Weddell Island () is one of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, lying off the southwest extremity of West Falkland. It is situated west-northwest of South Georgia Island, north of Livingston Island, northeast of Cape Horn, northeast of Isla de los Estados, and east of the Atlantic entrance to Magellan Strait.
With an area of Weddell is the third largest island in the archipelago after East Falkland and West Falkland, and one of the largest private islands in the world. It has only one inhabited location, Weddell Settlement, with a single digit population engaged in sheep farming and tourism services. The island offers walks to wildlife watching sites and scenery destinations including some spectacular landscapes featuring the famous Falklands stone runs. Weddell is both an Important Plant Area and a priority Key Biodiversity Area.
It is a remote place, infrequently visited by a resupply ship and occasionally by private yachts, accessible by air with a short (some ) if expensive flight from the Falklands capital, Stanley.
Etymology
Until the mid-nineteenth century Weddell Island was known as Swan Island, a name of unknown derivation recorded as early as 1785 by Capt. George Dixon, a seasoned mariner who had sailed under James Cook. Amused by this particular name and the Falklands place naming in general, he wrote: Though these islands are universally known by the name of Falkland’s, yet many of them are called by different names, just, I presume, as the fancy of different cruisers have suggested; I just mention this circumstance to prevent thy surprise, on seeing such names as Swan Island, Keppel’s Island &c &c.
The present name of the island comes from James Weddell, a British sealer and explorer who visited the Falklands in 1819–1824, overwintered once in 1820, and then a second time in May–September 1823 ashore on the island at Quaker Harbour. Weddell's book A Voyage Towards the South Pole documented, inter alia, certain events and persons of local history, including his running across the privateer David Jewett and the former castaway Charles Barnard. He is well known for his voyages to the Antarctic, and the Weddell seal and the geographic features Weddell Point and Weddell Glacier on South Georgia, and Weddell Sea (discovered by him in February 1823), Weddell Plain, Weddell Arm, Weddell Islands (name given by Weddell himself) and Weddell Lake in Antarctica are all named in association with him.
History
Discovery
thumb|190px|Capt. [[John MacBride (Royal Navy officer)|John MacBride, the discoverer of Weddell Island; portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1788]]
thumb|270px|[[John MacBride (Royal Navy officer)|MacBride's chart featuring Weddell Island (nameless); the ship track depicted is that of HMS Jason in 1766]]
thumb|190px|Weddell Island is named after [[James Weddell]]
The island was discovered in 1766 by the British navigator and accomplished military commander John MacBride during the first hydrographic survey of the Falklands archipelago carried out by his ship HMS Jason out of Port Egmont, the early British settlement situated on Saunders Island off the northwest coast of West Falkland. Of his new discoveries Capt. MacBride wrote unfavourably: We found a mass of islands and broken lands, beaten by storms almost perpetual. His temperature records for the area were more agreeable though. In January and February the thermometer rose to , but no higher; in August, it once fell to , but was seldom lower than . As a result of that survey Weddell Island appeared on MacBride's chart of the Falklands, one of the most accurate for its time. Capt. James Cook, who surveyed and mapped South Georgia but did not visit the Falklands, based his 1777 chart of the islands on MacBride's one, inheriting some of its specific characteristics. For instance, both charts fail to show the secluded bay of Port Stephens, applying its name to present Port Albemarle instead.
Judging from contemporaneous mapping, the island was unknown to the French who established the first Falklands settlement, Port St. Louis in 1764. (April 1768 according to other sources). Following a survey of the island and its principal embayment Chatham Harbour carried out by Capt. Manuel Pando in the ship San Francisco de Paula in July 1770, Weddell appeared on the map made by the ship's pilot Joseph Puig (and widely copied by other Spanish cartographers) together with Beaver and New Islands, the group denoted as Yslas de San Miguel. Puig, a Catalan, named the large bay Puerto de San Joseph after his own name saint, which name was subsequently applied to the island itself and Hispanicized to Isla San José. Such naming practices were not uncommon at the time, indeed San Miguel was Bernasani's name saint, while Port St. Louis honoured the name saint of the French navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville.
Early history
The early inhabitants of the island were seal hunters. While some seal skins were taken from the Falklands by Bougainville in 1764, a large scale sealing industry was only developed since the 1770s by American and British sealers who frequented Weddell and nearby islands in the process. The first to bring their sealing vessels to the Falklands were probably Capts. Gamaliel Collins, David Smith and Greenwood from New England in 1774. Due to the nature of their trade, the sealers used to spend extensive periods of time ashore, and sometimes overwintered. So did Capt. Greenwood in his vessel King George at Port Egmont in 1774, and the British sealer United States under Capt. Benjamin Hussey in 1785 in Hussey Harbour – probably the estuary States Harbour on the southeast side of States Bay (current names States Cove and Chatham Harbour respectively). On the local conditions for survival, American sealer Edmund Fanning reviewed the available sources of food and fuel to conclude in his memoirs: In fact, a person would be able to subsist at the Falkland Islands for a considerable length of time, without experiencing any great degree of suffering. As a reminder of that period, many place names in the Weddell Island area honour sealers and sealing vessels, mostly American.
