The Royal Navy and the Falklands War

By David Brown

This military history reveals the untold story of the United Kingdom’s Royal and Merchant Navies during the Falkland’s War.

Soldiers and journalists alike wasted no time in memorializing the campaign to recapture the Falkland Islands after the Argentinian invasion in April, 1982. With the overwhelming focus on the role of the Army, the vital contributions of the Royal and Merchant Navies have been largely overlooked. Yet no British military forces would have been there at all had the Royal Navy not provided the necessary transport, not to mention air cover and bombardment support.

In this book, naval historian David Brown tells the extraordinary story of how the fleet was assembled. Merchant-ships ranging from luxury liners such as the SS Canberra to cargo-carriers of every description were quickly converted to their new role as STUFTs, or Ships Taken Up From Trade. Brown describes the stupendous problems presented by the assembling and stowing of the thousands of tons of stores and equipment needed by the Expeditionary Forces and the way in which these problems were solved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 13, 1987
• ISBN: 9781473817791

David Brown

David Brown is the host of the hit podcasts Business Wars and Business Wars Daily. He is also the co-creator and host of Texas Standard, the Lone Star’s statewide daily news show, and was the former anchor of the Peabody award-winning public radio business program Marketplace. He has been a public radio journalist for more than three decades, winning multiple awards, and is a contributor to All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and other NPR programs. Brown earned his PhD in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and his Juris Doctor from Washington and Lee University School of Law. He lives with his wife and two children in Austin, Texas.

Book preview

title

The

Royal Navy

and the

Falklands

War

title   The   title

Royal Navy

title  and the  title

Falklands

War

David Brown

Leo Cooper

London

First published 1987 by Leo Cooper Ltd.

Leo Cooper is an independent imprint of

the Heinemann Group of Publishers,

Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB

LONDON   MELBOURNE   JOHANNESBURG   AUCKLAND

Copyright © David Brown 1987

Reprinted 1988

ISBN 0-85052-0592

Designed by Brooke Calverley

Printed by Redwood Burn Limited

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Contents

Introduction

Maps

Glossary

Prologue

PART I

A Convenient Station near Cape Horn

PART II

1 Scrap at South Georgia

2 Operacion ROSARIO

3 The Defence of Grytviken

4 The Task Force Prepares

5 Passage South

6 The Advance Guard

7 Halfway House

PART III

1 The Recapture of South Georgia

2 The Carriers Close In

3 The Argentine Preparations

4 The First Strike

5 ‘Lombardo’s Fork’

6 First Losses

7 Bad-weather Blockade

PART IV

1 ‘D’-Day

2 ‘The Battle of Clapp’s Trap’

3 The Loss of the Atlantic Conveyor

PART V

The Break-out

PART VI

1 The Siege of Stanley

2 Battles in the Mountains

3 The Last Battle

4 Aftermath

STUFT (Ships Taken Up from Trade)

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Equivalent Ranks

Sources

Index

Introduction

This book was conceived as a tribute to all those who took part in and contributed to the success of Operation ‘Corporate’, in particular those of the naval services – the Royal Navy, Royal Fleet Auxiliary, Royal Marine Auxiliary Service, the Merchant Navy, the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service and the Royal Marines, as well as all the men of the Army and Royal Air Force who found themselves attached to naval and Marines units. Behind the men ‘at the sharp end’, there were the legions of the staffs and organizations which kept the ships at sea and maintained the Commando Brigade on the far shore – condemned in time of peace as the excessive ‘tail’, in war they showed that they were none too numerous. As might have been expected, British industry provided wholehearted and unstinted support, rising to a new challenge every day, as it seemed, during the two and a half months of active hostilities. With the parts played by the other Services and their contributors, teeth and tail were united to form the body corporate which succeeded in restoring British rule in the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

Although many might feel that their contribution is not fully reflected in the following pages, only in one area is this intentional. For reasons which they well know, the doings of the submariners must remain discreetly unreported for the time being and it must suffice to say that all those who served in the South Atlantic are in the debt of the men of the six submarines which provided the advanced guard and then the first line of defence against the Argentine Navy. That the Fleet did not venture forth after the example of the General Belgrano does not detract from the dangers and discomforts of long patrols, often in shallow and inadequately charted waters, right up to the time of the Argentine Government’s acceptance that the campaign was over.

