Williams Rebolledo, Juan (1826–1910)

Juan Williams Rebolledo (b. 1826; d. 1910), Chilean naval officer who commanded his country's fleet in 1865 during its difficult struggle against the Spanish navy. The son of an English officer who had helped Chile win its independence and a resourceful officer himself, Williams not only attempted to hold off the Spanish—an impossible task, given the small size of Chile's fleet—but managed to capture one of Madrid's vessels, the Covadonga. Williams again served as commander of the Chilean flotilla during the War of the Pacific. By then an old man and perhaps ill, Williams seemed incapable of waging as aggressive a war as he had decades earlier. Obsessed with the idea of winning the Conservative Party's nomination for the 1881 presidential campaign, Williams acted cautiously to avoid any disasters which might wreck his political career. His failure to blockade Callao and his overall incompetence, which resulted in the capture of the Rimac, as well as his refusal to cooperate with the Aníbal Pinto government eventually led to his dismissal. As a pro-Balmaceda officer he refused to join his naval colleagues in launching the 1891 revolution. Williams also worked as a hydrographer, fixing the borders between Chile and Bolivia, and served as the maritime governor of Atacama.

See alsoWar of the Pacific .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

William F. Sater, The Heroic Image in Chile (1973), pp. 40-42, 46, 49, 65-68, 171-172, and Chile and the War of the Pacific (1986), pp. 19-20, 39-41, 59-60, 184.

Additional Bibliography

Cavieres Figueroa, Eduardo. Chile-Perú, la historia y la escuela: Conflictos nacionales, percepciones sociales. Valparaíso, Chile: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 2006.

Larraín Mira, Paz and Ángel Soto. Anécdotas del Guerra del Pacífico. Santiago, Chile: Centro de Estudios Bicentenario, Universidad Gabriela Mistral, 2006.

Leciñana Falconí, Carolina. La Guerra del Pacífico, 120 años después: Diplomacia y negociación. Lima: s.n., 2004.

Sater, William. Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

                                      William F. Sater