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.)