A speck of coral where humanity lost its mask – and where the last survivors had to become something else entirely just to stay alive.
Clipperton Atoll, Eastern Pacific·10°18′N 109°13′W
Total Land Area: 9 km²
Distance from the Nearest Coast: 1,080 km
Colonists at Peak (1910): ~100
Survivors Rescued (1917): 3
YEARS UNDER ÁLVAREZ’S TERROR
There is an island in the eastern Pacific Ocean that no one lives on, no airline flies to, and no travel agent has ever tried to sell. It has no hotels, no roads, no fresh water, and no permanent residents.
What it has instead is a history so dark, so operatically brutal, and so entirely forgotten that it reads less like recorded fact and more like a fever dream set by a writer with a very bleak imagination.
Clipperton Island sits alone in the eastern Pacific, roughly 1,080 kilometres southwest of the Mexican coast – close enough to appear on maps, far enough to feel like a different world entirely.
It is a coral atoll: a ring of sand and jagged reef enclosing a stagnant freshwater lagoon, the whole thing measuring just nine square kilometres at its widest. There are no mountains, no rivers, no agriculture, and no natural harbour.
There is, however, an almost absurd abundance of crabs – millions of them, orange and relentless, coating every surface and devouring anything that does not move fast enough.
The island takes its name from John Clipperton, an English privateer who sailed these waters in the early 18th century and is said – though never proven – to have used the atoll as a base for raiding Spanish ships.
French explorers documented it in 1711 and named it the Île de la Passion. France formally claimed it in 1858. The United States, Mexico, and Britain each staked their own claims at various points. The island seemed barely worth the paperwork – until someone noticed the guano.
But what is guano? The dried excrement of seabirds, accumulated over centuries on remote islands. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it was among the most valuable commodities on Earth, prized as a fertiliser and as a source of the nitrates used in explosives. Islands with large guano deposits were, briefly, strategic assets.
How It All Began: Guano Fever and the Men Who Stayed
In 1906, the Mexican government of President Porfirio Díaz reached an agreement with the British Pacific Island Company to exploit Clipperton’s guano deposits.
A settlement was established: barracks, a small railway to move the ore, a lighthouse on Clipperton Rock – the only prominent geological feature on the island – and a military garrison to assert Mexico’s sovereignty claim.
The garrison was commanded by Captain Ramón Arnaud, a complicated figure who had previously deserted his post earlier in his military career, been imprisoned for five months, and been assigned to Clipperton as a form of punishment.
He brought his wife, Alicia Rovira Arnaud, with him – a decision that would eventually make her the central figure in one of the most extraordinary survival stories of the 20th century.
The lighthouse was assigned to a solitary keeper named Victoriano Álvarez, who lived alone on the cliff below the light, rarely interacting with the rest of the colony.
By around 1910, the colony numbered approximately 100 people: soldiers, miners, engineers, and their families.
They received supply ships from the port of Acapulco every two months – a lifeline that brought food, medicine, news from the mainland, and the basic materials that kept the settlement functioning.
The guano business had already begun to falter (the company went bankrupt in 1908 and the mining operations wound down), but the garrison remained, its purpose shifting from economic extraction to territorial assertion. Then, in 1910, Mexico erupted.
The Forgetting (1911-1914): The Revolution on the Mainland and the Silence That Followed
The Mexican Revolution deposed Porfirio Díaz in 1911, replacing his government with a succession of factions in violent, chaotic conflict.
The new authorities had more immediate concerns than a tiny garrison on a forgotten atoll in the Pacific. The supply ships became irregular, then stopped almost entirely.
The last reliable resupply arrived in January 1914. After that, nothing. The colonists were, in every meaningful sense, abandoned – not through any deliberate act of cruelty, but through the indifference of a government consumed by its own survival.
In the vast machinery of a revolution, 100 people on a coral reef in the middle of the ocean simply ceased to register.
In February 1914, a stroke of apparent luck arrived: the American schooner Nokomis ran aground near the island. Four crew members volunteered to row a lifeboat to Acapulco to raise the alarm.
