On 3rd January 1833, Captain James Onslow sailed HMS Clio into Port Louis and did something British naval officers have periodically found themselves doing in the South Atlantic: he told whoever was there to take down their flag and go home. The Argentine commander, Major José María Pinedo, protested in writing and then sailed away. The British flag went up. The Falkland Islands, or the Islas Malvinas, depending on whose map you are reading, were back under British administration.
The word “back” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The prior claim was not straightforward. France had settled the islands first, in 1764, establishing Port Saint Louis on East Falkland. Britain arrived the following year, unaware of the French, and planted its own colony at Port Egmont on West Falkland. Spain then purchased the French settlement in 1767, argued that the whole archipelago fell within its South American sphere under the Treaty of Tordesillas, and in 1770 sent five ships and 1,400 soldiers to eject the British from Port Egmont. Britain and Spain nearly went to war over it. In the end, Spain backed down, returned the colony, and the crisis passed. Four years later, Britain quietly abandoned Port Egmont anyway - too expensive to maintain during the run-up to the American War of Independence - leaving behind a plaque asserting continued sovereignty over the islands. Spain demolished the plaque. Spain itself withdrew in 1811, under pressure from the Napoleonic wars and the Argentine independence movement, leaving another plaque on the way out.
So by 1820, the islands were empty, legally speaking, and the new United Provinces of the River Plate - the predecessor state to Argentina - sent a naval colonel named David Jewett to claim them by inheritance from Spain. Jewett arrived half-starved, with a crew largely on the verge of mutiny, spent six months at Port Louis, declared possession, and left. In 1823, the United Provinces granted fishing rights on the islands to a German-born entrepreneur named Luis Vernet, who attempted three separate colonisation expeditions over the following years, each failing in its own way. His third attempt, in 1828, finally stuck. He built a functioning settlement, brought in cattle, and managed to make the place marginally viable. He sought and received permission from the British consulate in Buenos Aires before each departure, and offered to provide regular reports on conditions in the islands. He was simultaneously working for both claimants, which was clever until it became unstable.
The instability arrived in 1831, when Vernet tried to enforce his monopoly on seal hunting by seizing three American vessels. The United States consul responded by sending USS Lexington to the islands, where Commander Silas Duncan arrested seven senior settlers for piracy, declared the settlement dissolved, and sailed away with most of the population. What remained was a rump colony of gauchos. Buenos Aires then tried to establish a penal colony under Major Esteban Mestivier. His soldiers mutinied shortly after arrival and killed him. The settlement was in chaos when Onslow arrived.
Onslow’s task was therefore not so much to dislodge a functioning Argentine administration as to fill a vacuum before someone else did. He arrived with HMS Clio and HMS Tyne, 121 men, and 20 Royal Marines. Pinedo had the Sarandí and around 26 effective sailors - a large portion of his nominal crew were British mercenaries who made it known they had no intention of fighting their own countrymen. He wrote a formal protest, received a polite acknowledgement, and departed on 5th January. The reassertion cost no lives and took three days.
Charles Darwin arrived in 1834, during the second voyage of HMS Beagle, and wrote what remains the most accurate summary of the situation: “After the possession of these miserable islands had been contested by France, Spain, and England, they were left uninhabited. The government of Buenos Aires then sold them to a private individual, but likewise used them, as old Spain had done before, for a penal settlement. England claimed her right and seized them.” He went on to describe the population as consisting largely of runaway rebels and murderers. Darwin was not wrong, but he missed the logic of the contest. The islands were not fought over because anyone particularly wanted to live on them. They were fought over because of where they sat.
The Falklands lie at the eastern approach to the Drake Passage and the Strait of Magellan - the only viable sea routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific before the Panama Canal opened in 1914. Any power that controlled them could monitor, harass, or deny access to the most important maritime chokepoint in the southern hemisphere. That was the calculation in 1765, in 1770, in 1833, and in 1982, when Argentina invaded on 2nd April and Britain sent a task force of 127 ships, 28,000 men, and three nuclear submarines to take the islands back. The war lasted 74 days. 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers died. The population of the islands at the time was approximately 1,800 people and 500,000 sheep.
Argentina has not formally abandoned its claim. The 1982 defeat was military, not diplomatic, and Argentine maps still show the Malvinas as Argentine territory. The islands’ potential offshore oil reserves - explored seriously since the 1990s - have added an economic argument to the geopolitical one. Since the Panama Canal handles modern container shipping, the old strategic rationale has faded somewhat, but prestige and resources have taken its place. Every Argentine government treats the Malvinas question as a domestic political obligation, and every British government treats continued possession as non-negotiable as long as the islanders - who vote overwhelmingly to remain British, as they did in a 2013 referendum with 99.8 per cent in favour - want it that way.
Onslow’s flag-raising in January 1833 settled nothing permanently. It was one episode in a sequence that ran from French sailors in 1764 to British paratroopers in 1982, and the sequence is not obviously finished. The islands remain what they have always been: a small, cold, treeless place that a lot of people are prepared to fight over precisely because no one can quite afford to let anyone else have them.
The 21st century has not yet weighed in.