I am grateful for the ready assistance and guidance of many officers and men of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines who took part in the various aspects of the campaign. Without their help it would not have been possible to piece together, and in some instances reconcile, the various accounts, semi-official, private and published, British and Argentine, which have been used to compile this narrative. I am also indebted to Admiral Sir Peter Stanford KCB MVO, the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff from 1982 to 1984, and to Mr Alistair Jaffray CB, the Deputy Undersecretary of State for the Royal Navy until 1984, for their permission and encouragement to undertake this work.

David Brown

June, 1984

Although what follows is published by permission of the Ministry of Defence, any opinions which may be expressed are my own and do not represent those of the Ministry, the Navy Department or the Naval Service as a whole.

DB

September, 1986

Maps

title

View over Two Sisters of the final battlefields, Wireless Ridge to the left, running down to Navy

Point, and the tangled summits of Mount Tumbledown to the right, overlooking Port Stanley

(via Captain S.H.G. Johnston RN)

titletitletitletitle

Glossary

Prologue

BATTLE GROUP DEPLOYMENT, 1914

On the blustery late-spring evening of 1 November, 1914, off the coast of Chile, a Royal Navy cruiser squadron ill-advisedly accepted battle with a much superior German squadron. Two large armoured cruisers were sunk with all hands – some 1,600 men and their admiral. Two ships, the light cruiser HMS Glasgow and the weak auxiliary cruiser Otranto, escaped in the gathering dusk off Coronel.

Not until 6 November did a full report of the disaster reach the British Admiralty, cabled from the most southerly telegraph station in the world, at the Chilean town of Punta Arenas, on the Straits of Magellan. With a clear idea of the threat which the German ships posed and the force needed to deal with them, Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, moved swiftly and decisively, ordering the battlecruisers HMS Invincible and Inflexible to detach from the Grand Fleet in Scottish waters for service in the South Atlantic. They sailed from Devonport on 11 November with full coal bunkers, provisions for three months and stores and ammunition for the ships already in the South Atlantic. It was a feat which was not to be bettered 68 years later.

Twenty-five days after leaving Plymouth Sound, Vice Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee joined the rest of his force in Port William, the sheltered inlet outside Port Stanley at the eastern extremity of the Falkland Islands, unaware that his opposite number, Vice Admiral Count Maximilian von Spee, with five cruisers, was less than 250 miles away, heading for the same destination. The next morning, 8 December, the German squadron was seen approaching: scarcely any of Sturdee’s ships were ready for sea, but von Spee retired when the strength of the Royal Navy’s squadron was realized and, too late, recognized the distinctive tripod masts as the two battlecruisers reached the open sea.

With the Glasgow leading, the British ships – the Invincible, Inflexible and four cruisers – chased the fleeing enemy through the calm south Atlantic for two hours until, at midday, the battlecruisers were close enough to open fire, at a range of eight miles. Von Spee, knowing that he could neither out-run nor out-fight his big opponents, deliberately sacrificed his own chances of escape by turning his flagship, the Scharnhorst, and her sister-ship, the Gneisenau, to draw fire from his three light cruisers, the Leipzig, Nürnberg and Dresden, which made off to the south, pursued by HMS Glasgow and two larger cruisers, the Cornwall and Kent.

title

The battlecruiser Invincible, Admiral Sturdee’s flagship, as she appeared at the time of the first Battle of the Falklands, in December 1914 (via author)

Three hours after the ‘split’, the Scharnhorst, shattered by 12in shells, foundered while driving at the battlecruisers for a torpedo attack – not one of her 700-odd men survived. The Gneisenau then became the sole target for the Invincible, Inflexible and the Carnarvon, a slow ship which had only just caught up. The German armoured cruiser was brought to a dead stop after an hour’s pounding and when her guns fell silent at last the British ships ceased fire, rescuing 187 of her officers and men after she sank.

