The fascinating history of the Cocos Keeling Islands
Tags: Island, Cocos, Maps, History, Keeling

The next notable visit was from Dr. Henry Ogg Forbes, a Scottish naturalist and explorer who came to the islands in 1879, during what is often considered the period of greatest prosperity of the Cocos Islands, although I’m not really sure what this is based on. So what had changed since Darwin’s visit?

In 1879, our old friend John Clunies-Ross was unfortunately long dead and was followed as ruler and owner of the Cocos Island by his son John George and then by his grand-son George. Please note the fabulous smoothness of this transition from John to George.

John George Clunies-Ross, or Ross II if you want to add a little feudal spirit, ruled for about 30 years, from the death of his father to his own, in what would become the classical Ross Dynasty style. During this time, he came up with an ingenious idea to tackle the lack of workforce in the coconut tree plantations: simply import convicts from Bantam, on the island of Java, to work for free of the islands. It’s not very hard to see where they got the inspiration from this idea, clearly in the typical style of the late Alexander Hare, harem not included.

The only other notable event during the Ross II era was the incorporation of the Cocos Islands in the British Empire in 1857.

What’s that? An invasion?

Well, when John Clunies-Ross and Alexander Hare settled on the islands, they were fully inhabited and claimed by no one (that’s called Terra nullius, just in case you liked interregnum and wanted to start a collection). So after Alexander Hare left the place, John Clunies-Ross could consider the islands to be his very own kingdom, without any foreign country having anything to say about it. And that’s what he did: he established himself King of the Cocos islands.

But John Clunies-Ross was realistic and he guessed that if an other country (the kind with an army) decided to annex them, he would be pretty much helpless. So, very early on, he tried to find the protection of a major European power established in the region and first reached out to the British to have them acknowledge his ownership of the islands. However, the tiny islands seemed to spark very little interest and it was only in 1857 that the British Empire deigned to invade the islands and put poor Clunies-Ross out of his misery.

It is worth noting that some reports indicate that this was actually a mistake and that Captain Fremantle was actually supposed to take control of the Maldive Islands. There is however no consensus on this and Fremantle’s rather huge geographical error is not certain.

This event changed nearly nothing to the life on the islands since the Clunies-Ross kept ownership of the land and Ross II was appointed governor-king of the place. A little later, in 1886, the Queen Victoria even granted the Clunies-Ross family perpetual control and ownership of the island.

Now, back to 1879. Ross II had been dead for 8 years and Ross III was busy as a bee modernizing the place all around. Ross III (George) is said to have been a popular leader of the islands, much more appreciated by the inhabitants than his father. This is backed up by the notes of Dr. Henry Ogg Forbes, who described the place differently than Darwin half a century ago: he found the inhabitants “fairly contended”, the houses “neat” and “comfortably furnished”. George had stopped the importation of Bantamese convicts but free labour was still recruited there however and the habitations were still separated into two groups: the locals (of European and Malay descent, more and more a mix) and the workforce from Bantam.

Even if the practice of convict/slave importation had been sort of over for 4 years, Dr Forbes found that this had left the island with an “unruliness” issue due to this population. At the time, the island was under a strict curfew and everyone had to report at the guard-house at fixed hours. Despite being theoretically free, no one had the right to leave the main village at night and every boat was tracked with an accuracy that evokes your run-of-the-mill totalitarian state more than the classical idea of a tropical island.

At the time however, the economy was looking good for the Cocos Islands, or at least for the Clunies-Ross family. Coconut-based products (coprah and coconut oil mainly) were shipped by the family's own fleet and sold in large quantities.

Copra production (between 1908 and 1921) [National Library of Australia]

This revenue stream allowed the Islands to import a variety of products which went from rice to wives, the latter being harder to get.

Financial prosperity probably peaked during the following decades, largely thanks to Christmas Island where the Clunies-Ross established the first settlement in 1888. When a little later, Phosphate was found, they were given around half the shares of the company that extracted it, to avoid litigations on land property. This turned to be very profitable and helped fuel the development of the Cocos Islands.