Combat· Mexican-American War
Second Tabasco Expedition
The largest sustained American river operation of the war, and the high point of Perry's Gulf command.
In the summer of 1847 Perry gathered a squadron of some sixteen vessels at Frontera and pushed up the Tabasco River into the interior of southeastern Mexico, bound for San Juan Bautista. The advance against the defended, winding river was a difficult feat of riverine warfare, the ships and boats fighting their way upstream while landing parties, formed from the Marines and sailors of the whole squadron, went ashore to clear the banks and storm the obstacles in a series of skirmishes. Several men were wounded in the fighting before the town was taken. The expedition carried American power deep into a region the war had otherwise scarcely touched, and it showed the reach of a determined naval commander up an inland river, a campaign that anticipated the riverine operations of later American wars.
Podcast episodes on Mexican-American War
Record no. 355