Our Island Story: The Falklands

On the heels of the 60 volumes of the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography may seem curious to compile a biographical dictionary of the Falklands - relatively small and sparsely settled islands with a population of 2-3,000 inhabitants and a recorded history of just over four centuries. The idea came to me in 1995 when I was coming to the end of a three-year posting in Stanley as the 28th Governor of the Islands. I had chanced upon an obituary of a certain Christian Andreasen, a Danish settler who had played a notable part in Falklands history for it was he who first sighted and then tracked the arrival of Graf von Spee's German East Asiatic fleet in 1914, before it was destroyed by the British battlecruisers in the Battle of the Falkland Islands. It struck me then that there must be many other islanders who had lived interesting lives, worthy of record. I was aware, too, of the wealth of material available in the 19th-century letter-books of the Falkland Islands Government and of the number of Islanders who were keen students of their family histories.