Few small places have changed hands, or names, so often. The French called it Port Saint Louis. When Spain took over in 1767 and ran the islands as a naval outpost administered from Montevideo, it became Puerto Soledad, the port of Isla Soledad. The British later renamed it Anson's Harbour, then restored the old French name, Port Louis. The Spanish governor was removed in 1806, and by 1811 the settlement was abandoned altogether. Each empire left a layer behind on the same windswept shore: French turf, Spanish stone, British survey markers, an Argentine claim. The harbour kept them all and outlasted them all, returning each time to grass and silence.

In October 1820 the harbour gave shelter to a ship in real distress. Colonel David Jewett limped in with the frigate Heroina, the end of a catastrophic eight-month voyage that had seen a mutiny and most of his crew laid low by scurvy and disease. Even in port the crew nearly mutinied again, desperate to turn back for Buenos Aires. Jewett was rescued, in part, by the British Antarctic explorer James Weddell, who happened to be in the islands and helped him ready the ship for sea. It is the kind of encounter the Falklands have always produced: two ships from opposite ends of the world, thrown together by foul weather at the edge of the map, helping each other survive.

The settlement's most ambitious chapter belonged to Luis Vernet, a Hamburg-born merchant who in 1828 was granted all of East Falkland, with exclusive fishing and sealing rights, by the authorities in Buenos Aires. Settling at the old Spanish capital, he revived the name Puerto Luis and by 1831 was advertising for colonists, though life on the boggy islands was hard and the colony stayed small. Vernet hedged his bets carefully: knowing Britain still claimed the islands, he had quietly sought British approval for his ventures and asked that, should the British return, they take his colony under their protection. He hunted seals, curbed rivals, and in 1831 seized the American ship Harriet for breaking his restrictions. That seizure brought disaster down on the colony.

The United States did not recognise Buenos Aires's authority over the islands, and when Vernet seized American sealers, the U.S. consul dispatched the warship USS Lexington. In 1832 the Lexington's crew destroyed the guns and powder of Puerto Luis; an American ambassador later declared the Falklands res nullius, free of any power. Forty settlers seized the chance to leave aboard the warship, and twenty-four were left behind in the wreckage of the colony. Into that turmoil the British stepped in 1833, reasserting their claim. In March or April that year a young naturalist named Charles Darwin came ashore from HMS Beagle, unimpressed by the grim little outpost. After the administration moved to Stanley in 1845, Port Louis settled into the role it still holds.

Today Port Louis is a working sheep farm, one of the oldest inhabited spots in the South Atlantic, where the drama of empires has given way to the cries of waterfowl and wading birds along the shore of Berkeley Sound. Its nineteenth-century stone houses still stand, weathered but solid, looking out over the same grey water that carried Bougainville's Acadians, Jewett's mutinous crew, and Darwin's curiosity. The fort is long gone to grass. But the sense of standing at the beginning of something, the first roof, the first furrow, the first flag, lingers in the wind off the bay, where the modern history of the Falklands first took root.