Anthony de la Roché (spelled also Antoine de la Roché, Antonio de la Roché or Antonio de la Roca in some sources) was a 17th-century English maritime explorer and merchant, born in London to a French
Huguenot father and an
English mother, who took part in a joint venture established by English and Dutch shipowners in the Spanish port city of
Cádiz in order to engage in the lucrative
New World trade. During a commercial voyage between Europe and South America he was
blown off course in
Drake Passage, visited the island of
South Georgia and sighted
Clerke Rocks in 1675, thereby making the first discovery of land in the
Antarctic.[1][2][3] In doing so he crossed the
Antarctic Convergence, a natural boundary of the Antarctic region that would be described a quarter of a century later by the English scientist
Edmund Halley.
1675 voyage
Discovery of Roché Island (South Georgia) and Clerke Rocks
In April 1675 La Roché rounded Cape Horn and was overwhelmed by tempestuous conditions in the treacherous waters off
Staten Island (Isla de los Estados). With "the Winds and Currents having carried them so far to the Eastward,"[4][5] he failed to make Le Maire Strait as desired, nor could he round Cape Saint John, the eastern tip of Staten Island[6][7] "to sail into the No. Sea by Brouwer’s Strait" (no strait actually but rather a seaway by the east of Staten Island[5] discovered during the circumnavigation of that island by the
1643 Dutch expedition of Admiral
Hendrik Brouwer).[8]
Eventually, they found refuge in one of South Georgia's southern bays – possibly
Drygalski Fjord or
Doubtful Bay, according to
Matthews and other authors[9][1][10] – where the battered ships anchored for a fortnight.
According to La Roché's account of the events reportedly published in French in London in 1678[11] and its surviving 1690 Spanish précis by the mariner,
cosmographer and writer Capt. Francisco de Seixas y Lovera[12][13][14] (translated into English by
Alexander Dalrymple, the first
Hydrographer of the
British Admiralty), "they found a Bay, in which they anchored close to a Point or Cape which stretches out to the Southeast with 28. 30. and 40.
fathoms sand and rock."[11][4][15] The surrounding
glaciated, mountainous terrain was described as "some Snow Mountains near the Coast, with much bad Weather."
Once the weather cleared up, they set sail and while rounding the southeast extremity of South Georgia sighted on their starboard
Clerke Rocks (Seixas y Lovera's "Southern land"[11]), a group of conspicuous rocky islets[16] extending 11 km in east–west direction and rising to 244 m (
James Cook's "Sugar-Loaf Peak"[7]) some 60 km to the east-southeast.[1][17][18]
Fleurieu and Admiralty variant routes
French naval officer, explorer and hydrographer
Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu opined that La Roché's strait was actually
Stewart Strait running between
Willis Islands and
Bird Island off the northwestern tip of South Georgia, traversed and mapped by Capt. James Cook in 1775,[5] which however is 3.6 km (less than one league) wide, with no point or cape stretching out to the southeast.
For quite some time in the 20th century, the even narrower (550 m wide) nearby passage separating Bird Island from the main island of South Georgia used to appear as La Roché Strait, La-Roche-Straße or Estrecho La Roche on
Admiralty charts and in other publications. This version was eventually discarded due to its discord with the existing historical description, and the passage got renamed to
Bird Sound.[19][20][21][22][23]
Likewise, the navigable[23]Cooper Sound separating
Cooper Island from mainland South Georgia is way too narrow (exactly one kilometer wide) to qualify as a possible La Roché Strait.
Burney, Fitte and Destéfani variant routes
Royal Navy officer and author
James Burney conjectured that La Roché might have visited not South Georgia but the
Falkland Islands instead (known at that time as John Davis's South Land or Sebald Islands, not yet Malouines, Falklands or Malvinas), possibly anchored in the
Bay of Harbours or
Eagle Passage area, and upon his departure sailed east with the flat, boggy
Lafonia Peninsula on his port and
Beauchene Island on his starboard.[5]
In a variant Falklands version, Argentine historian Ernesto Fitte identified La Roché Strait with the
Falkland Sound separating the two main islands of the Falklands archipelago.[24] That passage, however, is some 90 km long – no way of disemboguing through it "in 3
Glasses" – and narrowing to less than 5 km rather than "10
leagues little more or less."
