Thomas Falkner

Born in Manchester in 1707, Thomas Falkner trained in medicine and later sailed to South America as a ship’s surgeon. After arriving in Buenos Aires, he converted to Catholicism and eventually joined the Jesuits, beginning a long career as a missionary in the Río de la Plata region.

He worked for many years among Indigenous communities and became known as a missionary, explorer, and writer. He is remembered especially for A Description of Patagonia, a work valued for its account of the geography, natural history, and peoples of southern South America.

Falkner died in 1784. Accounts of his life consistently describe him as an English physician-turned-Jesuit whose years in Patagonia and nearby regions gave him unusual firsthand knowledge of a part of the world that was little known to English readers at the time.