114. Skipping Christmas for Cocos
17 September 2014
Christmas Island was named by Captain William Mynors of the "Royal Mary", an East India Company ship, on sighting it on the 25th December 1643. It is about ten miles across and rises steeply from the ocean floor to a plateau around 300m above sea level. Its natural history has much of interest and is particularly notable for the migration to the sea of tens of millions of red land crabs to spawn each November. The island was annexed by Great Britain in 1887 after the discovery of thick deposits of phosphate of lime originating from guano. Mining began using indentured labour from China, Malaya and Singapore and is continued by their descendants today. Sovereignty was transferred to Australia in 1957. Boats carrying refugees, mainly from Indonesia, began to reach the island in the late 1980s, resulting in up to 3,000 asylum seekers being held in detention centres at any one time. The Government has recently closed them down and, in controversial deals, moved all of these people to islands belonging to Papua New Guinea. We passed close enough to the coastline to spot a couple of familiar yachts on moorings in the open roadstead and we spoke to them on the vhf, but we had already decided not to stop there as, with limited time, we had to be selective about which places we could visit.
With a slight alteration of course and the wind increasing to 15-25 knots, we took down the poles and continued under single headsail. We'd been trolling a fishing line for several days and next morning got our first bite. It put up quite a fight and we doubted that the line and hook would hold, but we finally succeeded in landing our first wahoo, measuring 113cm from head to tail. The swell started building next morning, and a flock of about twenty frigate birds came to pluck fish from the wave-tops. Gusts of 30 knots hit us during the night, and the following dawn brought a scene of 3.5m high seas, and lots of gannets wheeling and diving. From the top of the swell, we sighted the low atoll of South Keeling about 7 miles away. We started the engine and entered the wide bay known as Port Refuge and continued through a shallow channel across coral beds marked by beacons towards Direction Island, guided over the vhf by friends who'd arrived earlier. We dropped the anchor in the midst of a rain squall. Within half an hour an Australian Federal Police RIB was alongside, and the friendly officers issued us with our immigration, quarantine and customs clearance, and gave us an information leaflet about the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
South Keeling is the larger of two atolls making up the territory of Cocos (Keeling). The lagoon is around six miles in diameter with twenty islands strung around its perimeter. Captain William Keeling gave the atolls his name in 1609 but they weren't settled until Captain John Clunies-Ross arrived with his family in 1816 to establish a copra business, employing labour from Malaya. They exported whole coconuts to Singapore and Mauritius and oil to Java and the UK. He and his heirs became known as "the King of the Cocos Islands". "HMS Beagle" stopped there in 1836, and Captain Fitzroy's survey helped Darwin develop his theory of the formation of coral atolls. The islands were claimed by Great Britain in 1857, although ownership was granted to the Clunie-Ross family. They were transferred to Australian control in 1955, but the government objected to the family's fiefdom and effectively compulsorily purchased the islands in 1978.
There is a regular fast-cat ferry service between the only two inhabited islands, called Home and West, with extra stops at Direction Island twice a week. We caught Saturday's ferry to Home Island and spent the day there. We'd heard that fresh supplies had just arrived by air, so we made a bee-line to the shop, but the fruit and vegetables were chilled and very expensive, so we just bought a few essential items and asked the shop to keep them to one side for us to collect later. We had hoped to send and receive our e-mails, but our Australian 'sim' card didn't work and the library - the usual source of wifi - was closed. We would have visited the museum, but a notice said that it was only open by appointment, but didn't explain how to make one and there was no one to ask. We spent a bit of time looking at the buildings of the old copra works and the collection of double-ended working boats. We wandered through the wide block-paved residential streets with their lines of identical bungalows clad with aluminium sheeting. A sign proclaims a 'Roads to Recovery' project, and the buildings are probably designed to be hurricane resistant. Apart from a few women shoppers who drove around in golf buggies, the small town was almost deserted. No children could be seen playing, no adults passing the time of day. Apparently 500 ethnic Malays live there, but they weren't out and about that Saturday - perhaps there was a football match showing on television.
We walked across to the ocean shore. Signs state that the beaches provide critical nesting grounds for green sea turtles, but it looked as if their greatest hazard would be finding a way through the mounds of plastic rubbish washed up, a sad demonstration of the amount drifting around the seas. As we circuited the island we came across evidence of the island's past, such as semi-derelict masonry buildings, stone slipways and a massive, crumbling and leaning brick wall which must have surrounded the Clunies-Ross home. There was little indication of any produce being cultivated - just a few banana plantations, fruit and, of course, coconut trees. At the northern point there is a cemetery, mostly Muslim apart from the large headstones of several generations of the Clunies-Ross family. We came across a graveyard of another sort: wind turbines lying on the ground, rapidly being overwhelmed by vegetation - we wondered what had gone wrong. It took a couple of hours to complete our tour, which left another couple of hours to wait for the return ferry - without even a café or bar to sit in. The timetable doesn't allow a visit to Home Island unless you make a long dinghy ride to West Island to catch an early ferry across the lagoon. The population is smaller there, mainly whites manning a resort or two, the airport and a military base. One guesses that Australia's principal reason for maintaining the territory is for its potential strategic value.
Direction Island, crescent shaped and half a mile long, used to be the site of a cable and wireless station, but it now seems to be dedicated for the use of passing cruisers. It appears idyllic as you approach across the turquoise waters of the lagoon. Swaying palms overhang the silver coral sand of the beach, which is backed by dense woodland. On landing you are met by red hermit crabs looking very silly wearing their enormous shells, and one day we saw a crowd of them squabbling over an open coconut. There are shelters with picnic tables, a barbecue, rainwater tank, clothes lines and toilets. Boards have been nailed to three trees with the names of cruising yachts that have called there in the past. There were usually around ten yachts from almost as many countries at anchor near "Egret", and crews would often gather in the evening for supper or drinks around a bonfire. On the days when the ferry called, a small group of tourists would be deposited on "our" island for the day, and sometimes a few off-duty servicemen came over in RIBs for some 'R&R', but otherwise, we had it all to ourselves. We would liked to have stayed longer than our four days, but the forecast warned of severe weather approaching, and we thought it prudent to get away sooner rather than risk a delayed departure.