The islands carry names assigned by people passing through. The British surveyors Robert FitzRoy and Phillip Parker King christened Picton after Sir Thomas Picton, the first British governor of Trinidad. Lennox had first been sighted in 1624 by the Dutch admiral Schapenham, whose crew called it Terhalten before FitzRoy renamed it. Long before any European chart, the Yámana paddled these channels in bark canoes, hunting seals and gathering shellfish along shores that froze and thawed with the southern seasons. By the late nineteenth century the Chilean government was parceling out grazing concessions; one of them, on Picton, went to Thomas Bridges of nearby Harberton. Tiny settlements with names like Puerto Piedra and Caleta Oro flickered into existence and mostly faded again.

The trouble was a single geographic question with no obvious answer. Did the Beagle Channel, and therefore the border, run north of the three islands, making them Chilean, or south, making them Argentine? A 1977 arbitral award handed the islands to Chile. In January 1978 Argentina's military junta rejected the ruling outright. The stakes were never really about the islands themselves; they were about the maritime territory and the access to the Atlantic and the rich seas beyond. Two dictatorships, each desperate to look strong, locked themselves into a confrontation neither could easily abandon.

On 22 December 1978, Argentina launched Operation Soberanía, a plan to seize the islands and strike the Chilean mainland. Warships moved into position. Then, only hours in, the operation was called off, partly because of foul weather and partly because of what was arriving from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II had sent both presidents a personal plea for peace, and now he dispatched a mediator. In January 1979 the two countries signed the Act of Montevideo and accepted papal mediation. It took years more, but in 1984 a treaty signed in the Vatican gave the islands to Chile while splitting the surrounding waters. The peace held. It very nearly had not.

The brush with war left physical marks. Minefields were laid here, some of the last installed shortly after Argentina turned its attention to the Falklands in 1982, and from 2007 Chilean army and navy de-mining units worked for years to clear them. This was not the islands' first taste of distant wars, either. In December 1914, after the Battle of Coronel, Admiral Graf Spee's German squadron moored briefly off Picton on its way to disaster at the Falklands, an intrusion that pushed neutral Chile to fortify the anchorage. The same little harbour later helped fuel the Yelcho on her famous voyages to rescue Shackleton's stranded men from Antarctica. There is a literary footnote, too, fitting for so remote a place. Jules Verne set a late novel, Magellania, on Nueva Island, imagining a man called Kaw-djer whose motto was Neither God nor master and who wanted only to live beyond the reach of any flag. The 1881 boundary treaty, in Verne's telling, destroys his anarchist paradise by ending the region's status as land belonging to no one. It is a strange irony that the real islands would nearly trigger a war over exactly that question: whose land is this, at the end of the earth?