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Cocos-Keeling Islands

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Cocos-Keeling Islands

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands form a small atoll archipelago lying approximately 1,000 kilometres southwest of Java in the Indian Ocean, comprising a main atoll of low-lying coral islands and a separate island, North Keeling, situated some 16 miles to the north [1, p. 91]. The atoll was first sighted by Europeans in 1609 under Captain William Keeling, permanently settled in 1827 by John Clunies-Ross and Alexander Hare, and passed through successive jurisdictions—British Crown, Ceylon, and finally the Straits Settlements in 1903—while remaining in the effective private ownership of the Clunies-Ross family for more than a century [2, pp. 139–148]. The islands’ strategic significance as a trans-Indian Ocean cable relay station brought them into the global theatre of the First World War in November 1914, when the German raider SMS Emden was destroyed off the atoll by the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney [1, p. 91].

Toponymy, Discovery, and Physical Setting

The atoll bears the name of Captain William Keeling, who first sighted the islands in 1609 during a voyage from the East Indies to England [2, pp. 139–143]. The name “Cocos” derives from the coconut palms that dominate the landscape and formed the basis of the islands’ economy from the earliest settlement [2, p. 148]. The main atoll consists of a ring of low-lying coral islands enclosing a lagoon, while North Keeling is a separate, slightly larger island to the north, also fringed by a shallow reef [3, pp. 68–69]. The lagoon on North Keeling occupies the greater part of the island’s interior and reaches a maximum depth of less than six feet at low tide; the only freshwater sources are two brackish wells, twelve to fifteen feet deep, which the islanders used for washing and cooking but not for drinking [3, pp. 68–69].

The physical environment of the main atoll is characterised by an overwhelming dominance of the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, which at its height in the 1880s supported an export trade of roughly 700 tons of copra and 140 tons of coconut oil annually to Batavia [2, p. 148]. The cyclone of 1909 destroyed over 90 per cent of the coconut palms, and the resulting overgrowth of immature palms from sprouted nuts on fallen trees meant that most islands remained thick with non-bearing palms for decades [2, pp. 154]. Rats introduced from the wrecked American schooner Robert Portner in 1878 had spread across all islands except Pulo Luar by 1941, feeding on the stalks of growing coconut nuts and causing a high proportion to fall prematurely at about the size of an apple; two men and eight dogs were employed to kill approximately 100 rats per week [2, pp. 149].

North Keeling presents a markedly different ecological profile. Gibson-Hill divided its vegetation into four clear-cut units: the Pisonia-Cocos belt, the Tournefortia fringe, the Pemphis clumps, and open bare spaces [3, pp. 77–80]. The island is notable for the conspicuous absence of rats, lizards, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, and termites, all of which are present on the main atoll, a condition Gibson-Hill attributed to the island’s inaccessibility and the lack of suitable substrate [3, pp. 74–85].

Settlement, Economy, and Social Life

The permanent settlement of the atoll began in 1827 when John Clunies-Ross, a Shetland-born seaman, and Alexander Hare, a former British Resident at Banjermassin in south-east Borneo, occupied the islands jointly as a trading depot for eastern spices [2, pp. 139–143], [4, pp. 57–70]. Hare arrived in June 1826 with approximately 98 Asian followers—former slaves from Malacca, Borneo, and Java—whom he had retained in a state of quasi-servitude, while Ross brought his family and ten British seamen in February 1827, formally establishing “New Selma” on 4–5 November of that year [4, pp. 57–70]. The two men’s incompatible temperaments and economic interests produced an irreconcilable rivalry; Hare withdrew to Bencoolen in March 1831, abandoning his followers to Ross, and died probably in 1832 or early 1833 [4, pp. 91–98].

The settlement’s economy was built almost entirely on the coconut palm. At its height in the 1880s, the islands exported roughly 700 tons of copra and 140 tons of coconut oil annually to Batavia, generating an estimated income exceeding £20,000 per year [2, p. 148]. The economic collapse began with the cyclone of 1909, which destroyed over 90 per cent of the coconut palms, and was compounded by the loss of the trading schooner Ayesha to the German cruiser Emden in 1914 and the post-war collapse in copra prices [2, pp. 154–155]. By 1941 the annual export had fallen to just over 600 tons, yielding less than $10 per ton after freight and commission, against a population that had grown to over 1,450 [2, p. 156]. The owner, J.S. Clunies-Ross, was drawing on his Christmas Island Phosphate Company dividends and borrowing against his life insurance to purchase rice [2, p. 155].

The community’s social structure, as documented by Gibson-Hill in 1941, was characterised by a near-total absence of theft, no prostitution, and a strong norm of redistribution of surplus—fish, cigarettes, credit balances—with the worst social stigma being sekikir (meanness); the last murder had occurred nearly thirty years before his visit [2, p. 157]. The inhabitants spoke a modified form of Batavian Malay with distinctive phonological shifts, including initial consonant changes, and a small vocabulary of English and Dutch loanwords related to sailing and introduced customs [2, pp. 162–163]. The kampong (village) comprised 243 identical houses arranged in parallel rows, governed by a local legal code that persisted long after formal incorporation into the Straits Settlements [2, pp. 156]. An edict forbidding the return of any Malay who had once left the islands had been in force for nearly half a century [2, pp. 156–157].

The Clunies-Ross family also directed timber operations on North Keeling, employing 40–60 Cocos-Keeling Malays on the island for approximately three months at a time to fell Cordia subcordata, mostly for boat-building [3, pp. 67–68]. These operations ceased in 1929 when no suitable overseer could be found to replace a dead Clunies-Ross relative, effectively ending systematic human pressure on the island [3, pp. 67–68].

