A Place Fit for Buccaneers

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."