Clipperton Island: The Pacific Colony Mexico Forgot, and the Rescue of 1917

On the morning of 18 July 1917, the American gunboat Yorktown was steaming along the Pacific coast of Mexico on an errand that had nothing to do with rescue. The Navy had heard rumours that German agents were setting up radio stations and submarine bases on lonely islands off Mexico, and the Yorktown had been sent to look. One name on the list was Clipperton, a ring of coral and guano so low and so far out that sailing directions warned ships about it rather than inviting them in.

The captain first planned only to circle the island, then decided to land, if nothing else to find out whether its light was working. As his boat headed in, the crew saw women on the beach making frantic signals. When his boat finally got through the surf, the landing party found no Germans. They found three women, a girl of about fifteen and seven younger children, the last people left of a Mexican colony that its own government had stopped supplying years earlier. Every man on the island was dead. The last of them had been killed that very morning, by one of the women he had terrorised.

What follows is the story of how they got there, how they survived, and what happened to the island after they left. It is a story about guano and flags, a forgotten garrison, a king’s courtroom in Rome, and, in the end, pigs, boobies, crabs and rats.

A Good Friday island

Clipperton sits at about 10 degrees north, roughly 1,080 kilometres southwest of the Mexican mainland. It is the only coral atoll in the eastern Pacific: a thin ring of land about 12 kilometres around, enclosing a lagoon that has been cut off from the sea for about 170 years. Its land area is only about 1.7 square kilometres, and most of it stands around two metres above the waves. The one exception is Clipperton Rock, a volcanic outcrop on the southeast side that rises 29 metres and looks, from a distance, like a sail or a castle.

The lagoon is strange in its own right. With no ocean water coming in, it has become a layered, or meromictic, lake whose deep water never mixes with the surface, the same kind of layering that made Cameroon’s Lake Nyos so deadly. Clipperton’s lagoon has no fish, and its deepest pockets hold acidic, stagnant water.

The first Europeans known to have charted the place were two French ships, La Découverte under Michel Dubocage and La Princesse under Martin de Chassiron, which arrived in April 1711. Dubocage sighted it on Good Friday, and so they called it Île de la Passion, the Island of the Passion. The English name came from John Clipperton, an English pirate and privateer who fought the Spanish in the same era and is said to have passed the island, and perhaps hidden there. Nobody has proved that he did.

Guano and three flags

For a century and a half the island had no obvious value. Then the world discovered what seabird droppings could do for farmland. Clipperton was covered in guano, and in April 1858 France made an agreement with a businessman from Le Havre to claim Pacific islands for their guano. On 17 November 1858 France annexed Clipperton as part of its protectorate of Tahiti. A French naval officer, Victor Le Coat de Kervéguen, drew up a record of possession and had a notice of the annexation published in a newspaper in Hawaii. France then left. Nobody stayed on the island and nobody built anything.

Mexico protested, arguing that it had inherited all of Spain’s Pacific islands on independence and that Spanish records mentioned the island long before the French arrived. In the 1890s Americans moved in too. A San Francisco firm, the Oceanic Phosphate Company, began digging guano on Clipperton in 1895 without any approval from Washington. In November 1897 a French warship found three Americans there and had their flag lowered. A few weeks later, on 13 December 1897, President Porfirio Díaz sent the Mexican gunboat Demócrata. Fifteen men went ashore, found the company’s three employees flying the American flag, and replaced it with the Mexican one.

Mexico now held the island. In 1905 it reached a guano deal with a British firm, the Pacific Islands Company, and in late 1905 a young army officer named Ramón Arnaud was put in charge of a small garrison there. In March 1909 Mexico and France signed an agreement to settle the dispute by binding arbitration, with the King of Italy as judge. Neither side could have guessed how long he would take.

Arnaud’s colony

Arnaud was born in Orizaba, Veracruz, in 1879, to a family of French descent. By most accounts he did not want the posting and saw it as a kind of exile, but he was persuaded that President Díaz had chosen him personally to guard Mexico’s claim. He spoke English and French, which would help in a quarrel with two foreign powers. His soldiers brought their wives and children. In June 1908 Arnaud himself married Alicia Rovira and took her to the island as a bride. Their first son was born on Clipperton in June 1909.