Two of the three light cruisers had been bought only brief survival. The Glasgow took the Leipzig under fire at long range, an hour and a half after the German ships had been ordered to detach, and continued to engage this ship after the Cornwall came up in support. The Kent took a further two hours to run down the supposedly faster Nürnberg, but then closed the range rapidly, disregarding the many hits which the German ship scored, and fought her to a standstill in under an hour, then watched as she sank slowly, flooding through opened seacocks.

The Leipzig’s end was more protracted, for her opponents continued to fight at long range until her guns ran out of ammunition, four hours after the Glasgow had first opened fire. 1,400 rounds of 6in and nearly 900 rounds of 4in had been needed to finish the Leipzig, whereas the Kent had fired only 634 6in shells at the Nürnberg. In both instances the British ships moved in quickly to pick up survivors, but the shellfire and the chill water had taken a tragic toll and of the combined crews of about 580 men, only twenty-five survived.

The German shooting had been accurate until the guns had been smothered by the sheer weight of hits. The Invincible had attracted most of the Scharnhorst’s and Gneisenau’s fire, sustaining twenty-two hits compared with three on the Inflexible, but neither of the battlecruisers had suffered serious damage. The Leipzig had managed to hit the Cornwall with eighteen shells but landed only two on the distant Glasgow; Kent’s decision to close the Nürnberg resulted in her having to accept thirty-eight hits – although the light 105mm shells did not affect her ability to steam or fight, the Kent lost four men dead and twelve wounded, out of the British total of six dead and twenty wounded. The German Navy’s losses – some 1,900 men – in this seven-hour battle were nearly double those of both sides in the twelve-week war of 1982.

title

HMS Kent avenged her sister-ship, HMS Monmouth, on 8 December 1914, sinking the Nürnberg in a 90-minute duel. In the months after the battle, the Kent, operating from secluded bays in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, took a prominent part in the hunt for the escaped Dresden and, on 14 March 1915 in company with the Glasgow, brought her to bay at Mas a Fuera, Juan Fernandez (via author)

The victory off the Falklands was less than complete. Although von Spee’s two colliers had been found and sunk by two British ships attempting to catch up with the battle, the cruiser Dresden had escaped. Only the Glasgow was fast enough to overhaul her, but Captain J. D. Luce RN was preoccupied with the Leipzig and did not break off even after the Cornwall had caught up and was obviously hitting the latter hard. This ‘failure’, for which Admiral Sturdee was to be blamed by the First Sea Lord, led to the continued deployment of up to six Royal Navy cruisers in South American waters until mid-March 1915. The solitary German ship remained one step ahead of her pursuers, hiding in isolated inlets, until she was finally tracked down by the Kent and Glasgow at Juan Fernandez, short of fuel and with her machinery badly in need of overhaul. The British cruisers opened fire, but the Dresden scuttled herself to avoid further waste of life.

PART I

Chapter One  

A Convenient Station

near Cape Horn

The Falkland Islands lie not far from one of the world’s great ocean turning points – ‘focal areas of trade’ in strategic jargon – but one which did not see a great deal of traffic until the nineteenth century. A Spanish expedition was the first to round the South American mainland, in 1520, reaching the Pacific through the straits named after its Portuguese leader, Magellan. The peculiarities of the Spanish colonial system, whereby the wealth of Chile and Peru were exploited by way of the Isthmus of Panama and communication between the River Plate and Peru was permitted only by the overland route, across the Andes, led to the neglect of the Straits of Magellan by Spanish navigators. English seamen sought out the rich Spanish trade off the west coast of South America and Drake’s voyage in 1578 was followed in the year of the Armada by Cavendish. The latter died during a second attempt but one of his companions, John Davis, better known as an Arctic explorer discovered the Falklands on 14 August, 1592.

The next English adventurer, Sir John Hawkins, also sighted the Falklands, early in 1594, and then passed into the Pacific through the Straits. Later in the decade the Dutch sought an alternative route to the East Indies and this took van Noort through the Straits in 1599; one of his ships, unable to make headway against the prevailing wind, turned back and was blown within sight of the most westerly group of the Falklands’ islets, the Jasons, which were known as the ‘Sebaldines’, after the commander of the Dutch ship, Sebald de Waerdt.

