It was 18 July 1917 when the crew of the US military ship USS Yorktown found 3 women and eight children in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, beckoning them from a small island to more than 1, 163 km away from the closest point on the mainland, Acapulco.
They were the last inhabitants of a community that in its maximum splendor must have have around fifty people.
But how did they get there and what happened so they were left alone?
To understand their odyssey you have to know the incredible history of this tropical island lost in the middle of nowhere, which was once Mexican.
To begin with, it has least three different names.
One, Dunes , the one given to it by the Spanish conquerors who first recorded it on a map, back in the century XVI.
Another, Clipperton , the one that prevailed, which is the last name of a famous English pirate who they say used it as a hiding place and base of operations at the beginning of the XVIII century.
And a third, i sla of the Passion , the one put to it by the French explorers who rediscovered it on Good Friday in the early 18th century, when they declared it as their own.
But many in Mexico are unaware of its existence, the long international dispute over its sovereignty and the tragic history of which it was the scene.
It is a tale of those who surpass fiction, starring businessmen, shipwrecked men, military men and brave women who survived the disease and violence , abandoned for years in the middle of the ocean and in charge of their children.
All that , before France finally took the island, in the 20th century, by decision of an Italian king.
The last man on the island
Shortly before this photo was taken, two of the women portrayed had blood on their hands.
For some time, to protect their families, Tirsa Rendón and Alicia Arnaud Rovira had decided to end the life of the only man left on the island, who had been tormenting his small and vulnerable community for several years with beatings, rapes and murders, according to survivors counted.
By chance they carried out the plan the same day they ended up being rescued by the American gunboat, who, in the context of the First World War , had approached Clipperton during a reconnaissance mission looking for German ships.
Ramón Arnaud was about 8 years old when he witnessed of what happened, a traumatic episode that he spoke of frequently to his descendants and that he would describe sixty years later in great detail to the famous French explorer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau , when he returned to Clipperton on 1945 as a guest to participate in one of his documentaries.
Since the rescue he had not set foot on the island where he was born, in 1909, when Mexico still considered her his.
It had been a year since her father, the young Captain Ramón Arnaud , the first and last governor of Clipperton, had settled permanently there, as a newlywed, with his wife Alicia.
Arna ud (father) was in charge of a military garrison of a dozen men who, accompanied by their families, were carrying out an assignment ordered by President Porfirio Díaz himself: to protect Mexico’s sovereignty over the island, which throughout the 19th century had aroused the interest of French, British and Americans .
Paradise and hell
From the air, Clipperton looks like a colorful paradise.
It is a white belt of coral sand that stands out against the blue of the ocean and encloses a lagoon of emerald water.
Up close it is something else.
The boobies dominate the island by covering it with a mantle of excrement, a peculiarity that played a key role in the history of Clipperton, because it attracted the interest of international powers and companies that in the middle of the 19th century were trading in guano , a precious fertilizer rich in phosphate derived from these animal feces.
Living there must have been hell, “but an absolute hell”, the researcher specialized in marine ecology Enrique told BBC Mundo Ballesteros, which has been submerged in waters around the world, including those of the Clipperton lagoon, closed to the sea, smelly and brackish, full of algae and bacteria but deserted with fish.
This Spanish participated in a scientific expedition to the island in 2016, as part of an investigation Project ion Pristine Seas , from National Geographic, in collaboration with the University of French Polynesia .
And there he found, together with his team of researchers, that the island and the waters that surround it are full of life, with a vegetation and fauna in constant evolution, which attracts the attention of scientists.
But it is a place inhospitable to humans .
In addition to being in the path of frequent storms and hurricanes , “There is a wind that does not stop and huge waves that do not let you access the sea,” recalls Ballesteros.
The island is surrounded by a great coral reef that makes extremely difficult and dangerous access by boat.
In addition to some groups of palm trees, the only thing that stands out above the completely flat line of sand is a large volcanic rock of about 28 meters high.
On that rock, at the beginning of the 20th century the Mexicans put a lighthouse to work.
And in a secluded cabin, to At the foot of that rock pierced by caves and passageways, Victoriano Álvarez, the lighthouse keeper, spent days and nights, who ended up losing his mind.
Pulse of great powers
The determination of Captain Arnaud and his garrison, who ended up giving their lives to protect the sovereign interests of Mexico, did not succeed in preventing France from remaining with Clipperton in the end.
The French, in fact, had already annexed unilaterally in 1858 which they then called i sla de la Pasión , but the Mexicans did not find out until almost 40 years later s , in 1877.
In 1858 France sent a lieutenant on behalf of Emperor Napoleon III to take formal possession of the territory that its explorers had first sighted at the beginning of the century.