Argentine naval officer and historian Laurio Destéfani referred to the possibility of Roché Island actually being Beauchene Island itself.[25] Yet there is no land to the southeast of Beauchene, whether within visibility range or further beyond, hence no "said Passage." Furthermore, with its elevation of 70 m that island could hardly be one of the two "high lands" in Seixas y Lovera's summary.
One common drawback of Burney's conjecture and its varieties is that the Falkland Islands are not known for their "snow mountains near the coast."
Another drawback would stem from La Roché's approaching his island from the west ("the Land which they now began to see toward the East"). Indeed, in such a westerly location with respect to the Falklands he would have already been in the "North Sea," even before his two-week anchorage and before sailing his strait – something refuted by the report narrating that, on departure, "steering ENE they found themselves in the No. Sea."[11]
(According to American historian Mark Peterson, "maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries commonly referred to the entire
Atlantic as the North Sea … even the southernmost regions of the Atlantic, the waters to the east of Argentina and
Tierra del Fuego …"[26][27][28])
That a sailing ship in Drake Passage could be blown off course and find itself near South Georgia was demonstrated by the Spanish merchant ship León captained by Gregorio Jerez on a voyage in service of the French company Sieur Duclos of
Saint-Malo, which ship made the second sighting of the island in June 1756.[1][4][29] On that particular occasion, the Board of Expert Pilots in Cádiz examined the ship pilot Henri Cormer's report and concluded that the island was probably that sighted by Antoine de la Roche in 1675.[30]
Varnhagen-Duperrey hypothesis
Brazilian historian
Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, in following French naval officer and explorer
Louis-Isidore Duperrey, supposed that South Georgia might have been discovered as early as April 1502 by a Portuguese expedition led by
Gonçalo Coelho, finding evidence of this in an episode reported by Florentine
Amerigo Vespucci.[31][32] According to the latter's account, from Brazil the expedition headed south and reached 52°S
latitude, from where, after a four-day voyage in turbulent weather they encountered land and sailed "about 20 leagues" along a rocky coast in severe cold weather.[33]
Vespucci made no mention of snow/ice cover, something with which South Georgia invariably impresses seafarers. For instance, Cook described
Possession Bay, South Georgia like this: "The head of the bay, as well as two places on each side, was terminated by perpendicular ice-cliffs of considerable height. Pieces were continually breaking off, and floating out to sea; and a great fall happened while we were in the bay, which made a noise like cannon … and the valleys lay covered with everlasting snow."[7] The island rises to an elevation of 2934 m[23] and has been described like "the
Alps in mid-ocean" or "the
Himalayas seen from
Simla."[1]
Vespucci wrote, however, that the night there was fifteen hours long,[31] which on the date in question (7 April, 17 April
New Style) was valid 2,000 km south of 52°S – a location unattainable in four days. Indeed, the estimated top speed of a ship like Coelho's
caravel was 8
knots or 356 km per day.[10][34]
Coelho's voyage was commissioned by King
Manuel I of Portugal and duly documented in the Portuguese archives which, however, have no reports of venturing that far south, and indeed no information sourced to Vespucci.[10]
In comparison, Seixas y Lovera's work Descripcion Geographica y Derrotero de la Region Austral Magallanica (for which there is evidence of governmental aid for its printing costs[12]) was duly licensed, endorsed and officially reported to
Charles II of Spain in his
Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies in 1690,[11] its publication and translation into French[12] making the reported European and Spanish American developments related to La Roché's voyage open to wider scrutiny. The 1690 Spanish map of the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego area[35] was officially presented before the Council in 1692,[36] while Seixas y Lovera's 1688 book Theatro Naval Hydrographico extensively referring to Roché Passage[37] had three Spanish editions and a French one.
Alexander von Humboldt respectfully disagreed with Duperrey, and thought that Vespucci must have been driven back by a storm and seen part of the east Patagonian coast.[38][39] According to British historians Eric Christie and Robert Headland, the analysis of historical evidence refutes the Varnhagen-Duperrey hypothesis.[40][1]
Isle Grande (Gough Island) landing and Cook's mapping error
Several days after his departure from South Georgia, La Roché came across another uninhabited island, "where they found water, wood and fish" and spent six days "without seeing any human being," thus making what some historians believe was the first landing on the
South Atlantic island that had been discovered by the Portuguese navigator
Gonçalo Álvares in 1505, called Gonçalo Álvares Island (sometimes erringly Diego Álvarez or Diego Alvares Island), and better known as
Gough Island since 1732.[11][15][41][42]
Following La Roché's voyage, a sizeable island named Isle Grande, Isla Grande or Isle Grand was placed on the map mostly northeast of Roché Island (like on the 1703 map by
Guillaume Delisle, 1710 map by
Nicolaes Visscher or 1715 map by
Herman Moll referred to below) and west-southwest of Gough Island, with near five degrees of latitude discrepancy between them.