Not until 1616 was the southernmost point of the continent rounded, by Willem Schouten, who named the headland and the island after his native town of Hoorn. Cape Horn, as it became generally known, soon gained a reputation for its ferocious weather and seas and while the Straits of Magellan were more sheltered, they were navigationally ‘challenging’, with a prevailing wind facing the westbound voyager and an inhospitable coastline with equally inhospitable natives. The English turned their attention elsewhere when the wars with Spain ended and the Dutch East India Company, a bureaucratic organization, objected strongly to sailors arriving in their Spice Islands by any other than the approved route, from the west, so that there were few, if any, passages around the Horn or through the Straits until the later years of the seventeenth century, when the lure of Spanish gold called again.

The predators were the buccaneers, a polyglot assortment of bandits who had started in a small way in the West Indies but quickly grew in strength and daring until they were able to undertake profitable raids on the major Spanish towns which served as trans-shipment entrepots between the Pacific and Atlantic. In 1683 an expedition left the Caribbean to pillage ‘at source’. Pausing only to seize a better ship which, after embarking more than enough West African maidens, they renamed the ‘Bachelors’ Delight’, they set off for the Straits of Magellan, to raid the coastal towns of Chile. Before reaching the Straits, they were blown eastwards to sight again the Falklands, early in 1684.*

Six years later, by which time Britain and Spain were again at war, a privateer named John Strong made the first recorded landing on the Falklands, on 27 January, 1690. The channel between the two main islands he named Falkland’s Sound, in honour of the Viscount who had been Treasurer of the Navy at the date of his departure (but who was now in the Tower, under suspicion of misusing the funds of the Navy).

The wars, which lasted from 1689 to 1714 with only a short break, saw passages around South America become almost popular. The buccaneers, dignified by ‘Letters of Marque’ into privateers, passed into the Pacific and ships of the newly-founded French South American Company voyaged in both directions. These produced a rash of fresh sightings of the Falklands: in 1708, Captain Poree, of St Malo, was twice blown out to the islands by gales but failed to realize that his two sightings were of the same group. Later in that year, another British privateer, Woodes Rogers, sighted the islands and went on to the Pacific where he rescued the unfortunate Alexander Selkirk (the original for Robinson Crusoe), who had been marooned by his captain in 1704 on Juan Fernandez, the isolated group of islands 400 miles west of Valparaiso, where the Dresden was to meet her end 210 years later.

By 1721 the islands to the east of the Straits were known by a bewildering variety of names – ‘Hawkins’ Land’, ‘The Sebaldines’, the ‘Anican Islands’, ‘The Coast of the Assumption’, ‘Les Iles Nouvelles’ (which, by 1716, they were not) and ‘Belgia Austral’, the last being a hopeful bid by a Dutch explorer in 1721. The term ‘Falklands’ Isles’ was used but not until later did it become common in British usage. This coincided with the first statement of strategic interest in the Falklands, made by Commodore Anson on his return from his 1739–44 round-the-world raiding cruise. Anson never saw the islands, but his squadron suffered great hardship in reaching the Straits of Magellan and he recognized

the prodigious import a convenient station might prove, situated so far to the southward, and so near Cape Horn … This, even in time of peace, might be of great consequence to this station, and in time of war, would make us masters of those seas.

This appeared in 1748 and two years later the Admiralty ordered the preparation of an expedition to settle a garrison. The Spanish learned of the plan and, after a personal appeal from the Ambassador to King George II, the project was abandoned for the time being.

The Spanish were convinced that the islands belonged to them by virtue of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas – a papal arbitration which shared the undiscovered world between Spain and Portugal without reference to any other nation: that the islands had not yet been sighted by a Spanish ship was immaterial, the islands lay to the west of the line of demarcation, 370 leagues to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. In 1763 a Spanish vessel, albeit one from the Viceroyalty of Peru, at last visited the islands. The Spanish ‘parliament’ at Madrid, the Cortes, declined an offer by the ship’s owner to claim, colonize and govern them in the name of Spain, mainly because he had been assisted in his exploration by a Jesuit ‘cosmographer’ and the Spanish authorities wished to give the Society of Jesus no opportunity to extend their influence.