The intention of the French was to later cede the exploitation of the guano to an American businessman who had taken an interest in the atoll.
When the lieutenant arrived on the island he raised a administrative act that he later registered with the French consul in Hawaii, his next destination, more than 6, 000 km away. The news was also published by the newspaper The Polynesian , from Honolulu .
But then the French did not come back by Clipperton, in part because their initial guano mining project failed.
Those who did, instead, were the Americans.
They raised, in fact , its flag over the atoll at the end of the 19th century, based on the so-called “ Law of the i slas g uaneras “, approved in 1200, which authorized its citizens to take possession and exploit any island with guano deposits that was uninhabited and not under the jurisdiction of another country.
When all this finally came to light, it became a international dispute which involved four nations.
Suc edited by chance: an article in the newspaper Herald of New York, in August of 1897 , reported that a ship loaded with guano had just returned from Clipperton and pointed out that the British flag was about to replace the American flag there because an English company was going to take the reins of exploitation.
During the following weeks, several Mexican newspapers reported on the surprising news and the pressure grew so much that that same year President Porfirio Díaz sent a gunboat to the atoll to see what was happening. passing and defending Mexican sovereignty.
There they found, indeed, an American flag and several company workers Oceanic Phosphate Company , who were informed that the island was Mexican and took possession of the territory.
What they did not know then is that the true The threat to its sovereignty would not come from the United States, but from France.
Mexico began to install a small colony in Clipperton, which would later be led by Captain Arnaud.
But France insisted so much diplomatically that the atoll was hers, that in 1909 the government of Mexico, sure of its position, agreed to submit the dispute to a international arbitration .
The The decision, which would be binding, was thus in the hands of a neutral arbitrator, who agreed that it should be the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III.
“A chain of bad decisions”
“We shouldn’t have let her lose,” Laura Ortiz, passionate about Clipperton’s history and professor of International Law, told BBC Mundo. nal at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Like the vast majority of Mexicans, he did not learn anything about the atoll in school, but rather listened to the story “full of fantasy and half noveleada ”when he was studying law at university.
For Ortiz, behind the loss of Clipperton above all there is the “ historical disinterest ” of the Mexican government for the island and for the insular territory in general. And also “a chain of bad decisions.”
The first, he says, was that of President Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico between 1876 Y 1910, for agreeing to submit the dispute to international arbitration, “because the island was already colonized by Mexicans,” explains Ortiz.
Then more than 20 years before the Italian king issued his award. At that time the Mexican Revolution and the First World War were unleashed.
When the award in favor of France finally arrived, the 28 of January of 1931, already Mexico was another country : Porfirio Díaz had already died and post-revolutionary Mexico was in the making.
The ruling said that Clipperton’s sovereignty belonged to France since 1858.
In the arbitration “the tests of the maps of the Spanish routes were not taken into account, in whose routes it appeared as island of Médanos. And it was taken into account the sighting of the French who discovered and registered it in quotation marks. ”
And there comes, according to Ortiz, another error in the string: n or have immediately appealed the arbitration decision before the Permanent Court of International Justice, the predecessor of the current International Court of Justice in The Hague, the main judicial organ of the United Nations.
Another error de México, continues Professor Ortiz, was rushing to reform the Constitution after accepting the arbitration ruling, eliminating Clipperton from the article 42 , which expressly appeared, along with other Mexican islands, as an integral part of the national territory.
In Mexico, “for all jurists and scholars of the subject, the arbitration award was unfair “, says Ortiz.
This was also considered by the late lawyer, writer and Mexican politician Miguel González Avelar, author of “Clipperton, Mexican Island.”
“The circumstances that led to his exclusion from Mexican sovereignty are so absurd that there is no reasonable person who, upon knowing them, would satisfied with the result ”, he wrote in 1992.
A heroic decision that ended in tragedy
Captain Ramón Arnaud and Alicia Rovira’s first years on the island, at the beginning of the last century, passed with relative calm.
Every two or three months came from Acapulco a ship loaded with provisions, medicines and news.
In addition to the members of its garrison and their families, the last workers of the British company lived in the atoll to which Mexico ended up giving the concession to exploit the guano, although they would soon abandon the mission when verifying that it was actually an unprofitable operation.
But everything changed after 1910: the start of the R Mexican evolution on the mainland at first interrupted the supply of the island and left it completely in oblivion later.
What followed then was a tragic story of survival, which lasted seven years for the most fortunate.
Before reaching the moment Most critical of shortages, sickness and death , Captain Arnaud had the opportunity to leave Clipperton aboard an American ship that arrived to rescue the survivors, upon learning that They were still alive.