The sealers favoured Weddell and nearby Beaver Island and New Island as a base for their operations in the Falklands and South Georgia on several grounds. First, the islands offered a number of excellent harbours providing shelter against sudden westerly gales. Second, the sealers preferred to keep some distance away from the Spanish settlement of Puerto Soledad (present Port Louis) situated at the opposite extremity of the archipelago, about away by sea. Spain was hostile, regarding sealer presence and activities as a challenge to its sovereignty claim of the Falklands. Nevertheless, the Spaniards refrained from using force against the sealers, and following the abandonment of Puerto Soledad in 1811, sealer presence spread throughout the Falklands. Finally, with the discovery of Livingston Island and other territories south of 60° south latitude in 1819, the location of the Falklands’ southwesternmost islands made them the ideal staging post for a final southbound sailing leg to the new hunting grounds in Antarctica, with an occasional stopover at Staten Island (present Isla de los Estados) for the provision of necessary timber unavailable on the Falklands.
The Americans came to regard the Falklands seal fisheries as their traditional industry pursued freely since before the American Revolution, and did not hesitate to deploy the US Navy in protection of that industry from an Argentine attempt to curb American seal hunting by force in 1831. That ill-conceived attempt had long-lasting implications for the future of the islands, paving the way to a reassertion of British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands in 1833.
A Robinson Crusoe mise-en-scène
thumb|270px|[[Charles Barnard (castaway)|Capt. Barnard, his companions and their boat in front of their stone built hut on New Island, December 1813; the left side beach is occupied by a seal colony]]
In a famous Robinson Crusoe-like episode of Falklands history, American sealer Capt. Charles Barnard got marooned in the area from 11 June 1813 to 25 November 1814, together with four sailors – Jacob Green (American), and Joseph Albrook, James Louder and Samuel Ansel (Britons), accompanied by the captain's most helpful dog named Cent, and in possession of a whaleboat. The castaways built several shelters on Weddell (Swan Island to them) while hunting feral hogs and collecting drift wood for subsistence. Under the circumstances, one of them, Ansel, developed an aggressive attitude and was temporarily exiled by his companions to survive alone at Quaker Harbour from 28 December 1813 to 16 February 1814. In the vicinity of his tussac-built bivouac, the graves and headstones of two men were found a mile up the bay who, Barnard reasoned, must have been buried long since, as the letters were almost effaced from the stones. Following his encounter with James Weddell on New Island in 1821, the latter popularized Barnard's castaway story by his book published in 1825. Certain inaccuracies in Weddell's retelling of events and his attempt at embellishing his compatriots’ motives for taking over Barnard's ship Nanina and claiming it as a prize of the War of 1812 (subsequently, Barnard appealed successfully against the London prize court judgement and got his ship restored to him), probably prompted the American to write his Narrative of Sufferings and Adventures book published in 1829.
Barnard would later become a prominent figure in the Antarctic seal fishery, and Barnard Point and Rotch Dome on Livingston Island in the South Shetland Islands are named after him and two other American pioneers of Falklands and Antarctic sealing, the brothers Francis and William Rotch. Barnard named two features in the vicinity of Weddell Island after himself – Barnard's Island and Barnard's Harbour, present Dyke Island and Carew Harbour respectively. In particular, neither land mines nor naval mines have been planted in the Weddell Island area, and indeed, anyplace west of Fox Bay, West Falkland.
On 5 June 1982, while en route from Falkland Sound to Chatham Harbour, the diesel-electric submarine HMS Onyx commanded by Lt. Cdr. Andrew Johnson – the only non nuclear powered Royal Navy sub to serve in the war – struck a pinnacle of rock off Cape Meredith at depth, which upon subsequent dry-dock examination at Portsmouth Naval Base turned out to have damaged two torpedo tubes and dangerously impacted one of the torpedoes. On the occasion, the submarine proceeded with the transportation of a six-member Special Boat Service detachment led by Lieut. David Boyd and Sgt. William Lewis to carry out reconnaissance of Weddell Island, take out any observation posts providing guidance for approaching enemy aircraft (none, it turned out), and insert a British team to send last minute warnings of the number and flight directions of inbound Argentine Air Force planes.
Shipwrecks and burials
Five vessels were reportedly lost in Weddell waters: the schooner Castalia dragged ashore in 1893, the pilot schooner Hadassah wrecked in Smylie Channel in 1896, the cutter Messenger dragged ashore in 1920, and the cutter Weddell sunk at Dyke Island whilst being towed to Weddell Island in 1939.
