North Keeling has no harbor, is seldom visited, and
is of no importance. The South Keelings are a strange little world,
with a romantic history all their own. They have been visited
occasionally by the floating spar of some hurricane-swept ship, or by
a tree that has drifted all the way from Australia, or by an
ill-starred ship cast away, and finally by man. Even a rock once
drifted to Keeling, held fast among the roots of a tree.
After the discovery of the islands by Captain Keeling, their first
notable visitor was Captain John Clunis-Boss, who in 1814 touched in
the ship _Borneo_ on a voyage to India. Captain Boss returned two
years later with his wife and family and his mother-in-law, Mrs.
Dymoke, and eight sailor-artisans, to take possession of the islands,
but found there already one Alexander Hare, who meanwhile had marked
the little atoll as a sort of Eden for a seraglio of Malay women which
he moved over from the coast of Africa. It was Boss's own brother,
oddly enough, who freighted Hare and his crowd of women to the
islands, not knowing of Captain John's plans to occupy the little
world. And so Hare was there with his outfit, as if he had come to
stay.
On his previous visit, however, Boss had nailed the English Jack to a
mast on Horsburg Island, one of the group. After two years shreds of
it still fluttered in the wind, and his sailors, nothing loath, began
at once the invasion of the new kingdom to take possession of it,
women and all.
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