Word: falklander
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When he surprised the world by ordering Argentine troops to seize the Falkland Islands two weeks ago, President Leopoldo Fortunate Galtieri, 55, enhanced his image at home as a bold and decisive leader. It was a daring stroke by a man who has some times been underestimated by his countrymen. During the ill-fated administration of Eduardo Viola, Galtieri quietly engineered the "retirement" of two rival generals and replaced them with men loyal to him self. The move assured Galtieri's path to the presidency last December. A military man who states his views explicitly with few ifs, ands...
...around the world, from Africa and Asia to the Pacific islands and the Americas. Today Britain is part of the 46-nation Commonwealth, a loose political and trade association composed of its old possessions, now completely independent. Britain still claims only a clutch of 13 tiny dependencies, including the Falkland Islands, the British Virgins, Anguilla, St. Helena, Bermuda, Pitcairn Island and the uninhabited British Antarctic Territory. Britain's two most important holdings are Gibraltar, which Spain would like to reclaim, and the free-trade port of Hong Kong...
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...
...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...
...first to settle among the penguins, though, were French colonists organized by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who wrote mournfully of the "vast silence broken only by the occasional cry of a sea monster." The French were building a tiny fort in Port Louis on East Falkland in 1764; the British reappeared the next year and began creating a settlement in West Falkland called Port Egmont...