Capture of the schooner Peruviana

The Capture of the Peruviana^[a] occurred on January 3, 1838, in and around the waters of the port city of Callao. After this engagement, the Peruviana was reincorporated into the Confederate Navy after having been captured in the previous year by a Chilean squadron commanded by Victorino Garrido.

After landing in Quilca, the troops of the first restorative expedition under the command of Manuel Blanco Encalada, the Peruvian gouter under the command of 1st Lt. Tomás Ruedas, set sail to the north of Peru with the mission of harassing its ports, interfering the trade for them and capturing the merchants it found in its path. Without sufficient results, the goleta arrived in Santa on 26 October. Believing that the port was unguarded, he sent a boat manned by 15 men to make landfall, however, the captain of the port, Juan Seguín, gathered and armed a group of militiamen with whom he attacked the Chilean sailors, forcing their surrender after a brief but bloody firefight.^[2] The garrison of the Peruviana was limited to witnessing the combat because its crew, now reduced to 14 men, was barely enough To operate the ship. After this incident, the goose set sail to the port of Pisco where on his arrival on December 22 the rivero port captain made known to him the signing of the Treaty of Paucarpata, by which peace was established and the Blanco Encalada army withdrew from Peru and the Chilean government must also return the Peruvian ships that Victorino Garrido had treacherously captured in Callao. Ruedas reported that he would go to deliver the gutter to the port of Callao for which he requested that he be provided with what was necessary, after being warned by the military commander of Pisco, Rivero delivered the necessary food only to get to Callao, after doing this the Peruvian set sail in the direction of this port. Arriving, Lieutenant Ruedas went ashore and met with the Minister of War who fully informed him about the content of the treaty and its provisions on the ships captured by Garrido, Ruedas said that he could not deliver them without an order from his government, when trying to withdraw his ship from the port the governor of Callao, General Guillermo Miller, informed him that he could not authorize the sail without superior orders before this Ruedas embarked and after obtaining from the French war brigantine Bisson, the indispensable food for his trip he intended to flee at full sail of the Callao however The wind was not favorable and the gulet was reached by the manned boats of the corvette Socabaya, which had returned from its expedition to Chilean coasts at the end of December of the previous year, whose sailors boarded the Peruviana and after a short skirmish in which 5 of the men of Ruedas and 1 Confederate sailor killed, and 1 Confederate sailor wounded, the rest of the crew surrendered and the gulet being recaptured by the Peruvians and Ruedas and their men confined to the Callao.^[3][4]