Clipperton Island

A ring of coral

Clipperton is a roughly circular coral atoll in the eastern Pacific, about 2,900 km west of Panama. It covers about 5 km² and is barely 3 m high in most places, except for a rock about 21 m high topped by a ruined lighthouse. Nobody lives there.^[1]

The ring of sand closes off a lagoon from the sea, and a coral reef around the island makes landing by boat hard and dangerous.^[3] The atoll is named after the English pirate John Clipperton, who used it as a hideout in 1705.^[1] Spanish maps called it Médanos, and French explorers who came on a Good Friday called it the Île de la Passion.^[3] French ships’ logs described it in 1711.^[2]

Three flags

On 17 November 1858 a French naval officer, Lieutenant Victor le Coat de Kerwéguen, cruising about half a mile offshore, signed a declaration that the island belonged to Emperor Napoleon III. A boat managed to land a few of the crew, but the ship left without leaving any sign of French rule. The declaration was published in English in The Polynesian, a Honolulu newspaper, on 8 December. A guano mining concession that had prompted the trip came to nothing.^[2]

The United States listed the island under its 1856 Guano Act.^[1] On 24 November 1897 a French warship found three men digging guano for the Oceanic Phosphate Company of San Francisco, who raised the American flag when it appeared. Asked about this, the US government replied on 28 January 1898 that it claimed no sovereignty over Clipperton.^[2]

Mexico, which believed the island had long been Mexican, sent the gunboat Demócrata. On 13 December 1897 its crew landed, had the American flag lowered and raised the Mexican one. France protested, and the argument went on for years.^[2]

The forgotten garrison

Mexico set up a small colony on the atoll, led by Captain Ramón Arnaud: about a dozen soldiers and their families. At first a ship came from Acapulco every two or three months with food, medicine and news.^[3]

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, and supplies first faltered and then stopped. Arnaud was once offered passage home on an American ship but refused to leave his post without orders, and the others stayed with him. Without fresh food, scurvy killed many of them. In 1915 Arnaud and his last soldiers drowned trying to reach a ship they had seen on the horizon.^[3]

That left three women, eight children and the lighthouse keeper, Victoriano Álvarez, who, the survivors said, beat, raped and killed. Two of the women, Tirsa Rendón and Alicia Arnaud Rovira, killed him. That same day, 18 July 1917, the American gunboat USS Yorktown, searching for German ships, found the three women and eight children waving from the shore and took them off the island.^[3]

The king’s decision

On 2 March 1909 Mexico and France agreed to let King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy decide who owned the island, and to accept his ruling.^[2] It took him until 28 January 1931.^[2][3]

The king found no proof that Spain, and so Mexico, had ever discovered or ruled the island, so in 1858 it had belonged to no one. For an uninhabited island, he said, France did not need settlers or officials there; its clear, published declaration was enough, and leaving the island alone afterwards did not mean France had given it up.^[2]

Mexico accepted the ruling and removed Clipperton from Article 42 of its constitution, the list of the country’s islands. Many Mexican lawyers still call the award unfair.^[3] The United States briefly ran a weather station there in the Second World War.^[3] Since 2007 France has run the island directly under its minister for overseas France.^[1] The atoll gives France about 425,000 km² of sea, rich in tuna.^[3]

“l’île de Clipperton a été légitimement acquise par la France le 17 nov. 1858”^[2]