For a few years the colony worked. A lighthouse was installed on the island at the end of July 1906. Mexican Navy files show furniture shipped out for the soldiers’ and workers’ houses, and pigs and vegetable gardens were introduced. At the height of the guano trade more than a hundred men were working on the island. Supply ships, usually the gunboats Demócrata and Tampico, sailed out from Mexico to bring food and relieve the garrison, though the coral reef often made landing impossible and voyages were late.

There was one danger built into the place from the start. Nothing on Clipperton could feed people for long. Navy papers record cases of scurvy, the disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, from late 1906. The colony’s best defence turned out to be a handful of coconut palms, thirteen of them planted on his own initiative by Gustav Schultz, the German who ran the guano company’s operation.

Forgotten

In 1910 the Mexican Revolution began. Díaz fell in 1911, and Victoriano Huerta seized power in 1913. Arnaud, promoted to captain in 1912, was told to stay at his post. In June 1914 the Tampico, the gunboat that usually carried the colony’s food, was badly damaged in fighting during the revolution. No Mexican supply ship ever reached the colony again.

Earlier that year, on 28 February 1914, the schooner Nokomis had been wrecked on the reef, adding a dozen more mouths to feed. Four of her crew volunteered to row a boat to Acapulco for help. One died on the way, but the others got through, and the cruiser USS Cleveland was sent to fetch the shipwrecked sailors. Her captain offered to take the colonists too. Arnaud refused. He believed a Mexican supply ship was due any day, and there was a political problem as well: the United States had just occupied the Mexican port of Veracruz. The Cleveland sailed away with the sailors and with Schultz and his family. It was the last ship the colony would see for more than three years.

The food ran out entirely in early 1915. From then on the islanders lived on fish, seabirds and eggs, and on about one coconut a week, rationed to hold off scurvy. It was not enough. Scurvy killed many of the soldiers and workers. Arnaud, by the account his widow later gave, became convinced that he had doomed them all by refusing the Cleveland‘s offer.

One day in May 1915 he thought he saw a ship offshore and ordered the remaining men, all except the lighthouse keeper, into a boat to row out to it. Alicia watched through a glass as they launched it through the surf. She saw them start to fight, apparently because the men knew there was no ship. Then the boat overturned. Ramón Arnaud, Lieutenant Secundino Cardona, Sergeant Agustín Irra and Corporal Felipe Lara all drowned. A few weeks later, in June 1915, Alicia gave birth to her fourth child.

The lighthouse keeper

That left one man on Clipperton: Victoriano Álvarez, who kept the light. He declared himself the island’s ruler, and in many retellings its king. With no one to stop him, he raped the women, taking them one at a time to his hut and keeping them there as long as he liked. He murdered a woman, Juana Ramírez. The survivors later said she had been killed for refusing him. He told Alicia that he would kill her the moment a ship appeared, so that she could never testify against him.

In July 1917 his victim was Tirza Rendón. Alicia went down to his hut to keep the peace. While he was roasting a seabird on a spit, Rendón picked up a hammer and struck him on the head, struck him again, and then stabbed him. The details come from the Yorktown‘s captain, who heard them from the survivors on board. Mexican accounts say Alicia and the other women joined in, and that they acted in self-defence. Either way, the two women ran out of the hut and saw a warship approaching the island.

Every man on the island was dead. The last of them had been killed that very morning, by one of the women he had terrorised.

The Yorktown

The captain wrote to his wife every evening, and in 1937 his letters were published by Charlotte K. Perrill in the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine Proceedings. They are the closest thing we have to an eyewitness log of the rescue. When his officer returned from the beach, the captain wrote, he “revealed a tale of woe absolutely harrowing in its details.”

The people he brought off were three women, one girl about fifteen years old, and seven smaller children, the sole survivors of the original colony. Not a man was left.

When the Yorktown‘s boat first turned back, beaten by the surf, the women thought they had been abandoned. One of them told the ship’s doctor that she would go back to the settlement and kill the children, and that the rest would then walk out over the reef into the sea. The boat came back on its second try.

