A Place Fit for Buccaneers

By Otto Friedrich

There are about 10 million penguins (if any penguin census can be believed), mainly Magellans, gentoos and rock hoppers. There are also sooty shearwaters, kelp geese, oyster catchers, ground-tyrants, king shags and occasionally a black-browed albatross.

There are about 650,000 sheep. There used to be 100,000 wild cattle too, but they almost all got killed, as did the elsewhere-unknown "wolf fox," called the warrah. There are also sea lions, sometimes in colonies as large as 300, and elephant seals up to four tons in weight.

There are even 1,800 people, who shear the sheep, shoot the geese and occasionally eat penguin eggs. Almost all of the residents are of Scottish, Irish or Welsh descent and passionately claim allegiance to the distant monarchy that many of them have never seen (one of the three secular holidays celebrated every year is April 21, Her Majesty's birthday). And now there are about 5,000 Argentine troops who declare that the place is theirs.

Such are the Falkland Islands, the rainswept archipelago about 300 miles east of the Strait of Magellan, which is perhaps the most bizarre scene for an armed conflict since the Orcs attacked J.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. The two main islands, East Falkland (2,550 sq. mi.) and West Falkland (1,750 sq. mi.), surrounded by a shoal of 200 islets, cover an area about the size of Connecticut.* The prevailing west winds are so fierce that the Falklands have no trees, and, rumors of offshore oil notwithstanding, there are virtually no natural resources except grass. There are also no newspapers or television sets and no paved roads outside the little capital of Port Stanley (pop. 1,050). And in pre-Argentine days, not even the town jail was locked. To Fred Strebeigh, a tutor at Yale who paid a long visit to the islands, Police Chief Terry Peck explained: "We haven't got hardened criminals here."

The conflict over the Falklands originates in disputed versions of previous quarrels, and they all combine into something rich and strange. The British have long claimed that the place was probably first sighted in 1592 by Captain John Davis, whose ship named Desire was driven off course by what he called "a sore storme" and found haven "among certaine isles never before discovered." Two years later, another Briton, Sir Richard Hawkins, proclaimed the islands "Hawkins' Maiden-land" in honor of Queen Elizabeth I and "in a perpetual memory of her chastitie." Some maintain, however, that Magellan's expedition first sighted the islands in 1520. Others speculate that the discoverer was an anonymous Viking, or even a roving Fijian or Chinese.

The first mariner who kept a record of actually landing there was yet another Briton, John Strong, who arrived in 1690 and artfully named the place after the First Lord of the Admiralty, Viscount Falkland, who never came near the islands. Strong was gratified at the friendly reception by what a shipmate called "the inhabitants, such as they were [i.e., the penguins]. Being mustered in infinite numbers on a rock," he wrote, "upon some of our men landing, they stood, viewed and then seemed to salute them with a great many graceful bows, with the same gestures, equally expressing their curiosity and good breeding."

The first to settle among the penguins, though, were French colonists organized by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who wrote mournfully of the "vast silence broken only by the occasional cry of a sea monster." The French were building a tiny fort in Port Louis on East Falkland in 1764; the British reappeared the next year and began creating a settlement in West Falkland called Port Egmont.

The two colonies remained cheerfully unaware of each other's existence for two years. When the British accidentally discovered the French, they ordered them to depart, but while the colonists elbowed each other, the Spanish argued that the Papal Line of Demarcation of 1492 had awarded the whole region to them. The French sold out to Spain for -L-24,000, and Port Louis was renamed Puerto de la Soledad. The British, expelled by Spanish troops in 1770 from Port Egmont, talked fiercely of war. Or at least some London politicians did; the government tried to calm the public belligerence by hiring London's most talented polemicist, Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson obliged with a pamphlet calling the Falklands "an island which not even the southern savages have dignified with habitation." It was a place fit only for smugglers and buccaneers, he wrote, and any British garrison sent there would "contemplate with envy the exiles of Siberia."

Johnson's sneers proved prophetic. Although British diplomats won Spain's permission to maintain a settlement in the Falklands, London was preoccupied with the rebellion in its North American colonies and abandoned Port Egmont in 1774 as "uneconomical." In departing, though, the British commander nailed up a lead plaque that said: "Be it known to all nations that Falkland's Islands. . . are the sole property of His Most Sacred Majesty, George the Third, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland . . ."

A Spanish governor ruled in somnolent serenity until 1806, when Spain was succumbing to Napoleon, and Spanish rule in Buenos Aires was attacked by the British. The Spanish governor of the Falklands decided to flee, leaving the islands without any government at all. The population dwindled to a few lawless gauchos and wandering fishermen.

