Boat chase

California has by now become firmly celebrated for its car chases: some nut or hoodlum at one end, the local authorities at the other; the latter winning out, almost always. Hollywood knows we like car chases. Today’s item, The Itata Incident, is a celebrated boat chase of 1891, with an arms-laden boat — two of them actually — and as chases go, it was a long one, of several thousand miles down the west coast of the Americas. We nearly went to war with Chile over it. (I wonder why it hasn’t been made into a movie; or, more seriously, there are many points in common with marine chases today that could have grave consequences to our national security.)

The homepage of my American history site (25 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.