In the same year a French Colonel of Infantry, Louis de Bougainville, persuaded the Ministry of Marine to allow him, at his own expense, to equip and command an expedition to colonize the islands on behalf of the French India Company. Leaving St Malo in September, 1763, his two ships arrived in Berkeley Sound on 3 February, 1764, and landed two ex-Canadian families and volunteers from the ships as settlers. A fort was built and guns landed to defend the settlement, which was named Port Louis, before de Bougainville and his ships departed in early April.

The British Government might have been prepared to give way gracefully to Spain, but it was not ready to stand by while the French installed themselves in a position commanding the approaches to the Pacific. Commodore the Hon John Byron, with the frigate Dolphin and the sloop Tamer, sighted the Falklands on 13 January, 1765, and after a brief examination of suitable locations raised the Union Flag on Saunders Island and claimed the islands for Great Britain on 23 January. This was regarded as quite sufficient and the two ships left four days later.

A British garrison did not arrive until January, 1766, when the frigate Jason, the bomb-ketch Carcass and the transport Experiment landed twenty-five Marines, four 12pdr guns and a ‘portable blockhouse’ which had been carried out in kit form, at Port Egmont, Saunders Island. The Jason remained to survey the islands but did not discover the French settlement at Port Louis until 4 December. Courteously, each side demanded that the other should leave the islands but there the matter ended and the Jason left for England in January, 1767.

Unbeknown to the two local commanders, the days of the French settlement were already numbered. In September, 1766, Louis XV acknowledged the Spanish claims to sovereignty over the islands. Charles III was under no obligation to pay compensation for the restoration of what he regarded as his own lands, but he handsomely reimbursed de Bougainville, who formally handed over Port Louis to a Spanish garrison on 1 April, 1767. The French name given by the settlers, ‘Les Isles Malouines’, was simply hispanicized into ‘Las Islas Maluinas’, but Port Louis became ‘La Soledad’ – solitude – and was regarded as aptly named by the Spanish soldiery sentenced to serve there.

The new occupants suspected, but did not know of for certain, the existence of a British settlement. It was confirmed when the French colonists returned to Europe in the autumn of 1767 but the Captain-General of Buenos Aires was not informed until the summer of 1768 and it was not until November, 1769, that a Royal Navy sloop and a Spanish survey schooner met, to their mutual surprise. Again the formal letters of protest were courteous, as were the exchanges of visits, but the Spanish Governor, who had invented yet another name for the group – ‘Las Islas Magellan’ – did place a time limit of six months on the British presence, from 30 November, 1769. Even if one of the British sloops had left immediately on receipt of this warning, the passage time to England and back to the Falklands would have been too great to permit reinforcement before the end of May, 1770.

The Spanish force actually appeared on 4 June, 1770. After a few days of preliminaries and a brief exchange of fire between the five Spanish ships (with 126 guns and 1,500 seamen and soldiers) and the British sloop and blockhouse (eighteen guns and about 120 seamen and Marines), the latter surrendered on 10 June. The terms were quite favourable and included a signature by the Spanish for all items which could not be carried away in the sloop Favourite, which left on 11 July. The news of the bloodless expulsion of the garrison reached Britain before her return, in late September.

The Spanish, in informing the British Government, excused the action by stating that the colonial authorities at Buenos Aires had acted on their own initiative, without the Cortes’ knowledge. This was untrue and the justification for the act was based on a wilful misinterpretation of a treaty which was not relevant – a diplomatic device which was to be repeated 212 years later under similar circumstances. It is probable that the British Government of the day would have let the matter rest, but public opinion was against concession and so the Fleet was mobilized in August 1770. Sixteen ships of the line and ten frigates were commissioned out of reserve: one of the former category was the new 64-gun Third Rate Raisonnable, whose captain signed on his 12-year-old nephew as his servant. The lad later served aboard the Carcass and the Dolphin, commanded by the George Farmer who had been the Falklands naval commander in June, 1770, but he was never to see the islands for himself in the course of his illustrious career, which ended at Trafalgar.

