de Madrid, the screw frigate , Paquete de Maule, and three transport frigates and, after burning prize ships his squadron had captured, set off on 14 April 1866 for San Lorenzo Island off Callao, the second division getting underway at 09:00 and the first division at 16:00. The first division made the voyage under steam and arrived at San Lorenzo Island on 25 April, while the second division, making the journey under sail and delayed by the low speed of one of the transport frigates, arrived on 27 April 1866. Several days of negotiations began on 26 April, during which Méndez Núñez granted neutral countries a four-day delay in his attack to give them time to salvage their interests in Callao. The Spanish ships used the delay to prepare for the attack: The frigates all lowered their topmasts and main yards and altered their rigging to reduce the likelihood of damage to their masts, set up on-board field hospitals, and painted over the white stripes on their hulls with black paint to reduce the ships' visibility and give Peruvian gunners less of an aiming point.
On the morning of 2 May 1866 the Spanish ships entered Callao Bay, beginning the Battle of Callao, the largest battle of the Chincha Islands War. Vencedora and the auxiliary ships stood off near San Lorenzo Island while the other six Spanish ships attacked Callao, with Resolución, Numancia, and Almansa assigned to bombard the northern part of the harbor while Reina Blanca, Berenguela, and Villa de Madrid shelled the southern part. Numancia fired the first shot at 11:55, and soon all the Spanish ships were exchanging fire with the Peruvian fortifications. Resolución fired 1,304 rounds and was hit 19 times, suffering three killed in action and 11 wounded. Running low on ammunition, the Spanish squadron ceased fire entirely at 16:40 as dusk fell and fog began to form in the harbor; by then all but three guns of the harbor defenses had been silenced.