Anchoring the Past in the Falklands

The Falkland Islands are celebrating their unique maritime history with publication of the first guide to the Stanley Harbour historic trail (by Graham Bound, (published by Falkland Islands Tourism). At the islands' new museum, where anchors and small boats decorate the garden, John Smith, the curator, has documented scores of wrecks around the islands.

These waters became graveyards to vessels which limped into sheltered waters to escape South Atlantic storms, only to be declared unfit to set sail again. Several became used as stores, moored alongside jetties. The growing awareness of these historic remains is timely – next year marks several anniversaries. It will be ten years since the conflict between Britain and Argentina, which has subsequently given rise to tours of battlefields and memorials.

Over 400 years ago, in 1592, the English navigator John Davis first set eyes on these islands – more than 200 of them forming a land mass the size of Wales. The Desire (his vessel) still forms part of the national flag. 1992 also marks the centenary of the cathedral – a large brick and stone building topped with a traditional red corrugated iron roof. In the middle of Stanley, it faces the sea near the hulk of the impressive Charles Cooper: the last survivor of the North Atlantic packet ships, whose carved transom is in the museum.

The Charles Cooper was built in America as a square rigger, and has dominated the Stanley waterfront since 1866, although she was bought by the South Street Seaport Museum, New York, in 1968. She shelters the smaller Actaeon – a 561-ton barque which sailed into Stanley in 1853, having failed to round the Horn.

In that year the Falkland Islands Company was just two years old and pioneer farmers were settling the land. Today the population is still only 2,000 civilians, but they are looking to a secure future, and a significant pointer to this is the planned opening in 1992 of a new £10 million secondary school funded by the Falkland Islands Government. Previously, islanders have taken their historic assets for granted but as the international world increasingly recognises the significance of their treasures, history teaching is gaining importance as a means for young islanders to get in touch with their roots. Historians from the National Maritime Museum in London and the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool are voyaging to the South Atlantic to research and document the legacy.

It is now twenty years since the most famous vessel – the SS Great Britain – was transported to her home port, Bristol, where she is a star attraction. A fragment remains behind. Outside the Upland Goose Hotel in Stanley, her wood and steel mizzen mast – nearly three-and-a-half feet in diameter – is mounted and labelled. The mast is described in the Stanley Harbour trail, along with some nearly intact ships, such as the magnificent 128 foot-long barque, the Jhelum, built in Liverpool in 1849, and described as 'the best preserved British-built wooden hulled merchant ship of the mid-nineteenth century'.

In the year of the Jhelum's maiden voyage, the Vicar of Bray was one of the 'forty-niners' – the 1,000 vessels which sailed to California in the gold rush. Also on East Falkland, the Vicar is the only survivor, and is now a couple of hours away by rough road at the end of the jetty at Goose Green, where typically, she served as a store room and is still crossed by planks to reach local fishing boats. Night herons have set up home in her gently rotting timbers, yet visitors see nothing to indicate her worth, nor the fact that she was bought by a Trust from San Francisco for a nominal sum with the idea of making her the centrepiece of a gold-rush museum. That was some twenty-five years ago: the millions of dollars needed to transport her have never been found and, like so many of the nineteenth-century vessels in the Falklands, she will gradually disintegrate slowly because the cold water is polluted.

Robin Lee – a direct descendent of early farmers – owns the tourist lodge at Port Howard on West Falkland, one of several, where those tempted by the islands' past might stay in settlements whose names ring with the memories of 1982. He has opened a museum of the 1982 conflict in a nissan hut in the garden. It shows ejector seat, parachute, uniforms and the basic rations of the Argentinians. A few miles away on open moorland lies the wreckage of one of their planes. Just outside Port Howard is the grave of the SAS officer, Captain John Hamilton. There are no visible maritime remains from the Falklands war beyond the coastal memorials to HMS Sheffield on Sea Lion Island. The battleships were scuttled in deep water.

Vessels still carry freight to the Falklands all the 8,000 miles from Britain. One recently arrived at Goose Green with a flock of cashmere goats, which may prove an extra income generator for farmers who have been hit by the drop in the price of wool. In the past, a few such boats remained on duty in the Falklands. Among those which continued to serve as an inter-island ferry was the Gentoo, which began life as Nancy, built around the start of the First World War with a steam engine. She arrived in 1927 and, according to John Smith in his booklet, Condemned at Stanley, worked for thirty-eight years. Eventually, in early 1982 she developed a serious leak and the events of that year dashed any further hopes of saving her. The Gentoo – named after a species of penguin – is one of the more modern boats now forming part of the largest visible fleet of wrecks in the world.