The survivors had kept a calendar, tearing off a page each day. They were only two days out, but they asked the sailors what year it was. They had made fish hooks from the handles of oil cans and clothes from the Nokomis‘s sails. They had no idea that a world war was going on, and they still believed Huerta was president of Mexico. Alicia was 29. Her youngest child, two years old, had rickets and could not walk. On board, the crew raised almost $200 for the refugees, and the women said they hoped never to eat gull again.

On 22 July 1917 the Yorktown anchored at Salina Cruz. The captain had radioed ahead, and a port boat came out carrying Alicia’s father, who had written letter after letter to the Mexican government and had always been told that everyone on the island was dead. The government of Venustiano Carranza, which had overthrown Huerta, gave the survivors a cool reception, according to the Mexican government’s own archive.

A king’s verdict

The question that had put the colonists on Clipperton was still waiting in Rome. On 28 January 1931, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy finally gave his award. He found no proof that Spain had discovered the island, and no sign that Mexico had exercised any authority there before 1897. France’s claim of 1858, he ruled, had been valid, because a deserted island does not need settlers to be possessed, and France had never abandoned it. Clipperton, he concluded, had belonged to France since 17 November 1858.

The award settled who owned the island. It could not undo what had happened there. Mexico accepted the ruling, amended its constitution in January 1934 to remove Clipperton, and France formally took possession in January 1935. The case is still taught in international law courses as a lesson in what it takes to own an empty place.

Clipperton never got another permanent population. Franklin D. Roosevelt stopped there in July 1938 on a fishing cruise aboard USS Houston, and a Smithsonian scientist went ashore to collect specimens, including a sponge later named Callyspongia roosevelti. In December 1944 the U.S. Navy built a weather station on the island, which France protested and which the Americans left after the war. In 1962 nine fishermen from a sunken tuna boat lived there for 23 days.

Pigs, boobies and rats

The people who lived on Clipperton in those decades left behind more than graves. They had released pigs, and the pigs ate the island’s seabirds and land crabs. When the ornithologist Ken Stager of the Los Angeles County Museum visited in 1958, he counted only about 500 brown boobies and 150 masked boobies. Appalled, he shot all 58 pigs. A 2005 paper in the journal Marine Ornithology described what happened next: “His efforts succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.” Aerial photographs from 2003 showed at least 25,000 brown boobies and more than 112,000 masked boobies, by far the largest masked booby colony in the world.

The pigs had also been eating the island’s orange land crabs, and the crabs turned out to be its gardeners. Before the pigs came, the crabs ate nearly every seedling and kept the land bare except for mature palms. With the pigs gone, the crabs came back in their millions and the island emptied of weeds again.

Then, around 1999 and 2000, two fishing boats ran aground on the reef, and black rats came ashore. The same thing has happened on many islands, from Henderson to Lord Howe, where rats wiped out a giant insect that survived only on a sea stack offshore. On Clipperton the rats went for the crabs. A French bird-conservation group, the LPO, sent a team in November 2025 and estimated only about 40,000 land crabs, compared with 1.25 million in 2005 and 11 million in 1968. With fewer crabs to clear seedlings, creeping plants and coconut palms are spreading. The team counted almost 1,900 palms, against 581 in 2015.

Not everything is going badly. The masked boobies are holding steady at about 35,400 pairs, close to 70 percent of the world’s breeding population, and red-footed boobies have grown from 171 pairs in 2005 to 693, using the new palms for nests. But smaller seabirds such as noddies and terns are struggling to breed anywhere except the cliffs of the Rock, where rats find it harder to reach them.

The island today

Clipperton is now French state property, run directly by the overseas ministry in Paris. France created a marine protected area out to 12 nautical miles in 2016 and banned fishing there from January 2017. In March 2026 the French government told the National Assembly that a rat eradication had not yet been scheduled, though it had helped pay for a feasibility study. The LPO tested methods on a five-hectare plot in 2025 and is pushing for a full operation and a much larger protected area. Clipperton is also on the list of places you can’t simply sail to and visit: landing, anchoring in its waters or staying ashore needs authorization from the minister for overseas France.

There is still no one living there. Since the Second World War the island has mostly hosted scientific expeditions, amateur-radio teams and periodic French Navy visits, and litter from the wartime station and later visits still lies on its shores. The women who walked down to the beach in July 1917 to signal a passing ship are long gone. The island they survived is still waiting to find out whether the crabs, or the rats, will inherit it.

Further reading