The US Navy gunboat Cleveland arrived months later to rescue the stranded sailors. Its captain offered to take the entire Mexican garrison back to the mainland. Captain Arnaud refused.
He believed, or persuaded himself, that a supply ship was imminent. It was the last offer of rescue anyone would make for three years.
“It is difficult to imagine the physical and especially mental conditions of the sparse population of the island — isolated, without provisions and without hope, going crazy every minute.”
– The Mazatlan Post, Reconstructing the Colony’s Final Years
The Dying (1914-1917): Scurvy, Starvation, and the Sea That Offered No Way Out
The island had almost nothing to eat beyond fish, birds, and bird eggs. The vegetable garden had been destroyed in a storm and never rebuilt.
The few coconut palms provided some sustenance but nothing approaching an adequate source of Vitamin C and without it, the adult men began showing the telltale symptoms of scurvy: bleeding gums, weakening joints, extreme fatigue, and eventually death.
The disease killed slowly, systematically, and without mercy. One by one, the men died. Their bodies were buried deep in the sand to keep them away from the crabs.
Captain Arnaud, watching his garrison disappear, made one final attempt at salvation: he and four remaining men launched themselves on a makeshift raft, trying to reach a ship they had spotted on the horizon. The sea swallowed them. Not one of them returned.
The Scurvy Deaths
Vitamin C deficiency killed most of the adult male population over a period of approximately two years. The disease was entirely preventable but in this case – entirely inevitable, given the island’s food supply.
The Failed Escape
Captain Arnaud and four men drowned attempting to reach a passing vessel on a makeshift raft. The distance to the nearest coast – over 1,000 km – made any open-boat escape effectively suicidal.
The Crabs
Millions of land crabs inhabited the island. The colonists buried their dead deep in the sand specifically to keep the crabs away from the bodies. The crabs would later dispose of a different corpse entirely.
No Fresh Water
The island had no reliable freshwater source. Survivors caught rainwater in old boats. The lagoon water, while technically drinkable in extremis, was described by later castaways as muddy and unpleasant.
The Hurricane
A hurricane destroyed the settlement’s remaining structures during this period, leaving the women and children living in makeshift shelters they built themselves from whatever materials remained.
The False Hope
Captain Arnaud believed he saw a ship on the horizon and launched his fatal raft. Some accounts suggest no ship was there at all – that he saw what he needed to see after years of waiting.
The Last Man Standing: Victoriano Álvarez, Self-Proclaimed King of Clipperton
By early 1917, every male colonist was dead. Every one, that is, except the lighthouse keeper. Victoriano Álvarez had spent years living alone in his hut at the base of Clipperton Rock, watching the colony’s disintegration from a distance.
He was described by those who knew him as reclusive and disturbed, a man who had been marginalised throughout his life – partly, accounts suggest, on account of his African heritage, which carried a heavy stigma in the Mexico of his era.
Years of isolation in one of the most desolate places on Earth had done nothing to stabilise whatever was already fragile inside him.
With the last man gone, Álvarez emerged. He gathered the island’s remaining weapons and threw them into the sea, keeping only a rifle for himself.
Then he announced, to the fifteen women and children who remained, that he was King of Clipperton Island – and that the women were his property.
What followed was three years of systematic terror. Álvarez raped the women and enslaved the children, controlling their access to food and enforcing his authority through violence.
Two women were killed when they resisted. The others, malnourished and without weapons, had few options beyond endurance.
One – a twenty-year-old named Tirza Randon – refused to be entirely broken. She told him to his face what she thought of him when they were alone, and spoke openly among the other women about killing him. It was a declaration that would eventually matter.
One Morning, Two Things Happened at Almost Exactly the Same Time
By the middle of July 1917, Álvarez had tired of Randon and turned his attention to Alicia Arnaud – the captain’s widow, who had been watching her husband’s colonists die for three years and raising her children on a crab-infested reef.
He summoned her to his lighthouse for the following morning, a summons that everyone understood to be a death threat as much as anything else.
She had been told he intended to kill her when help finally arrived, to prevent her from speaking to the authorities. That morning, Tirza Randon and Alicia Arnaud went to his hut. Randon killed him with a hammer.
