During the Chincha Islands War, the Chilean Government sent her agent in Belgium Manuel Carvallo to British shipyards in search of unsold warships originally laid down for the Confederate States Navy; He found in Glasgow and Greenock, on the River Clyde, the hulls of the 1600-ton commerce-raider Texas (not the ironclad CSS Texas) and the 1200-ton Pampero.

[2] Robert Winthrop Simpson in behalf of the Chilean Government ordered both ships, Pampero and Texas to be manned in Hamburg and later to the Faroe Islands.

At 18:15; before arriving at the anchoring ground, she discovered a suspicious steamer weighing anchor and apparently getting ready to put to sea, for which reason the Commander of Gerona, Don Benito Escalera, thought fit to proceed towards her to see if he could obtains news, and to be at the same time in readiness to follow in her track, should she turn out to be either of the vessels indicated to him by the Spanish government.

On 12 February 1873 she was put under the command of Capitán de Corbeta Jorge Montt Alvarez and she sail to the Strait of Magellan to a hydrographic survey as she did up 1876 between the Parallel 23°S and the Caleta del Cobre.

Also aboard the steamship Abtao were the engineers Eugenio Plazolles and Macario Sierralta who were under government orders to do reconnaissance work along the northern Atacama coast.

According to Bermudez, as the corvette Abtao continued further south of Caleta el Cobre, the members of the expedition observed that the mountain range was further and further from the coast and, in its place, a wide plane appeared.