This is Alessandro VI or Alexander VI if you prefer and he was Pope from 11 August 1492 until his death aged 72 on 18 August 1503. His reign coincided with the first European arrivals in America and the competition between Portugal and what was to become Spain, or to be more precise, Aragon and Castille, for control of those lands about to be occupied by the European powers. In order to share out the foreseen booty, the Treaty of Tordesillas was agreed upon on 7 June 1494 when this Pope established a demarcation line at a distance 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, i.e. between 48 degrees and 49 degrees west of Greenwich.
All newly discovered lands to the east were to be Portuguese and to the west they were given to the Spanish. Here we have a map dating to 1502 produced by the Italian legate to the King of Portugal showing the world that was then known to the Portuguese explorers – and for when it was completed, I think it is a very good job. Remember that it had been only ten years since Columbus was the first European to see America.
It is this Papal ruling that is used by Argentina today to claim that as Spain was the benefactor of the Pope’s good grace in handing out things that did not belong to him to be plundered by Spain and Portugal, that it has the right to the Falkland Islands. Of course Argentina was not mentioned in the Treaty of Tordesillas and did not indeed exist until well over 300 years later.
Using this logic of course they could also claim California or Alaska.
Argentina also claims South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. South Georgia is located at 36 degrees west so therefore according to the Treaty of Tordesillas, it should have gone to Portugal.
The Falklands are a group of around 200 islands, located some 500km to the east of the island of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of America. It is part of the continental shelf of South America.
At this point, I am going to look at the claims of who were the first Europeans to see the islands. One such claim is that Amerigo Vespucci was the first to see the islands.
In a letter to Piero Soderini, written from Lisbon dated the 4 September 1504 the explorer wrote that on 7 April 1501 he saw land but because the cold was so intense a landing was not possible. However the geographical determinations are so imprecise and its description so vague that it could have been anywhere. In an earlier letter he wrote of finding islands at 50 degrees which had, and I now quote ‘a very mild and pleasant climate (...) many species of ferocious animals especially lions, snakes and others (...) There are extensive forests and trees of immense size, this land is extremely fertile (...)
Here we have an early sixteenth century Ottoman map called the Piri Reis map which does show some islands which appear roughly where the Falklands are which could indicate their discovery. Piri Reis based his 1513 map on four Portuguese maps, eight maps of Ptolemy, one Arabic map and the charts of Columbus. Whereas the charts of Columbus and the Portuguese maps were then new, the others were not, Ptolemy for example, had died 1,343 years earlier. However, I would say that whereas the Falklands are not in their true shape, the coastline of the southern portion of South America is vaguely recognizable, although it is rotated about ninety degrees counterclockwise.
In this world map by Diego Ribero from 1529 which is today in the Vatican, one can make out islands called Sanson, although admittedly they are not in the correct position. Here we have a nineteenth century copy of one of the maps of Diego Ribero. The maps were updated, or shall we say redrawn, in 1533 but without these islands. However the islands were shown on later sixteenth and seventeenth century maps, one of course needs to remember that the map makers were including information from older maps and if they had anything new to add then it was probably from their own personal experience and few of them had been in the southern Atlantic. For example, Diego Ribero probably got his information from Esteban Gómez, who had split with Magellan on 1 November 1520 and returned to Spain.

Photographs via Unsplash :
Falklands by Paul Carroll
Falklands penguins by Yuriy Rzhemovskiy
Saint Malo by Clovis Wood Photography

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