On the return voyage, they careened their vessels on the coast of Chiloé Island, Chile and set sail for Baía de Todos os Santos (Salvador), Brazil.

With "the Winds and Currents having carried them so far to the Eastward,"[5][6] he failed to make Le Maire Strait as desired, nor could he round Cape Saint John, the eastern tip of Staten Island[7][8] "to sail into the No.

According to La Roché's account of the events reportedly published in French in London in 1678[12] and its surviving 1690 Spanish précis by the mariner, cosmographer and writer Capt.

Francisco de Seixas y Lovera[13][14][15] (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.

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.

[4] 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.

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.

[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.

[11] 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[13]) was duly licensed, endorsed and officially reported to Charles II of Spain in his Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies in 1690,[12] with its publication and translation into French[13] making the reported European and Spanish American developments related to La Roché's voyage open to wider scrutiny.

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's marine chronometer[43]), the cartographers would seem to have overlooked the necessity to adjust the location of Isle Grande accordingly.

[11] 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.

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.

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]).

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.

"[56] 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.

Comments and analysis of La Roché's discoveries could be found in the ship's journals of notable explorers such as Britain's Cook,[8] Vancouver[44] and Colnett,[45] France's Lapérouse[16] and Russia's von Bellingshausen,[46] also in Dalrymple's Memoir of a chart of the Southern Ocean,[60] The Nautical Magazine for 1835[61] and multiple editions of the authoritative Laurie’s Sailing Directory by John Purdy and by Alexander Findlay.

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.

Neither did Spain, while major European powers of that time like France, England and a newly independent Netherlands denied any wider validity to the inter-Iberian agreement anyway.

Another attempt at introducing some bilateral legal arrangements for southernmost South America (roughly Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego) was the 1790 Nootka Sound Convention[69] 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.