Humanitarian· Central America Operations
USS Albany fire-fighting at San Juan del Norte
A humanitarian landing at the Nicaraguan port that would later see far darker American action.
In April 1852 a major fire broke out at San Juan del Norte, the Greytown of the Atlantic transit route, threatening the town and the American commercial property there, and Marines and seamen from the sloop USS Albany went ashore to help fight the flames and protect lives and goods. The duty had nothing of combat about it; it was the kind of emergency relief a ship's company close at hand could render to a port in distress. No casualties resulted. The episode is a reminder that the American presence at Greytown was not always hostile, the same town the Marines helped save from fire in 1852 would be bombarded and burned by an American warship just two years later, in the reprisal of 1854, a sharp contrast in how American naval power was brought to bear on the same small port.
Record no. 381