Empty isles got two names from one French port
The Falklands sit on the Patagonian Shelf about 500 kilometres east of southern South America. Uninhabited when Europeans arrived, they collected French, British, Spanish, and Argentine claims—and two enduring names from a sound and a Breton harbour.
John Strong’s English landing in 1690 named Falkland Sound for Anthony Cary, Fifth Viscount Falkland, and the islands later took the strait’s name. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s French settlers called them Îles Malouines after sailors from Saint-Malo, which became the Spanish Islas Malvinas. Since 1965 the UN has written Falkland Islands (Malvinas) in non-Spanish texts and the reverse in Spanish.
Fuegians from Patagonia may have visited in prehistoric times, and European discovery claims reach back to the sixteenth century without agreement. Nobody lived there until Bougainville founded Port Louis on East Falkland in 1764; a year later John Byron planted a British post at Port Egmont on Saunders Island. Britain withdrew its garrison in 1774, leaving a plaque that claimed the islands for George III, and Spain’s Río de la Plata viceroyalty took over administration.
In 1820 the American privateer David Jewett, acting on behalf of the Buenos Aires government of the Río de la Plata provinces, announced Buenos Aires’ 1816 claim to Spain’s former territories there. A garrison installed in October 1832 mutinied within a month, and British forces arrived the next year to reassert rule. Stanley, first called Port Jackson, became the seat of government in 1845, though ships rounding Cape Horn avoided it except in emergencies. From 1908 the colony also governed Britain’s subantarctic and Antarctic claims as the Falkland Islands Dependencies, and Juan Perón’s sovereignty claims later sharpened the dispute.
The 2021 census counted 3,662 people, about 30 percent of them temporary workers or staff at RAF Mount Pleasant. English is official, and islanders are British citizens. Straddling subantarctic and tundra climates, both main islands carry mountains of about 700 metres, and many seabirds no longer breed there because of introduced predators.
Source: Falkland Islands