When it became apparent that France was unwilling to go to war over the Falklands, Charles III of Spain backed down and agreed in January, 1771, to restore Port Egmont, though reserving right of sovereignty over the islands. This future point of contention was not pressed by the British Government, although the Opposition recognized it as containing ‘the genuine seeds of perpetual hostility and war’ – a slight exaggeration, but nonetheless prophetic.

The frigate Juno, with two other vessels, took out a garrison to Port Egmont and, after mustering the items on the 1770 inventory, formally took possession on 16 September, 1771. The sloop Hound remained as guardship until April, 1773, when she left without relief, the Admiralty having sent out in her stead a prefabricated ‘shallop’ named Penguin. The garrison was reduced to twenty-five Marines and the fifty-man crew of the small craft but even this minor presence, sufficient to uphold the principle of possession without unduly annoying the Spanish, was a target for Government economies and in April, 1774, the storeship Endeavour arrived to embark the garrison, guns, stores and the sound timbers of the Penguin. Watched by a North American sealing ship, the Endeavour sailed on 22 May, 1774, leaving fixed over the door a lead plaque which restated the British claim to sovereignty:

Be it known to all nations that Falklands Islands, with this fort, the storehouses, wharfs, harbours, bays and creeks thereunto belonging are the sole right and property of His Most Sacred Majesty King George the Third, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc., in witness whereof this plate is set up, and His Britannic Majesty’s Colours left flying as a mark of possession by SW Clayton, Commanding Officer at Falklands Islands.

AD 1774

The Spanish garrison remained at Soledad throughout the Royal Navy’s occupation of Port Egmont and thereafter, a convict settlement being established towards the end of the century. On 25 May, 1810, the prominent citizens of the city of Buenos Aires expelled the Viceroy of La Plata and declared that they would rule the huge provincial empire, which included modern Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as the settled northern provinces of Argentina, on behalf of Ferdinand VII of Spain, until such time as the mother country was cleared of the French.

The Viceroy retired to Montevideo, where loyal forces rallied to him, including the Soledad garrison. The abandonment of the ‘Maluinas’ was sanctioned by the Cortes, sitting under British protection at Cadiz, on the understanding that the islands were to be re-occupied when circumstances permitted. They never did.

The Plate colonists’ declared loyalty to the Spanish Crown did not survive the attempts by the Viceroy to put down what he saw as a revolt and after capturing Montevideo in June, 1814, they turned to assist Chile in her struggle against the Viceroy of Peru. On 9 July, 1816, a representative assembly met in Buenos Aires and declared that the ‘United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata’ were completely independent of Spain, to whose former colonies they fell heir. This imperial mantle was already a little ragged – Paraguay had gone its own way in 1811, Uruguay was seized by the Portuguese and added to Brazil in 1816 and in the north the province of Alto Peru saw almost continuous fighting between Spanish loyalists and various groups of rebels up to 1825, when Spain gave up and the local patriots opted for complete autonomy, calling their country Bolivia. Those provinces left within the union actively resented Buenos Aires’ assumption of leadership and internal disputes went on for thirty-five years after the declaration of independence.

For nine years the Falklands remained unclaimed. They were frequented by American sealers who enjoyed the freedom from any authority and came to regard it as their right. The first visit by a United Provinces’ warship occurred in March, 1820, when the Mercuria, bound for Chile with Government stores, was carried there by a gale. The captain, an American, sold the ship to a shipwrecked French Navy crew, who dropped off him and his men and the stores at Rio de Janeiro.

On 1 November, 1820, the Heroina, commanded by another American, Daniel Jewitt, arrived intentionally in Berkeley Sound to take possession of the islands on behalf of the Provinces, much to the surprise of the resident sealers, who were generally unimpressed by the dilapidated state of the warship and her near-mutinous crew. After Jewitt’s departure, the sealers returned to their activities and were not inconvenienced again for several years.

The United Provinces granted a lease of land at Soledad, with fishery and grazing rights, to Louis Vernet in 1823. Vernet, whose origins are uncertain but who was at the time a naturalized citizen of La Plata Province, established a profitable settlement in 1826 and two years later his grant was extended to twenty years, with exclusive fishery rights, including those for the seal industry. At the same time a convict settlement was opened on a government reserve at San Carlos, on Falkland Sound.