When the Argentines declared their independence in 1816, they claimed they had inherited Spanish sovereignty over the offshore islands that they called Las Malvinas. Nobody paid much attention, however, and several years passed before the Argentines made any attempt to take possession. They then appointed an ambitious cosmopolitan named Louis Vernet to be governor of the Malvinas, with exclusive fishing rights in the surrounding waters. That brought on a clash in 1831 with a new power: the U.S. Three American sealing schooners denied Vernet's authority, so Vernet seized them and took one ship with its crew to Buenos Aires for prosecution. There U.S. Consul George Slacum demanded that Vernet be prosecuted for piracy. When the Argentines demurred, the patrolling U.S. Navy corvette Lexington went to wreak vengeance. Commander Silas Duncan attacked Vernet's headquarters at Soledad, spiked all the cannons, blew up all the ammunition, sacked the settlement, and sailed away with seven of Vernet's aides in irons (they were eventually released in Montevideo, but Argentine demands for compensation went on for 53 years).

This would be a splendid time, the British decided, to reassert their claims to the Falklands. The British warship Clio arrived there in 1833 to take charge. The ship's commander found only 50 Argentine soldiers defending the place, so he simply ordered them to depart and ran up the Union Jack. The U.S., by not invoking the new Monroe Doctrine, tacitly approved. The Argentines protested to London, where Lord Palmerston calmly let six months pass before deigning to reply that the islands belonged to His Majesty. The Argentines renewed their protests--regularly, and in vain--for the next century and a half.

One of the first Britons to visit the new acquisition was Charles Darwin, outward-bound on H.M.S. Beagle to investigate the workings of nature. He found the Falklands about as Dr. Johnson had described them, "miserable islands . . . desolate and wretched."

To this remote outpost, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought an increasing number of American vessels, which stopped for repairs and supplies just before or after the ordeal of rounding the Horn. The Americans were not always the best of guests. The captains of two whaling vessels, the Hudson and the Washington, were officially charged by the British with "killing a large number of hogs" in the course of eight months' poaching. Once again, a U.S. Navy corvette raced to the scene to defend American commerce. While the U.S.S. Germantown kept its 32-pounder guns trained on the courthouse in Port Stanley, the understandably nervous authorities sentenced the two captains to a nominal fine of only -L- 1 for each of 22 hogs.

The hogs had belonged to the Falkland Islands Company, and so did, gradually, almost everything else on the island. The company, organized by some enterprising merchants, won a Royal Charter from Queen Victoria in 1852 to begin the economic development of the colony, and that year it imported the first 46 hardy Cheviot sheep. (The Queen was later to donate -L- 30 toward the building of Christ Church Cathedral, a white clapboard edifice with a red corrugated-iron roof.) By 1860, possessing 200 Cheviots and Southdowns and 6,000 half-breeds, the company began buying up all the land it could--and sent in shepherds to work on it. It eventually acquired 1.3 million acres, nearly half of all the land in the Falklands. The company also owns the sheep, the warehouses where their wool is stored, the ships that carry it to Britain and the market there where it is sold.

The company's century-long rule has combined with the constant wind and rain to keep the Falklands in a state that a local Anglican priest has called "positively feudal." To some, this all seems a charming escape from the stresses and conflicts of the outside world. People born on the island proudly call themselves "kelpers," for the seaweed that grows thickly offshore. Visitors relish the fact that the milkman arrives at the door with his cow and then produces just enough milk to fill a bottle. Or that the big social event of the year is a week-long series of sheep-dog trials, sheep-shearing contests, horse races and other bucolic competitions. Or that the only telephone line is a single strand on which the islanders not only eavesdrop but into which they even plug their radios for family entertainment. Legend has it that one vengeful curmudgeon attached the lone telephone wire to an electric power outlet and blew out the radios in the Falklands.

But for all this blessed solitude and charming eccentricity, the islands have their faults. If exports to London have far exceeded imports every year (by $2.5 million in 1981), does that mean the Falklands are being systematically exploited? And if the shortage of social services is so picturesque, why has emigration kept the population steadily shrinking since 1931, when it was 2,392? An average of 200 days of rain per year is one reason for the discontent, but the picturesque life at an average annual cash income of $6,500 is little better than simple poverty. Mutton--stewed, ham-burgered or grilled--shows up at most meals. Drinking is a favorite sport; discarded beer cans are everywhere, even in peat deposits.

Life in such isolation has odd rewards and odd drawbacks. Yale's Strebeigh asked one oldtimer named Horace Binnie whether he ever wanted to see anything of the world outside West Falkland, and he promptly said, "No." Then he thought for a minute. He had often heard beautiful music on his radio, he said, but he had never actually seen a concert. "I think I'd like to be there," he said. "I'd like to see a real good opera singer."

With luck, he will not see a real good war.

--By Otto Friedrich.

--Reported by James Shepherd/London

*The Argentines also claim two Falkland dependencies, South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands, some 800 and 1,300 miles to the east. Both places are uninhabited except for a few British Antarctic scientists on South Georgia.

With reporting by James Shepherd

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