Henry Leonard Reynard, Enrique to the people of Magallanes, was born in Yorkshire in 1845. At 21 he left for Argentina, and in 1874 he reached Punta Arenas, where he set up a sawmill with his partner James Dunsmure.
In 1877 he bought from Governor Diego Dublé Almeyda the 300 sheep the governor had brought from the Falklands, and turned them loose on Isabel Island, in the middle of the Strait. Nobody knew if the animals would survive the wind and the winter. They did. By 1878 the trial was judged a success and the rush for land began: within a few years the Magallanes steppe filled with sheep stations, on Indigenous land, and Punta Arenas went from penal colony to wool capital.
Reynard was British vice-consul from 1879 and raised sheep, cattle and horses at Oazy Harbour, on land leased from the state. When the government auctioned it off in the early 1900s he was outbid, and moved to Santa Cruz, in Argentina. He died in England in 1919.
In a sense, every sheep station in Magallanes descends from those 300 sheep on Isabel Island.