The American sealers had scant regard for any law or authority which infringed their ‘right’ to work where they wished and, to deal with them, Vernet was appointed as the United Provinces’ Governor on the islands. Britain, which had not stirred when Buenos Aires had claimed the islands in 1820, protested immediately but took no further action; relations between Vernet and the Royal Navy were amicable, Captain Robert Fitzroy and HMS Beagle being cordially welcomed when the ship called early in 1830.

After repeated warnings, Vernet arrested two American sealers for poaching in July, 1831, and personally took one of them, the Harriet, to Buenos Aires. At the latter port was the USS Lexington, whose captain, Silas Duncan, demanded that Vernet be handed over to the United States for trial as a pirate or, failing that, the United Provinces Government should arrest and try him. Duncan did not wait for a reply, but sailed forthwith for the Falklands, where he arrived at Port Soledad on 20 December, 1831, flying the French flag. He invited Vernet’s principal agents on board, arrested them and then hoisted the US ensign before landing an armed party. This force spiked the settlement’s guns, seized all personal weapons and blew up the magazine and then went on to sack the defenceless place. Several leading settlers were taken on board the Lexington, seven of them in irons and treated as pirates, and the ship returned to the Plate, anchoring in Uruguayan waters off Montevideo. Duncan held his prisoners only until the United Provinces acknowledged that the men had been supervising the fisheries with official approval, put them ashore and then sailed off. The Buenos Aires Government was incensed and lodged a claim for compensation with the US Government. The latter did not reply officially until 1884, when the Argentine claim for damages for abuse of its citizens was dismissed as groundless.

News of the incident reached England in the spring of 1832 and appeared to confirm an earlier rumour that the United States were contemplating the establishment of a naval base to protect the sealers’ interests. The Commander-in-Chief, South America Station, was accordingly instructed, ‘in the name of His Britannic Majesty, to exercise the rights of sovereignty’ over the Falklands. In November, he sent Captain Richard Onslow, with the sloop Clio and the frigate Tyne, and they arrived at Port Egmont on 20 December, a year to the day after Lexington’s visitation.

Vernet was still in Buenos Aires and the acting-Governorship devolved upon the commander of the San Carlos penal settlement, Major Juan Mestivier. By an unfortunate but unrelated coincidence, Mestivier was murdered by one of the convicts soon after the British warships’ arrival at Saunders Island – a century after his death, he was to become a legendary leader of the resistance to the invader! His successor, Lieutenant Pinedo of the colony’s schooner, the Sarandi, was unable to offer any resistance to the Clio when she put into Berkeley Sound on 2 January, 1833, and left under strong protest, refusing to haul down his country’s flag. Delayed by bad weather, Pinedo was obliged to watch the raising of the Union Jack on 3 January, when Captain Onslow formally took possession of the Falklands.

The British Government ignored the United Provinces’ protests. It also ignored the re-acquired possession, leaving Vernet’s agents in charge and free to administer the settlement as before, the only mark of change of ownership being orders to the storekeeper to raise the Union Jack on Sundays and whenever ships arrived.

In August, 1833, a small group of gauchos and freed Indian convicts murdered the storekeeper and three of Vernet’s other employees. Law and order was not restored until January, 1834, when the frigate HMS Tyne arrived, sought out by an English sealer. The Tyne’s First Lieutenant and a small party of seamen and Marines were left to govern and rebuild the colony and to conduct a survey of the islands. Successive naval Governors, supported by half-yearly warship visits and survey vessels, built up the livestock and human population and by 1841 the Admiralty was confident enough to recommend the development of the Falklands as a permanent colony.

