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John Clunies Ross

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

John Clunies Ross

John Clunies Ross (1786–1878) was a Shetland-born seaman and colonial settler who established a permanent European presence on the Cocos-Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, a coral atoll situated between the Maldives and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean. His settlement, formally named “New Selma” in November 1827, represented one of the few private colonial ventures of the early nineteenth century to achieve sustained habitation on a remote atoll, and its history is inextricably bound to the commercial and political rivalry between Ross and the former British Resident at Banjermassin, Alexander Hare, whose Asian followers formed the labouring population of the settlement [1, pp. 7–9]. The Cocos-Keeling Islands ultimately passed under British sovereignty in March 1857, having been the subject of competing claims by the Netherlands and Britain throughout the 1820s and 1830s [1, pp. 104–105].

Origins and the Banjermassin Connection

Ross was born in 1786 in Shetland and went to sea at the age of thirteen. By 1813 he was serving as third mate on the whaler Baroness Longueville, and at Kupang, Timor, he accepted command of the brig Olivia, a vessel belonging to Alexander Hare [1, pp. 17–33]. Hare, a London-born merchant who had established himself at Malacca by 1807, had been appointed British Resident at Banjermassin in south-east Borneo through the patronage of Sir Stamford Raffles in 1811–12 and received a personal land grant of approximately 1,400 square miles from the local Sultan [1, 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 [1, pp. 34–53].

The Banjermassin settlement itself had been a financial failure. Over four years it ran a deficit of Java Rupee 556,770, and Hare’s failure to submit satisfactory accounts to the East India Company constituted the principal cause of his disgrace and eventual expulsion from Dutch territory in 1819 [1, pp. 42–46]. Hare subsequently lived precariously at the Cape of Good Hope, retaining a group of former slaves from Malacca, Borneo, and Java in a state of quasi-servitude [1, pp. 57–70].

The Cocos-Keeling Settlement

Ross first entered the atoll’s lagoon in December 1825 aboard the Borneo, taking formal possession and planting seeds on the entrance islets [1, pp. 57–70]. Hare arrived at the atoll in June 1826 with approximately 98 Asian followers, and Ross brought his family and ten British seamen in February 1827, formally establishing “New Selma” on 4–5 November of that year [1, pp. 57–70]. The two men’s incompatible temperaments and economic interests—Ross seeking a commercial entrepôt, Hare seeking isolation—produced an irreconcilable rivalry that would define the settlement’s early history [1, pp. 7–9].

The population of the settlement in 1836 comprised approximately 175 persons: twenty of British descent and 155 of Asian or African stock, including about 35 children born on the atoll [1, pp. 97–98]. 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 [1, p. 152]. At the time of Van der Jagt’s visit in October–November 1829, Hare’s Asian followers numbered 36 men, 25 women, and 37 children [1, p. 153].

Political Claims and the Question of Sovereignty

Ross’s petitions for British recognition of the settlement were uniformly rejected. His petition 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. 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” [1, pp. 133–148]. 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 [1, p. 103].

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 [1, pp. 80–83]. 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 [1, pp. 91–98].

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 [1, pp. 104–105]. Fitzroy and Darwin, visiting aboard the Beagle in April 1836, described the conditions of the former slaves as nominally free but functionally servile [1, pp. 91–98].

The Question of Historical Reliability

A central argument of the documentary record is that Ross’s later autobiographical writings, composed after his quarrel with Hare, systematically distorted earlier, more neutral accounts of their relationship. Gibson-Hill demonstrates that 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 attributed to Ross’s post-1831 hostility [1, pp. 36]. Gibson-Hill further argues that the political dynamics of British-Dutch competition over the islands have been consistently misrepresented by both Dutch and English secondary literature [1, pp. 7–9].

Research and Documentation

The principal scholarly treatment of John Clunies Ross and the Cocos-Keeling settlement is 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), which presents an exhaustive collection of primary sources spanning the period 1825 to 1857 [1, pp. 1–306]. Gibson-Hill, who had lived on the atoll in 1941 and lost his original manuscript during the Japanese Occupation, drew upon manuscript sources 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) [1, p. 291]. Typescript copies of Ross’s letters to Capel were held by Druces & Attlee, solicitors to the Clunies Ross family [1, 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 [1, pp. 7–8]. This gap in the archival record represents a significant limitation on further research into the early settlement period. The 2011 publication “The Colourful Early History of the Cocos-Keeling Islands” [2] provides a secondary overview but does not introduce new primary documentation beyond what Gibson-Hill had already compiled. The historiographical debate thus remains centred on Gibson-Hill’s 1952 work, which stands as the definitive documentary source on Ross, Hare, and the establishment of the Cocos-Keeling colony.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. 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
  2. Anon (2011). The Colourful Early History of the Cocos-Keeling Islands : 306.