However, when Roché Island was relocated on the map eastwards to its more precise
longitude ascertained by James Cook in 1775 (using a
Kendall copy of
Harrison'smarine chronometer[43]), which happens to be just about the longitude of the central meridian of the northeastern Brazilian state of
Alagoas, the cartographers would seem to have overlooked the necessity to adjust the location of Isle Grande accordingly.[10] Apparently, the error of placing Isle Grande due north rather than northeast of South Georgia was originally committed by Cook himself in his 1777 chart of the southern hemisphere, and widely upheld by others because of his impeccable cartographic authoritativeness.
As a result of that
Lapérouse,[15]Vancouver,[44]Colnett,[45]von Bellingshausen[46] and other mariners sought in vain to find Isle Grande as mapped north of South Georgia (like on the 1790 map by
de:Johann Walch, 1796 map by
Mathew Carey or 1804 map by
Jedidiah Morse referred to below) instead of northeast of it. For instance, on his way to the
Pacific via Le Maire Strait and Cape Horn, Capt. Lapérouse made in November–December 1785 a forty-day detour from the Brazilian island of
Santa Catarina to an area north of South Georgia in fruitless search of Isle Grande.
On his way to rounding Cape Saint John and Cape Horn, Colnett wrote in April 1793: "In this course I ran directly over the situations in which the Isle of Grand is placed in all the charts, without discovering any appearance of land" … "I am disposed to believe, that the Isle of Grand also exists, and that my not being able to find it, arose from an error in copying the Latitude given by La Roche … I might, on my return, search for it in the Latitudes of 40° and 41°, having strong reason to believe, that there is land in or near those Latitudes, but to the Eastward of the Longitude which I crossed; as otherwise, I am at a loss to account for such a quantity of birch twigs, sea-weed, drift-wood and birds as were seen in that situation."[45]
Colnett had been instructed by the
Board of Admiralty to look for Isle Grande as the first objective in his 1793-94 exploratory voyage[47] but, although his reckoned latitude was correct (Gough is actually centred at 40°19'S), he unfortunately missed the opportunity to find the island: "... we crossed near the supposed situation of the Isle Grande. At this time my vessel was almost a wreck, very short of provisions, and what remained in a very bad state, to which may be added an hurricane of wind and the winter season: circumstances that, I trust, will be a sufficient excuse for my not renewing my search of it as I had intended."[48][45]
In his attempted reconstruction of the 1675 events Burney found a possible place of landing as far west as the coast of
Patagonia, at the projecting headlands of either Cabo Dos Bahías or Punta Santa Elena (south and north entrance to Camarones Bay respectively[49][50]). Each of these, it was said, "afar off appears like an island."[5] However, for La Roché and his companions it was no afar off appearance as they approached, landed, and spent time ashore.
Royal Navy officer and prolific author
Rupert Gould endorsed Burney's Patagonian conjecture but not his Falklands one, and regarded La Roché as either discoverer or rediscoverer of South Georgia.[51]
Resuming his voyage from Isle Grande, La Roché successfully reached the Brazilian port of Salvador as intended, and eventually arrived in
La Rochelle, France on 29 September 1675.[11][4][9][52][2]
Legacy
Maritime navigation and exploration
Following the 1675 voyage cartographers started to depict on their maps Roché Island or Land of la Roché, Terre de la Roché, with Strait(s) de la Roché separating it from an Unknown Land, with these features situated to the eastward of Tierra del Fuego, as well as Isle Grande (occasionally Ile de la Roché, la Roche’s Island or Isla de la Roca) – that "very great and nice island" in the middle of South Atlantic Ocean.[10][36]
La Roché reckoned that his island was situated 18° of longitude east of Le Maire Strait,[11] which would place it on the meridian 47°W running across the Brazilian city of
São Paulo, 10° of longitude west of the central meridian 37°W of South Georgia. The 1768 chart by Dalrymple and
Thomas Jefferys shows Roché Island as situated on the meridian of
Cabo Frio, Brazil, some 5° of longitude west of the central meridian of South Georgia.
