Gran Colombia declared war on Peru in June 1828. Its leader, Simon Bolivar, was furious at what he saw as Peruvian interference in Bolivia, and he wanted payment on debts still owed from the Peruvian War of Independence - several million pesos, he insisted. He also wanted the northern provinces of Jaen and Maynas. Peru, under President Jose de La Mar, declared war in return on July 3rd, mobilizing army and navy. The real question was whether the war would be decided on land in the Andean highlands or at sea off the coast Bolivar needed to hold. Both sides quickly reached for ships and captains, and in South America in 1828, that meant reaching across oceans for men who could fight them.

The Peruvian corvette Libertad had a tangled origin. She began life as General Brown, was sold to Chile in January 1826 for 25,000 pesos, became General Salom in Peruvian hands, served briefly as a transport, and was finally renamed Libertad on March 6, 1827. In January 1828, Rear Admiral Jose Pascual de Vivero approved 7,354 pesos to turn the transport into a warship, fitting her with 22 twelve-pounder guns stripped from the corvette Limena. By August she carried 24 guns and a crew of 124. Her captain was Carlos Garcia del Postigo Bulnes, a Chilean officer in Peruvian service - the kind of transnational career the wars of independence produced in abundance. On July 2nd, 1828, the Libertad sailed for Guayaquil with orders to cross the Gulf and guard the entrance to the Guayaquil River.

On August 31st, two Gran Colombian warships intercepted the Libertad off Punta Malpelo. The schooner Guayaquilena and the corvette Pichincha sailed under Captain Thomas C. Wright, an Irish-born officer whose career had carried him from the British Navy to South American service. Wright, aboard the Guayaquilena, hailed the Peruvian vessel and demanded to know what she was doing in Gran Colombian waters. Before the exchange could continue, the Libertad opened fire. What followed was a close-quarter artillery duel rather than a set-piece battle. The Peruvians pressed so hard they nearly boarded the Guayaquilena. The Pichincha, inexplicably, hung back and never joined the fight. At the height of the struggle, the Gran Colombian ships suddenly broke off and retreated toward Guayaquil. The Libertad pursued until she had to break off herself - not for damage to her hull but to tend her wounded and bury her dead.

The arithmetic was brutal for both sides. The Peruvians counted 15 killed and 28 wounded. The Gran Colombians counted 24 killed and 36 wounded. Nobody took a prize. Nobody broke a fleet. But the Guayaquilena carried, among her officers, ensign Jose Maria Urvina and midshipman Francisco Robles. Both men would one day become presidents of Ecuador - Urvina from 1852 to 1856, Robles from 1856 to 1859. Robles is the same president whose 1859 resignation would eventually lead to the Battle of Guayaquil and the Treaty of Mapasingue. On this August day in 1828, he was a teenager riding gun smoke in a war between countries neither of which was yet his own.

The Peruvian Navy, 16 warships and transports strong with the frigate Presidente at its heart, used the momentum of Punta Malpelo to declare a blockade on September 19th of the entire Gran Colombian Pacific coast, from Machala in present-day Ecuador all the way up to Panama. The blockade held. Gran Colombia's Pacific ports were paralyzed through the final months of the war. The Gran Colombian–Peruvian War's major fighting ended with the La Mar-Sucre Convention in late February 1829, and the formal Treaty of Guayaquil followed that September, with both sides essentially where they had started. But the Peruvian Navy had fought its first real combat as an independent force, and a Chilean captain named Garcia del Postigo had delivered it a working myth. The Libertad survived. The war passed. The borders Bolivar demanded would remain disputed for generations - as the Treaty of Mapasingue, thirty-one years later, would prove.