Darwin was sailing with HMS Beagle when the 1835 earthquake devastated nearby Concepción, and he came ashore to study the aftermath. On Santa María he found the clearest proof of all: a freshly uplifted coastline, the recent shells of dead shellfish lifted clear of the water all at once. Traveling inland, he discovered the same marine remains high in the hills, the residue of countless earlier upheavals. The island had handed him a working model of how a coast becomes a mountain range. The lesson was not theoretical here. On 27 February 2010, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck the same waters, and surveys afterward recorded the coast jumping upward by as much as three meters again - Darwin's mechanism caught in the act, a lifetime's geology compressed into a single morning.

Long before the science, the island drew Europeans hungry for the riches of the Pacific. The Genoese navigator Juan Bautista Pastene made the first confirmed landfall in 1550, sailing for the Spanish crown. In 1587 the English privateer Thomas Cavendish anchored here with seventy men and was met not with hostility but hospitality - the Mapuche greeted his crew, traded with them, and were entertained aboard his ship before he sailed on. The Dutch came too: Simon de Cordes paused for two desperate months in 1599 during a circumnavigation that was already falling apart, his fleet scattered by fog and a faulty map. For ships rounding the bottom of the world, this small island with its good harbors was a rare and welcome certainty.

In 1643 the island figured in one of the boldest schemes ever aimed at Spanish Chile. The Dutch East and West India Companies sent an expedition under Hendrick Brouwer to seize a foothold on the coast, with Santa María among the sites considered for its isolation and fine harbors. Brouwer struck a pact with the Mapuche, who were then fighting their long War of Arauco against Spain, but he died at sea before the work was done. His successor occupied the ruins of Valdivia for barely two months before withdrawing. The episode ended with a grim coda: when the Spanish retook the site, they dug up Brouwer's body and burned it. The island had watched another empire reach for South America and fall short.

On 1 November 1914, the most consequential event in the island's history unfolded just to its northwest. In the open water off Coronel, Vice-Admiral von Spee's German East Asia Squadron met and destroyed a British force under Rear-Admiral Cradock. The Germans lost three men wounded; the British lost over 1,600 sailors and two armoured cruisers, Good Hope and Monmouth, both with all hands. It was Britain's first naval defeat since the War of 1812, a shock that reverberated to London and would be answered with vengeance at the Falklands five weeks later. The men who died sank within sight of this low green coast, and the island that had welcomed privateers and survived invasions became the silent landmark of a battle that changed the war at sea.

Today the island belongs mostly to its wildlife. Its rocky coasts shelter South American sea lions and have been named an Important Bird Area for the great colonies of shearwaters, diving-petrels, cormorants, and Franklin's gulls that crowd its shores. Now and then the sea delivers a stranger gift - thousands of dead squid and cuttlefish washed up at once, a phenomenon scientists tie to the warming pulses of El Niño. There are wrecks here too, like the sailing ship Garthwray, driven aground in fog in 1924 after twice being dismasted off Cape Horn. And the island holds a place in American literature: Herman Melville set his dark novella Benito Cereno, a tale of a revolt by enslaved people aboard a Spanish ship, on these very waters.