For no good reason, Roché Island is found further west on a number of old maps, roughly on the meridian 54°W of
es:Cabo de Santa María, Uruguay (like on the 1703 map by Guillaume Delisle, the 1710 map by Nicolaes Visscher or the 1762 map by
Leonhard Euler referred to below), or still further west, roughly on the meridian 62°W of the Patagonian bay of
es:Anegada (like on the 1719 map by Herman Moll, the 1754 map by Jefferys or the ca. 1763 map by Louis Delarochette referred to below).
Based on La Roché's data however,[11] old cartographers rendered
geographical latitude rather more uniformly by placing the island at 55°S on their maps.
Well aware of La Roché's discovery, James Cook mentioned it in his ship's
logbook upon approaching South Georgia one hundred years later in January 1775,[7] and later wrote in the general introduction to his 1777 book: "In April 1675, Anthony la Roche, an English merchant, in his return from the South Pacific Ocean, where he had been on a trading voyage, being carried, by the winds and currents, far to the East of Strait La Maire, fell in with a coast, which may possibly be the same with that which I visited during this voyage, and have called the Island of Georgia."[53]
Cook made the first recorded landing, surveyed and mapped Roché Island, and renamed and claimed it for King
George III of Great Britain and Ireland.[17] (Fleurieu disapproved of the name change disrespecting early discovery, and recommended that the island "should not be called New Georgia."[54] Cook was more considerate in the case of
Kerguelen though, an island that he visited in 1776 and noted: "which, from its sterility, I should, with great propriety, call the Island of Desolation, but that I would not rob
Monsieur de Kerguelen of the honour of its bearing his name."[55])
German
naturalistGeorg Forster, scientist in Cook's expedition, also knew of La Roché's discovery.[56] So did naval officer and explorer James Colnett, then a midshipman in the expedition who later wrote of "the land discovered by Monsieur La Roche, in Latitude 55° South, which I touched at with Captain Cook …"[45]
The second-ever map of South Georgia and Clerke Rocks, made in 1802 by Capt.
Isaac Pendleton of the American
sealing vessel Union and reproduced by the Italian polar cartographer
Arnaldo Faustini in 1906, was entitled South Georgia: Discovered by the Frenchman La Roche in the year 1675.[60] While Pendleton probably erred regarding La Roché's nationality due to his French last name, British historian Peter Bradley noted that "(d)espite the suggestion that La Roché was English, the name and the return to La Rochelle … appear to indicate a French connection."[61]
Some authors maintain that La Roché was a Spaniard ("… a century before, the Spaniard Antonio de la Roca had discovered Georgia …;"[62] "… the Spanish navigator Antonio de la Roca discovered the South Georgia Islands …"[63]) yet provide no evidence.
Both the discovery of Roché Island (South Georgia) and the landing on Isle Grande (Gough Island) in 1675 had little if any sovereignty implications, as the islands were not even claimed on that occasion.
A sort of antecedent in that respect might have been the territorial delimitation provisions of the
Treaty of Tordesillas concluded in 1454 between Portugal and Spain which, if applied, would have left both islands to the former.[64] Portugal, however, never claimed the islands. Neither did Spain, while major European powers of that time like France, England and a newly independent Netherlands denied any validity to the inter-Iberian agreement anyway.
Claiming would have to wait until 1775 for South Georgia and 1938 for Gough,[65][42] in both cases by Britain.
Another attempt at introducing some bilateral legal arrangements for southern South America was the 1790
Nootka Sound Convention[66] concluded by Britain and Spain, establishing a sort of regime that granted to the subjects of the two kingdoms equal exclusive rights over the local marine living resources, notably seals, whales and fish; and last but not least, kept third countries out.[67][10]
Colnett advised for his country to make use of the opportunity and take possession of Staten Island: "Staten Land is well situated as a place of rendezvous both for men of war and merchant ships ... the North side offers the best place for an establishment, if it should ever be in the view of our government to form one there ... If the navigation round Cape Horn should ever become common, such a place we must possess; and agreeable to the last convention with Spain, we are entitled to keep possession of it, and apply it to any purpose of peace or war." By his personal experience, living conditions there were "far preferable to many stations in Norway."[45] As it happened, Britain took over the Falkland Islands instead.