Colonial Administration and the Battle of the Cocos Islands

The islands’ formal political status shifted several times in the nineteenth century. The settlement was incorporated into the British dominions in 1857, transferred to Ceylon in 1878, and finally placed under the Straits Settlements in 1903, though in practice the Clunies-Ross family retained effective control as private proprietors throughout [2, pp. 146–148]. Queen Victoria granted the islands in perpetuity to John Clunies-Ross in 1886 [1, p. 91]. The British government’s 1839 rebuke to Rear-Admiral Maitland had explicitly stated that the Cocos-Keeling Islanders “are living where there is no law to protect their rights,” denying any British jurisdiction over the settlement [4, p. 103]. Ross’s earlier petitions for British recognition—a memorial to the Governor of Mauritius in September 1829 and a Humble Memorial to King George IV in October 1829—were both refused by the Colonial Office in July 1830, which judged the islands of no strategic or commercial value [4, pp. 133–148].

The islands’ strategic importance as a cable relay station brought them into the First World War. On 9 November 1914, the German raider SMS Emden, which had sunk the Russian warship Zhemchug and the French destroyer Mousquet near Penang on 28 October, put a landing party ashore on Direction Island to destroy communications facilities [1, p. 91]. The radio operator sent out a distress signal before the German soldiers arrived, and when the Sydney responded, it initiated a battle that resulted in the Emden’s destruction [1, p. 91]. The action commenced at a range of approximately 10,000 yards and closed to 4,500 yards under bright morning conditions with a light easterly breeze and a smooth sea [1, p. 93]. The Sydney fired approximately 560 rounds of 6-inch shells; the Emden fired nearly 900 rounds of 4.6-inch shells and one torpedo, which narrowly missed the Sydney [1, p. 93]. The Sydney suffered three killed and eleven wounded, including one officer, Lieutenant Hampden; the Emden lost nearly three-quarters of her complement killed, with half of the remainder wounded, some severely burned [1, p. 93].

After the ship suffered severe damage and lost many crewmen, its captain, Captain von Müller, ran it onto a reef off the coast of North Keeling Island [1, p. 91]. The surrender ceremony took place on the quarterdeck of the Sydney, with the swords of the German officers returned to them [1, p. 92]. A funeral service was held at 10:30 p.m. for the third man of the Sydney’s crew who died of his wounds, conducted amid the waste of waters with the flag half-masted and a faint light from a waning moon [1, p. 92]. During 1916–17, the wreck was dismantled and the guns salvaged for the Australian Government, reportedly installed in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane; by 1920 only boilers and a portion of the hull were visible at low tide [1, p. 93]. HMS Cadmus, a China Squadron gunboat, arrived to search the Emden’s wreck and buried a number of bodies washed ashore on Keeling Island in a single grave [1, p. 93]. The islanders themselves salvaged the wreck between October 1915 and January 1916, recovering between six and seven hundred tins of corned beef, salmon, and sardines [3, pp. 93–95].

Research and Documentation

The earliest European account of the islands derives from Captain William Keeling’s 1609 voyage, but the first systematic scientific observations were made by Guppy in 1888 and Wood-Jones in 1906, both of which were brief [3, pp. 68–69]. The most comprehensive pre-war study is C.A. Gibson-Hill’s 1947 monograph “Notes on the Cocos-Keeling Islands,” based on his residence on Pulo Tikus during the first ten and a half months of 1941 [2, pp. 133–135]. Gibson-Hill’s original manuscript and a book-length study of the islands were lost from the Raffles Museum during the Japanese occupation of Malaya; the published article was reconstructed from surviving notes and is therefore a partial but irreplaceable record of the pre-war settlement [2, p. 135]. His 1948 article on North Keeling, based on two field visits in 1941, constitutes the first systematic account of that island’s geology, vegetation, and fauna, and established the baseline faunal inventory against which later changes—including the post-war introduction of rats—could be measured [3, pp. 68–103].

The documentary record of the settlement’s founding is preserved in Gibson-Hill’s 1952 compilation, which presents an exhaustive collection of primary sources on the establishment of the colony between 1825 and 1857 [4, pp. 1–306]. The principal manuscript sources are held in the India Office Library (Raffles Collection MSS, Vol. 14), the Public Record Office (C.O. 167/109 and C.O. 167/214), and the Singapore Secretariat (C.S.O. 167/214) [4, p. 291]. Gibson-Hill’s access to the Clunies Ross family papers on Cocos in 1941 was limited by a locked room in Oceania House, said to contain early family correspondence, which was sealed after the death of George Clunies-Ross and whose contents were subsequently sent to Colombo, where their whereabouts remain unknown [4, pp. 7–8].

The civilian eyewitness account of the 1914 battle, a three-page typescript dated 10 November 1914 and signed “Clunies Ross,” was bound into a photograph album credited to C. (probably Cosmo) Clunies-Ross [1, p. 91]. The album found its way into a library maintained by the History Department at the National University of Singapore; when the university eliminated all department libraries in the 1990s, the album was among items left for staff to take [1, p. 91]. The facsimile reprint with an editor’s note by Paul Kratoska, published in 2025, provides a ground-level perspective that complements the official naval narrative [1, pp. 91–98].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. C. Clunies Ross (2025). Keeling Cocos Islands and the Destruction of the German Raider Emden in 1914. Facsimile reprint. With a note P. Kratoska JMBRAS 98(1): 91–98.
  2. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1947). Notes on the Cocos-Keeling Islands JMBRAS 20(2): 140–202.
  3. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1948). The island of North Keeling JMBRAS 21(1): 68–103.
  4. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1952). Documents relating to John Clunies Ross, Alexander Hare, and the establishment of the colony on the Cocos-Keeling Islands JMBRAS 25(4/5): 1–306. Read on JSTOR