This print was published in 1848 in ‘Steam Warfare in the Parana: A narrative of operations by the combined squadrons of England and France, in forcing a passage up that river’ by Commander Mackinnon. It is one of three by Joseph Miles Gilbert that are recorded as in the possession of Mackinnon (PAD5890-92) and presumably produced under his instruction to illustrate the text. Mackinnon was in command of the Alecto, one of three steam ships sent to navigate the Parana river and move stores under the protection of a combined English and French naval force. The manuscript note suggests it relates to the riverine naval 'Battle of Vuelta de Obligado' in the Paraná River, Argentina, on 20 November 1845 but the Alecto arrived in the convoy in January 1846. This print shows the Alecto towing other ships to pass the batteries at San Lorenzo.

The English and French action on the Argentine was the result of Palmerstonian 'gunboat diplomacy' in which the European powers concerned were trying to evade Argentine customs duties on trade upstream to the South American interior through their waters: technically the Anglo-French force won the ‘Battle of Vuelta de Obligado' but it was a pyrrhic victory in which it sustained heavy loss and which demonstrated the impossibility of forcing trade through in defiance of the local government. Joseph Miles Gilbert (b. 1799) , a marine and landscape painter formerly working in London, moved to Lymington around 1830 and died there in 1876.