A Story of Two Isles

Well, i love a good story, I love history and I love humour. So let me mix all three and tell you a story, which never should have been humorous, in a humorous way.

It´s the story a of two tiny islands lost somewhere in the atlantic ocean. Sterile islands where almost nothing grows and where the penguins have been witnesses of many sunsets and many more conflicts that history remembers. As a story, its a pretty standard one, it has pirates, corsairs, imperial powers angrily armwrestling for control over the islands, and a lot of courage, corruption, salt, and treachery dare I say it, from all sides involved. However there are also some special things about it that make it unique, specially the sleepless nights the author of this post had to endure to write it. I´ll let the reader decide which side wants to take, which “team” he or she wants to root for, once the full story unravels.

It begins with over two hundred small islands, a long, long time ago when Ferdinand Magellan discovered them. I don´t know what on earth made him take interest in them, maybe he just loved penguins. Those islands biggest brothers are two islands called “Isla Gran Malvina”(Great Malvina Island) and “Isla Soledad”(Loneliness Island). They have also been named creatively “East Falkland” and “West Falkland” by the british and generally “Îles Malouines”(Which literally translates to “Malvinas Islands”) by the french, but we don´t really care about that since we can´t pronounce it without locking our tongues into a knot.

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settlements there. Since “ownership” was a loose term back then, they boldly sailed an expedition(remember, they had to endure a lot of months of high sea and no women, arriving to the dullest place which didnt even have a tavern), commanded by two illustrious captains, Nicolas Pierre Duclos-Guyot and François Chenard de la Giraudais and a ragtag, misfit crew, since those ships were filled to the brim with some of the 18.000 Acadians(French colonists who settled Acadia) that had been deported for refusing to swear loyalty to the british crown. These were displaced refugees from the British-French war of 1755. They had been expelled from the french colonies once the british took posession of them. So these refugees had sailed half the world, only to be deported to some remote islands on the other half of the world. That´s some tough luck! On 1764 they settled on a colony they founded on Isla Soledad which they called Port Saint-Louis and made a return trip to bring in more refugees.(Preferrably with wine)
The spanish(remember Argentina was not even an independent country then, it was a satellite colony sucking the tit of Spain), in a fit of rage, protested that those islands were directly linked to the Continent of Meridional America. You see? The islands have an undersea stretch of land, which is called “Continental Shelf” that enabled them to say that they were part of the territory that would later be known as Argentina. Seemingly, this initial fit of rage was not very loud, because it fell on deaf ears.

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Little was known then, that in the old continent, a plot was forming by the british to take those islands and settle them. The british have been considering for quite some time(since 1745) to send an expedition to settle those islands if they were deserted, or take them by force if they were inhabited. I bet they called that “mingling” 😂. They knew that the islands guarded the ONLY pass in the southern hemisphere to the pacific ocean, and would some day be the key to extending their empire into the pacific, but they were wary of angering the spanish. So they prepared a recon expedition in such secret, that even in their documents said their destination was the “Eastern Indies”, which was of course, a lie. They probably even practiced their evil-mode laughter a few times.

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England took this spanish affront badly, and the conflict was threatening to turn into a full scale war between those two powers. France by was bound by the “Family Pact” which commanded the nation to unite with the spanish against the british in the case of war. Which they did, with their deadliest weapon at the time: rhetoric, probably staying behind the strong spanish fleet and hurling a lot of “your momma” insults.

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Will this conflict turn into a full scale war? Stay tuned for the next episode our "breaking" news of what happened around 1770. (Seriously, I plan to cover the whole history of the falklands up ultil 2017, including the British-Argentine war of 1982.

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DISCLAIMER: Even though this saga of articles about the islands is written in a very humorous tone, about a week of extensive research and fact checking has been done to make it so. If you are easily offended, then you shouldn´t be here. Seriously, leave this place. If not, here I cite my main sources.

• https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_las_islas_Malvinas
• Conferencia del historiador Felipe Pigna en Universidad de San Martín sobre Malvinas
• Malvinas contado por los ingleses
• The Falklands War, full documentary
• The Falklands War, the untold story