What a fixed-price warship contract asked of Earle's

Chile raised a 2.2-million-peso loan, mainly at home but partly in Britain, to cover both armoured frigates within a fixed price. The large number of British yards able to compete illustrates the depth of the nineteenth-century naval industrial base. Earle's offered good work without the price associated with more famous builders, but thin profit margins later created cash-flow trouble when input costs rose. Its eventual closure and the interwar destruction of shipbuilding capacity show that a full order book alone does not guarantee an industrial firm's survival or preserve national capacity. A nineteenth-century Earle-built ferry still operating on Lake Titicaca is a rare surviving trace of the yard's international output.