Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The 22 June 1897 found Joshua Slocum on tiny Thursday Island,
off the northern tip of Queensland. And in that remote and insigni-
ficant outpost of empire he represented the United States of America
in the celebrations marking the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria.
The main attraction was a corroboree, a dance festival performed by
four hundred aborigines specially brought over from the mainland
by the resident magistrate. The frenzied dancing went on, by the
light of fires, late into the night. It was, in Slocum's words, 'a show at
Australian waters and twenty-three days later, after a magnificent
run before the trade winds, he reached Cocos Keeling Islands, 2,700
miles away. It was during this run that he notched up the single-
handed speed record of 1,200 miles in eight days.
As we have already observed, the 'South Sea Islands' were no
sooner discovered than various adventurers - misfits, social out-
casts, younger sons of the nobility, and the like - began settling them
in the hope of discovering or creating their own tropical paradise.
One of the most successful escapists was undoubtedly Captain John
Clunies Ross RN who, on retiring from active service, in 1827, took
his family to live on the Cocos Keeling Islands. The only occupants
were fellow adventurer Alexander Hare and forty concubines and
slaves he had recently brought from Malaysia. Ross swiftly estab-
lished his ascendancy and when Slocum arrived, seventy years later,
he found a well-ordered community under the leadership of Sidney
Clunies Ross, the founder's grandson.
*
Slocum found the islands swarming with Malay and Eurasian
children. At first they feared the solitary seaman, believing him to be
a spirit from the deep. But, largely with bribes of ship's biscuit thick-
spread with blackberry jam, he won them over. For days on end they
sat on the beach and watched wide-eyed as Slocum re-tarred and
caulked his vessel.
