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Documents relating to John Clunies Ross, Alexander Hare, and the establishment of the colony on the Cocos-Keeling Islands

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Documents relating to John Clunies Ross, Alexander Hare, and the establishment of the colony on the Cocos-Keeling Islands

C.A. Gibson-Hill’s 1952 documentary compilation, published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 25, No. 4/5), presents an exhaustive collection of primary sources on the establishment of the Cocos-Keeling Islands settlement between 1825 and 1857, prefaced by a detailed introduction that corrects persistent errors in earlier accounts of the relationship between Shetland-born seaman John Clunies Ross and the former British Resident at Banjermassin, Alexander Hare. Gibson-Hill, who had lived on the atoll in 1941 and lost his original manuscript during the Japanese Occupation, argues that Ross’s later autobiographical writings—composed after his quarrel with Hare—systematically distorted the earlier, more neutral accounts, and that the political dynamics of British-Dutch competition over the islands have been consistently misrepresented by both Dutch and English secondary literature (pp. 7–9, 193).

Summary

The introduction reconstructs the intertwined careers of Ross and Hare from the 1810s through the 1850s. Ross, born in 1786 in Shetland, went to sea at thirteen and by 1813 was serving as third mate on the whaler Baroness Longueville. At Kupang, Timor, he accepted command of the brig Olivia, a vessel belonging to Alexander Hare, then British Resident at Banjermassin in south-east Borneo. Hare, a London-born merchant who had established himself at Malacca by 1807, had been appointed to Banjermassin through Raffles’s patronage in 1811–12 and received a personal land grant of approximately 1,400 square miles from the Sultan (pp. 17–33). Ross served under Hare for several years, managing the estate at Moluko and overseeing the construction of the ship Borneo, before the British withdrawal from Java in 1816 and the Dutch re-occupation of Banjermassin in 1818 severed their formal connection (pp. 34–53).

The Cocos-Keeling settlement emerged from this rupture. Ross first entered the atoll’s lagoon in December 1825 aboard the Borneo, taking formal possession and planting seeds on the entrance islets. Hare, expelled from the Netherlands Indies in 1819 and living precariously at the Cape of Good Hope, arrived at the atoll 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. Ross brought his family and ten British seamen in February 1827, formally establishing “New Selma” on 4–5 November of that year (pp. 57–70). The two men’s incompatible temperaments and economic interests—Ross seeking a commercial entrepôt, Hare seeking isolation—produced an irreconcilable rivalry. Ross’s petitions to the Governor of Mauritius (September 1829) and a Humble Memorial to King George IV (October 1829) for British recognition of the settlement were both refused by the Colonial Office in July 1830, which judged the islands of no strategic or commercial value (pp. 133–148). The Dutch, initially alarmed by rumours of smuggling, dispatched the corvette Anna Paulowna in 1827 (which failed to find the islands) and the civilian commissioner H. van der Jagt in October 1829; the latter’s report concluded that the islands were of negligible value and the Dutch government subsequently abandoned any claim (pp. 80–83, 148–159).

Hare left the atoll for Bencoolen in March 1831, abandoning his followers to Ross. His death, probably in 1832 or early 1833, went unrecorded; his son Alexander Hare junior died at Batavia in January 1834. Ross retained the former slaves under conditions that Fitzroy and Darwin, visiting aboard the Beagle in April 1836, described as nominally free but functionally servile (pp. 91–98, 261–265). The settlement’s population in 1836 comprised approximately 175 persons: twenty of British descent and 155 of Asian or African stock. Ross’s later years saw a gradual shift from British to Dutch commercial orientation—he flew the Dutch flag on his schooner Harriet from 1841 and his eldest son was naturalised as a Netherlands Indies subject—before the British formally annexed the islands in March 1857 (pp. 104–105).

Key Findings

  • The Banjermassin settlement (1812–16) ran a deficit of Java Rupee 556,770 over four years, with Hare’s failure to submit satisfactory accounts to the East India Company constituting the principal cause of his disgrace and eventual expulsion from Dutch territory (pp. 42–46).
  • Ross’s 1829 petition and Memorial to the King were both rejected: the Colonial Office reply of 1 July 1830 stated that “it was not expedient to guarantee the possession of those islands by making a grant of them to Mr Ross or to any other British subjects” (p. 148).
  • Van der Jagt’s 1829 survey recorded the atoll’s annual coconut production at 421,000 nuts, estimating that thinning the palms could increase this by one-third to 561,333, yielding approximately 37,422 bottles of oil annually (p. 152).
  • Hare’s Asian followers numbered 36 men, 25 women, and 37 children at the time of Van der Jagt’s visit (October–November 1829); by 1836 Ross reported approximately 155 persons of Asian or African stock, including about 35 children born on the atoll (pp. 97–98, 153).
  • The British government’s 1839 rebuke to Rear-Admiral Maitland 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 (p. 103).
  • Ross’s first letter to Capel (c. 1835–36) and his 1825 notes to Raffles present markedly different portraits of Hare: the earlier document shows Hare as a responsible if absent administrator, while the later one depicts him as a licentious and incompetent despot—a shift Gibson-Hill attributes to Ross’s post-1831 hostility (pp. 36, 193, 201).

Conclusion

Gibson-Hill’s definitive historical takeaway is that the Cocos-Keeling settlement was neither the heroic colonial venture that Ross’s later writings portrayed nor the Dutch-annexed territory that Dutch authors assumed, but rather a small, economically marginal coconut plantation sustained by a single family’s stubbornness and the labour of former slaves, whose political significance lay almost entirely in the diplomatic friction it generated between Britain and the Netherlands. The islands’ strategic value as a mid-ocean coaling and watering station was repeatedly recognised by naval officers and hydrographers yet consistently rejected by the Colonial Office, which preferred not to assume responsibility for a settlement it considered unprofitable and diplomatically hazardous (pp. 104–105, 289–290).

Context

  • 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); typescript copies of Ross’s letters to Capel were held by Druces & Attlee, solicitors to the Clunies Ross family (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 (pp. 7–8).

References