A very good copy of this unlikely survival. The majority of official material we see from the Mexican-American war are straightforward decrees. This is far more dramatic, full of war-time rhetoric and patriotism, as it describes the events at Guaymas on 9 October, 1846.
Guaymas was an important, strategic port in the Gulf of California. The Cyane had already been active in the war, blockading San Blas on 2 September, before moving on to La Paz on the 14th, and then to Guaymas where she arrived on 6 October, 1846. Captain Samuel F. Du Pont arrived at Guaymas on the Cyane and demanded that Mexican ships in port surrender. Colonel Antonio Campuzano refused and here reports the subsequent burning and sinking of two launches.
Antonio Campuzano, military commander at Guaymas writes: “I hasten to communicate these events to Your Excellency, enclosing the address that I have just given to the people and troops under my command, adding that the enthusiam of both is great and has increased upon hearing the enemy’s bombardment.”
The speech reads in part: “Sonorans, comrades in arms: you have already heard the explosion of our enemys cannon: hostilities have broken out, therefore, we must now die in defense of our homeland, without allowing the Sonoran soil to be trampled by their vile footsteps … LONG LIVE THE MEXICAN REPUBLIC and death to all our perfidious enemies.”
A second communication by Rafael Ceballos is printed in the right column which concludes: “my attention is primarily called to the duty of occupying myself with Guaymas, currently harassed by our enemies, the North Americans.”
Eerily prescient, these events took place almost a year to the day prior to the Battle of Guaymas. Capt La Vallette, commanding USS Congress and Portsmouth, bombarded the city, similarly enforced an evacuation and then dismantled its coastal defenses. USS Portsmouth remained in the bay to not only control access to it, but to levy tariffs on any craft looking to trade.
Rare: not in OCLC.