But the captain decided not to abandon his post unless ordered to do so by his Mexican superiors, and both the garrison and their respective families rejected the offer to return to the mainland to stay in his side.
For many it was a heroic sacrifice for the homeland that the Mexican authorities of the moment never appreciated.
What Arnaud did not imagine was that in Mexico, In the middle of the revolution, no one wanted to take over a small and remote military detachment loyal to the previous government , now an enemy.
Over time The people of Clipperton were left in oblivion and later presumed dead.
In the atoll they never went hungry because they could live off the sea and boobies, but the lack of vitamin C was killing the population with scurvy .
A dozen coconut trees, then the only vegetation of the island, was the salvation for the few survivors.
Meanwhile, the youngest children of Clipperton grew more or less oblivious to the concerns of the older ones.
The Ramón Arnaud’s three little brothers had little memory of the hardships that they later told them they lived through.
But Ramón, who grew up on the island until he was eight years old, remembered “all the details you can imagine . He had them all very clear ”, his granddaughter Gabriela Arnaud, great-granddaughter of Captain Ramón and Alicia , told BBC Mundo by videoconference
He counted one and again everything that had happened “with the same naturalness with which she had lived it,” recalls Gabriela, who now chairs a project called Clipperton Honor and Gloria, with which she wants to publicize family history.
“At first, as a child, I understood everything almost like a story. He told me about an island where he had lived, where at first everything was fine, where the ship came and went, they had a beautiful house, his mother played the piano, gave classes to all the children on the island … it was a very beautiful, at the beginning, before all the tragedy came, ”Gabriela says.
But over the years things got more and more complicated.
Almost three years Before seeing how his mother and Tirsa killed Victoriano Álvarez, Ramón had seen his father drowning in the turbulent waters that surround the atoll, trying to reach with his last men, except the lighthouse keeper, a ship that had sighted on the horizon.
By then, 1915, it was already clear to the captain that no one from the Mexican navy was going to look for them again.
This is how the first and last governors of Clipperton died. And that’s how Alicia Arnaud, Tirsa Rendón and Altagracia Quiroz ended up alone in the middle of the Pacific, in charge of seven children and a teenage girl, and harassed by a maddened and violent man.
After rescue in 1917 the women had to give explanations for the death of the lighthouse keeper, but according to Gabriela Arnaud explains, they were exonerated of guilt for having acted in self-defense .
With the stories that her maternal grandfather told her, Gabriela Arnaud wrote a book, “Clipperton, a story of honor and glory.”
It is not the only one. The tragic events also inspired a film, several documentaries, numerous essays, plays and novels such as Laura Restrepo’s “The Island of Passion.”
But the history of the atoll does not end with the rescue of the survivors, nor with the award of the Italian king.
Clipperton today
Clipperton never had a permanent population again, but during World War II it was briefly occupied by the United States, which established a meteorological base there and an observation center.
In a letter from 1945 the then American president Franklin D. Roosevelt , who had visited the atoll on several occasions, wrote to his secretary of state: “The ownership and development of Clipperton Island are matters that I consider to be importance for the United States due to its strategic location with respect to the Panama Canal “.
“For a long time Mexico has disputed the French claim on this island and the Mexican arguments are not unfounded . It would be advantageous for us if the United States, in the absence of direct ownership, sought to obtain rights to a base on Clipperton Island with a long-term concession through Mexican ownership, ”the letter continues, now a public document accessible to through the Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State.
But that idea nu nca prospered. Today Clipperton is a French overseas territory.
Every both a frigate approaches the atoll to replace the flag and repaint the letters RF, by Republique Française , inscribed on a concrete monument.
“After all these years the atoll per se has no economic or strategic interest, except for the waters that surround the islet, ”says Professor Ortiz.
Thanks to Clipperton France has under its jurisdiction a Exclusive Economic Zone of 425. 000 km² , the equivalent of the size of Paraguay, in one of the richest fishing areas in the world, in which Ironically, it allows you to catch tuna from Mexico through a fishing agreement.
But few in Mexico remember or question the loss of Clipperton.
“For several years some legislators They said that Clipperton’s territorial sovereignty would have to be vindicated, but they were not able to secure that idea, ”Ortiz explains.
Now, more than a sovereign claim by legal means, the most that Mexican fans of Clipperton hope to achieve one day is some type of negotiation with France that allows Mexico to co-administer the island.
Meanwhile, the bust of Captain Arnaud adorns a square on Calle Real in Orizaba , the city of Veracruz where he was born and which never he was able to return from his mission.
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