History
The first Europeans in the area were Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten on December 25, 1615, who named it Country of the Lords of the State. Le Maire and Schouten passed their ship, Eendracht, through a route south of the Straits of Magellan, a route now called the Le Maire Strait. To his left Le Maire noted the land mass (unexplored) as Staten Landt was perhaps a portion of the great 'Southern Continent.' The first European name for New Zealand was Staten Landt, the name given to it by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who in 1642 became the first European to see the islands. Tasman assumed it was part of this 'Southern Continent.'
Dutch captain Hendrik Brouwer sighted it in 1643. Argentine pilot Luis Piedra Buena constructed a shelter near Port Cook in 1862, and built a small seal oil extraction facility on the island.
The Light house of San Juan del Salvamento was inaugurated on May 25 1884, by Comodoro Augusto Lasserre, and functioned until September 1900. The lighthouse, better known as Faro del fin del mundo ("Lighthouse at the end of the world"), is said to have inspired Jules Verne's book The Lighthouse at the End of the World, published in 1905. A military prison was set on the island, working from 1899 to 1902, when it had to be moved to Tierra del Fuego after being compromised by the strong winds.
Read more about this topic: Isla De Los Estados
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)