There is a total of sixteen recorded graves on the island, including the earliest two found by Barnard in 1813. Half of them are in the Weddell Settlement Cemetery, with the first one dated 1889. Some deaths had to do with the poor emergency medical aid available to such remote places in the past.
Geography
thumb|270px|Map of the Weddell Island area featuring the island's airfield, roads and remote huts, and [[RRH Mount Alice station on West Falkland]]
Weddell Island is bounded by Queen Charlotte Bay on the east and Smylie Channel on the south, and is surrounded by a number of minor islands including Dyke Island to the southeast, Sea Dog Island and Horse Block (a conspicuous sea stack) to the southwest, Tea Island, Staats Island and Governor Island to the west, Beaver Island to the northwest, and Penn Island, Barclay Island and Quaker Island to the north, with New Island lying further away on the northwest.
The island is roughly inverted triangular in shape, almost entirely bisected by Chatham Harbour. Weddell extends in south–north direction and in east–west direction. Its highly indented coastline is long. Bar its northeastern lowland part, the island is mostly hilly. Pitt Heights (elevation ) are situated in the northwest and Hotham Heights () in the west, while the south-central part of the island is occupied by certain nameless oval shaped heights that extend in east–west direction and in south–north direction, and feature the island's summit Mount Weddell rising to .
Climate
Weddell has a maritime climate in the transition region between the tundra and subpolar zones under the Köppen-Geiger climate classification. It is influenced by the island's location north and west of the physical boundary of the Antarctic region, the Antarctic Convergence running broadly S-shaped in between the Falklands and South Georgia, and east of the southern Andes topographic barrier. The weather on Weddell Island is slightly warmer and notably more arid than that in Stanley, with an average annual temperature of about and 500 mm annual precipitation, as compared to and 600 mm in the latter. The variation between the average temperature of the warmest months (January and February) and that of the coldest months (June and July) is just -9 °C (16.2 °F). The extreme temperatures recorded on Weddell Island are and .
By way of comparison, Weddell has an annual temperature graph very similar to that of the Faroe Islands. While the former is located at the same geographic latitude in the Southern Hemisphere as that of London (not the Faroes) in the Northern and, accordingly, the Nordic archipelago lies over nearer than Weddell to the relevant geographical pole, as far as temperatures are concerned that is compensated by the climatic influences of the cold water Falklands Current and the warm water Norwegian Current respectively. However, the similarity does not extend to precipitation as the Faroes get two and a half times more rainfall than Weddell does.
Weddell Island Group
This island group in the Falklands archipelago comprises the following insular features associated with Weddell Island, i.e. lying closer to it than to neighbouring Beaver Island or New Island (which have island groups of their own), or to West Falkland:
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:1em auto;"
! Island || Coordinates || Island || Coordinates
|-
| Bald Island || || Useless Island ||
|-
| Barclay Island || || n/a (island) ||
|-
| Carthorse Island || || Quaker Passage Islet ||
|-
| Circum Island || || Penn Island ||
|-
| Cliff Island || || Pitt Island ||
|-
| Fox Island || || Skull Bay Island ||
|-
| Gull Island || || Smylie Rock ||
|-
| Harbour Island || || Stick in the Mud Island ||
|-
| Hill Island || || Stop Islet ||
|-
| Horse Block || || Quaker Island ||
|-
| Letterbox Island || || Weddell Island ||
|-
| Low Island ||
|}
Mapping
thumb|270px|Location of Weddell within the Falkland Islands; the Outlying Islands are shown in colours different from those of [[East Falkland|East and West Falkland]]
Because of the Falklands' extremely indented and irregular coastline, remote location and rather late and slow process of settling the originally uninhabited islands, their mapping remained rudimentary up to the late 18th century. It was not until after the early British and Spanish hydrographic and land surveys in 1766–1770 that the islands were mapped faithfully to any detail, first their northeastern and northwestern parts where Port St. Louis (later renamed Puerto Soledad) and Port Egmont settlements were located respectively, and eventually their southeastern and southwestern areas.
Stone runs
The modern Falklands landscape owes some of its most remarkable aspects to the polar climate of the last ice age. The islands have largely remained free of glaciers, with the exception of a few small ones on the highest hills. Nevertheless, they were repeatedly deep-frozen and battered by icy winds. The erosion of particular rock varieties caused by myriad freezing-thawing cycles taking place in periglacial conditions during the last Ice Age produced the dramatic stone runs, one of the most enigmatic features of the local landscape originally noted by Bougainville's naturalist Antoine-Joseph Pernety in 1764:
The young Darwin, who visited and explored the Falklands twice, in March 1833 and March–April 1834, wrote: