Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Prison Island Beach
Red-footed Booby
Photo by Wendy Murray
The island group is named after the coconut (Cocos nucifera), which grew there in profusion, even before the deliberate planting of all of the southern atoll as a part of the Clunies Ross estate.
Captain William Keeling is believed to have been the first European to sight the islands in 1609 on his return from Bantam in the Dutch East Indies, on behalf of the East India Company, though there is no record of that sighting.
In his sailing directory for this region of the Indian Ocean, compiled in 1805, the British hydrographer, James Horsburgh, called them the Cocos-Keeling islands, and named one of the islands after himself. After settlement the early inhabitants called them the Borneo Coral Reefs after the supply vessel the Borneo, owned by John and Joseph Hare and Co, and captained by John Clunies Ross. They were also known as the Keeling-Cocos Islands, until 1955 when they officially became the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
Despite knowledge of the islands for 200 years or more, it was not until the early nineteenth century that they were settled. Interest was taken in them because they lay on a trade route from Europe to the Far East. The first settlement was accidental, Captain Le Cour and the crew of the brig Mauritius lived on Direction Island for several weeks after their ship was wrecked on the reef in 1825.
On 6 December 1825, Captain John Clunies Ross, a Scottish trader sailing the Borneo for Alexander Hare's company, made a brief landing on the islands. In the following year a settlement was established by Alexander Hare. John Clunies Ross and his family returned in 1827 with the intention of commencing a settlement on the Islands.
The relations between Ross and Hare were poor. Initially both claimed ownership of the islands, but in 1831 Hare finally left the atoll. The Clunies Ross family, who became known as 'Kings of the Cocos', owned/occupied the islands for more than 150 years. In 1857 the islands were declared a part of the British Dominions by Captain Fremantle who arrived aboard H.M.S. Juno, having misread his directions which instructed that he annex Cocos in the Andaman Islands. In 1886 Queen Victoria granted all of the islands, under certain provisions, to John George Clunies Ross in perpetuity. Responsibility for supervision of the islands was transferred over the years to the Governments of Ceylon (1878), the Straits Settlements (1886), Singapore (1903) and Ceylon again (1939-45). They became a Territory of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1955, and in 1978 Australia purchased all of the lands, excepting the family home, from the Clunies Ross family for AU$6.25 million. In 1984 through the United Nations supervised Act of Self Determination (ASD) the Cocos-Malay population voted to integrate with the Australian community. The Territory is administered by the Australian Government.
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