John Byron
Royal Navy Officer and Explorer · 1723–1786
Who is John Byron?
John Byron, nicknamed "Foulweather Jack" for the storms that seemed to follow his voyages, was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer, and the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. He first encountered the Falklands as a young midshipman when his ship, HMS Wager, was wrecked off the coast of Chile in 1741 during Admiral Anson's ill-fated Pacific expedition, a disaster he later recounted in a widely read narrative. Between 1764 and 1766, now a commodore, Byron circumnavigated the globe and, in January 1765, landed on Saunders Island in the Falklands' western group, where he formally claimed the islands for Britain and established what became Port Egmont. In a letter to the Lords of the Admiralty, he praised the harbour there as one of the finest in the world, with ample fresh water and wildfowl, unaware that French settlers under Bougainville had already founded Port Louis on the eastern island the previous year. Byron's claim set the stage for a tense standoff between Britain, France, and Spain over the islands in the years that followed.
Sources: Falklands Biographies, "Byron, John (Foulweather Jack)" · Port Egmont, Wikipedia · British Empire, "Falkland Islands Colony - John Byron"