Maps and charts
The following 17th, 18th and 19th-century maps and charts reflect the geographical knowledge gained from La Roché's 1674-75 voyage:
Albernaz, João Teixeira; Jeronimo de Attayde e Francisco de Seixas y Lovera. (1692). Mapas generales originales y universales des todo el orue con los puertos principales y fortalezas de Ambas Indias y una descripcion topographica de la region Austral Magallonica año de 1692. (The 1630 Portuguese atlas
Taboas Geraes de Toda a Navegação appended in 1692 by the 1690 Spanish map insert
Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego.)
L'Isle (or Lisle), Guillaume de & Charles-Louis Simonneau. (1703).
Carte du Paraguai, du Chili, du Detroit de Magellan. Paris. (Shows the track of La Roché's; the Falkland Islands are called Isles de Sebald de Weert.)
L'Isle (or Lisle), Guillaume de; J. Covens & C. Mortier. (1705).
L'Amerique Meridionale. Paris.
Price, Charles. (1715).
Terrestrial Globe. London. (Curiously, the globe features Isle Grande same like the 1702 map by William Godson does, situated at 35°S latitude and named "la Roche’s Island.")
Dalrymple, Alexander & Thomas Jefferys. (1768).
A chart of the ocean between South America and Africa with the tracks of Dr. Edmund Halley in 1700 and Monsr. Lozier Bouvet in 1738. London: J. Nourse. (This chart is the subject of Dalrymple's Memoir of a chart of the Southern Ocean; a supposed track of La Roché's is shown as departing from the east entrance to an imaginary Gulf of St. Sebastian in
Terra Australis (admittedly borrowed from a 1586 edition of
Ortelius's
world map) that in January 1775 James Cook didn't find and wrote: "I think I may venture to assert that the extensive coast, laid down in Mr. Dalrymple's chart of the ocean between Africa and America, and the Gulph of St. Sebastian, do not exist." Isle Grande is located due north rather than northeast of Roché Island on this chart, which singularity might have been replicated in Cook’s chart of the southern hemisphere. Certain areas on the chart would appear somewhat distorted, with southern South America shifted ca. 3° of longitude to the west.)
Poirson, Jean-Baptiste. (ca. 1810–20).
South America. Paris. (Features two Isle Grande islands, one "discovered by La Roché in 1675," and another, more westerly, "according to Mr. Dalrymple.")
Apart from mapping, both La Roché and his geographic discoveries have been used in encyclopedic editions and dictionaries, scientific and popular publications, video gaming, commercial promotion etc. (see Bibliography).
A sea captain named Anthony de la Roche was reportedly in command of a merchant ship owned by the prominent
Bermudian Henry Corbusier in the late 1770s, having previously commanded the ship Saint James of
Bordeaux, France, which was wrecked.[72]
^
abcdeDalrymple, Alexander. (1775).
A Collection of Voyages Chiefly in The Southern Atlantick Ocean. London. (Includes a chapter on La Roché, and an extract (in French) from the logbook of French merchant and mariner Nicolas Pierre Duclos-Guyot onboard the Spanish ship León that sighted Roché Island in 1756.)
^Fitte, Ernesto J. (1968). La disputa con Gran Bretaña por las islas del Atlántico Sur. Buenos Aires: Emecé. p. 47.
^Destéfani, Laurio H. (1982). The Malvinas, the South Georgias and the South Sandwich Islands: the conflict with Britain. Buenos Aires: Edipress S.A. p. 111.
^Teixeira, Pedro & Diego Ramirez de Arellano. (1621).
Reconocimiento de los Estrechos de Magallanes y San Vicente. Madrid. (A Spanish map marking as Mar del Norte i.e. North Sea the waters off the east entrance to the Strait of Magellan; Estrecho de San Vicente being another name for Le Maire Strait.)
^Seixas y Lovera, Francisco de. (1690).
Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego. Madrid. (Map insert in the 1692 Spanish edition of the 1630 Portuguese atlas Taboas Geraes de Toda a Navegação.)
^Wace, Nigel Morritt. (1969). The discovery, exploitation and settlement of the Tristan da Cunha Islands. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian Branch) 10: 11–40.
^
abDingwall, Paul R. (ed.). (1995).
Progress in Conservation of the Subantarctic Islands. Proceedings of the SCAR/IUCN Workshop on Protection, Research and Management of Subantarctic Islands, Paimpont, France, 27-29 April, 1992. pp. 71-72.