Cocos (Keeling) Islands - History

History

In 1609 Captain William Keeling was the first European to see the islands, while serving in the East India Company, but they remained uninhabited until the 19th century.

In 1814, a Scottish merchant seaman named Captain John Clunies-Ross stopped briefly at the islands on a trip to India, nailing up a Union Jack and planning to return and settle on the islands with his family in the future.

However, a wealthy Englishman named Alexander Hare had similar plans, and hired a captain, coincidentally Clunies-Ross' brother, to bring him and a harem of forty Malay women to the islands where he hoped to set up his own private residence. Hare had previously served as governor of a colony in Borneo and found that "he could not confine himself to the tame life that prosy civilisation affords".

When Clunies-Ross returned two years later with his wife, children and mother-in-law, and found Hare already established on the island and living with a private harem, a feud grew instantly between the two men. Clunies-Ross' eight sailors, "began at once the invasion of the new kingdom to take possession of it, women and all".

After some time, Hare's women began deserting him, and instead finding themselves mates amongst Clunies-Ross' sailors. Disheartened, Hare left the island; he died in Bencoolen in 1834.

Clunies-Ross' workers were paid in a currency called the Cocos rupee, a currency John Clunies-Ross minted himself that could only be redeemed at the company store.

On 1 April 1836, HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy arrived to take soundings establishing the profile of the atoll as part of the survey expedition of the Beagle. To the young naturalist Charles Darwin, who was on the ship, the results supported a theory he had developed of how atolls formed, which he later published as The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. He studied the natural history of the islands and collected specimens. Darwin's assistant Syms Covington noted, "an Englishman and HIS family, with about sixty or seventy mulattos from the Cape of Good Hope, live on one of the islands. Captain Ross, the governor, is now absent at the Cape."