Londonderry Island () is an island (UFI -889706) in the
Magallanes Region at the western end of the
Beagle Channel
Beagle Channel (; Yahgan: ''Onašaga'') is a strait in the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago, on the extreme southern tip of South America between Chile and Argentina. The channel separates the larger main island of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego f ...
and
Darwin Sound. The island was named by the captain of
HMS Beagle
HMS ''Beagle'' was a 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy, one of more than 100 ships of this class. The vessel, constructed at a cost of £7,803 (roughly equivalent to £ in 2018), was launched on 11 May 1820 from the Woolwich Dockyard on t ...
,
Robert FitzRoy
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy (5 July 1805 – 30 April 1865) was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, FitzRoy's second expedition to Tierra de ...
, whose maternal grandfather was
The 1st Marquess of Londonderry, an
Ulster-Scots peer
Peer may refer to:
Sociology
* Peer, an equal in age, education or social class; see Peer group
* Peer, a member of the peerage; related to the term "peer of the realm"
Computing
* Peer, one of several functional units in the same layer of a ne ...
.
The island is very irregularly shaped. It lies between Fitzroy Bay to the west and
Bahía Cook to the east, and between the
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the conti ...
to the south and the
Ballenero Channel and O'Brien Channel to the north. Nearby islands include Gilbert Island and Stewart Island to the northwest,
O'Brien Island, Chile
OBrien Island ({{Lang-es, Isla O'Brien) is located at the western end of the Beagle Channel.
East of the island is the ''Paso Darwin'', that is the beginning of the Beagle Channel. To the north is the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, separate ...
to the north, and
Cook Island (or London Island) and Thompson Island to the east.
Londonderry Island and smaller nearby islands form an archipelago (UFI -889707) known as the Londonderry Islands ().
References
Islands of Tierra del Fuego
{{MagellanAntarctic-geo-stub