In August, 1841, Lieutenant Richard Moody, Royal Engineers, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor and he arrived at Port Louis on 22 January, 1842. More than a year passed before, on 23 January, 1843, Letters Patent established ‘Her Majesty’s Settlements in the Falkland Islands and their Dependencies’, raising Moody to the status of full Governor and Commander-in-Chief. The addition of the position of Admiral of the Islands, in September, 1843, gave him civil maritime jurisdiction over the surrounding waters. The Argentine Government again protested over the formal adoption of the colony, but again the protest was rejected. National pride, rather than practical considerations, may have been at the back of the protest, for it is reputed that, five years earlier, the dictator Juan Manuel Rosas had offered to relinquish the Argentine claim on the Falklands if Buenos Aires’ debt to a London merchant bank could be written off. The offer was not accepted.

The capital was moved from Port Louis to Stanley, on the inner harbour of Port William, in July, 1845. The growth of the settlement was slow and mistakes were made in attempting to stimulate the economy, full advantage being taken by unscrupulous outsiders and those settlers who could not foresee the consequence of their greed. By 1852 sheep farming had been introduced and four years later the Falkland Islands Company was incorporated by Royal Charter, to manage and develop large tracts of land. West Falkland was not colonized until 1867 but within two years all the land had been leased to sheep-farming settlers and the flocks expanded rapidly.

For a few years the Falklands, and Port Stanley in particular, derived a greater income from transient shipping than from their pastoral industry. The discovery of gold in California and, later, Australia, led to a dramatic increase in the volume of shipping traffic around the Horn. With no mainland harbour facilities south of the River Plate, Port Stanley was the only service station on the long run between Montevideo and Valparaiso and ships could obtain fresh water, fresh vegetables and meat and, at high cost, repairs. With the South Atlantic weather, there was no shortage of custom for the repairers and the wreckers, the latter benefiting not only from the genuine casualties but also from the dishonest owners or masters defrauding insurance companies and nervous crews unwilling to face Cape Horn in ill-found vessels.

The boom years were from 1850 to 1870. Thereafter, the appearance of the steam ship in greater numbers, inherently safer as it was able to choose its route, and with new requirements, primarily coal instead of provisions, led to the eclipse of Port Stanley. The failure on the part of the British Government to provide a coal depot in the Falklands, even when the desirability was obvious, was directly responsible for the decline of a profitable industry. The Chilean Governor of Punta Arenas, at the western end of the Straits of Magellan, showed greater foresight and his community, as isolated and in a more desolate spot even than Port Stanley, prospered accordingly.

The success of Punta Arenas and Chilean colonization aroused Argentine pride and from 1880 there were disputes over the ownership of the Straits, Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. A compromise settlement in 1881 recognized Chilean sovereignty over the Straits and Argentina got eastern Patagonia and, thereby, international recognition of her claim to the continental mainland opposite the Falklands. In 1884 and 1885 the Argentine Government added ‘contiguity’ to its claims to the Falklands and added the Falklands to a semi-official map of Argentina, as a possession. The British Government answered politely but firmly – the question would not be re-opened. Although not satisfied, the Argentine Government maintained a dignified position: it would continue to regard the Falklands as an integral part of Argentina and maintain an attitude of protest – no resort to force or other coercion was even hinted.

This was as well, for in 1879, again as an economy measure, the small Marines garrison was withdrawn and defence was provided by deterrence only, in the form of the Royal Navy’s South American Squadron. The removal of the garrison was, in a way, beneficial, for the islands’ Government had had to contribute to its upkeep and the elimination of this expenditure allowed the settlement to become independent of the British Treasury in 1881, when local income at last exceeded expenditure.

In the same year the Montevideo-based South American Squadron paid a visit to Port Stanley that was remarkable in that, for the first time, members of the Royal Family were aboard to see the islands. The sons of the Prince of Wales, Prince Albert Victor and Prince George (later King George V) were midshipmen in HMS Bacchante, which arrived on 24 January but left within 24 hours, before the Princes could go ashore, having been summoned urgently to the Cape of Good Hope.

The Falklands at last became a full Colony on 29 February, 1892, by virtue of an Order-in-Council. A week earlier, the first purpose-built Anglican Church on the islands had been consecrated as Christ Church Cathedral, a suitable seat for the diocese of the Falklands, which included the whole of South America and which had been established in 1869. The temporal celebration in no way overshadowed the spiritual occasion, for news of the new colonial status did not reach Port Stanley until April, when the contract mail steamer arrived.

The monthly steamer was the only