Minutes later, Arnaud’s son spotted a shape on the horizon. It was not a mirage. It was the USS Yorktown, an American Navy gunboat that had been patrolling the Pacific and had detoured past Clipperton on a whim, not expecting to find anyone alive. Commander Harlan Page Perrill sent two men ashore in a boat and was astonished when they returned with women and children behind them.
Perrill later wrote to his wife:
“You can imagine my surprise when the watchers on the bridge reported that they were getting into the boat.”
When his men went ashore and entered Álvarez’s hut, they found the body. Nearby lay a hammer and a knife, both covered in blood.
Perrill made a decision: he left the body for the crabs, and he left it out of his official report entirely. He and his entire crew kept the secret for seventeen years, specifically to protect Tirza Randon from any legal consequences.
The Yorktown set course for the Mexican port of Salina Cruz. The eleven survivors – three women and eight children – arrived on 22 July 1917.
Commander Perrill was reportedly stunned to learn that Alicia Arnaud, whom he had assumed to be in her forties from her haggard appearance, was twenty-nine years old.
Clipperton Now: A Kingdom of Crabs and Drifting Plastic
No permanent colony has been established on Clipperton since 1917. France – confirmed as the legal sovereign by the arbitration of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in 1931 – rebuilt the lighthouse and briefly stationed a small military outpost, which was abandoned in the 1940s.
The United States occupied the island quietly during World War II as a weather station and left in 1945.
Since then, visitors have been rare: occasional French naval patrols, sport fishermen, scientific expeditions, and in 1978, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who brought a camera crew and one of the 1917 survivors to film a documentary called “Clipperton: The Island That Time Forgot”.
The island’s current residents are the crabs – millions of them – and the seabirds whose ancestors produced the guano that made all of this worthwhile to someone once.
The lagoon hosts several species of microalgae, including at least one unique to the island, discovered by French scientists in 2005. The surrounding waters are among the richest fishing grounds in the eastern Pacific.
And on the beaches, plastic. Tonnes of it – bottles, nets, packaging, debris from ships and cities thousands of kilometres away, carried here by the ocean currents and deposited on a shore with no one to collect it.
The island that once represented Mexico’s geopolitical ambitions in the Pacific is now, among other things, an inadvertent monument to the reach of human waste.
The Eleven Who Made It Back
RESCUED BY USS YORKTOWN · 18 JULY 1917
- Alicia Rovira Arnaud
The governor’s widow. Age 29 at rescue, though Commander Perrill assumed she was in her forties. She had watched her husband die, survived three years under Álvarez, and walked to his hut on the morning of her own scheduled death. She went to the mainland and rebuilt her life.
- Tirza Randon
Age 20. The woman who ended Álvarez’s reign. Commander Perrill omitted her actions from his official report for seventeen years to protect her from prosecution. The history books argue about whether she deserves a monument.
- The Eight Children
Including two-year-old Angel Arnaud, who suffered from rickets and could not walk, and was carried to the rescue boat on the back of eleven-year-old Francisco Irra. The children were small for their ages from malnutrition.
- Commander Harlan Page Perrill
Not a survivor of the island, but of his own conscience. He risked court-martial by leaving Álvarez’s body for the crabs and omitting the killing from his report. He broke his silence seventeen years later to explain why:
“I was afraid of the effects it might have upon the fortunes of Tirza Randon.”
The story of Clipperton Island has been told in a handful of novels – by the Colombian writer Laura Restrepo, by the Mexican novelist Ana García Bergua – and in Cousteau’s documentary, and in the archives of the US Navy.
It has not, however, made it into the general conversation about what the 20th century was actually like in its less documented corners. Perhaps that is fitting. The island was forgotten once. It seems almost determined to be forgotten again.
CLIPPERTON ISLAND / ÎLE DE LA PASSION · EASTERN PACIFIC · FRENCH OVERSEAS TERRITORY SINCE 1931
Source and Further Reading:
- Wikipedia — Clipperton Island
- Atlas Obscura — Clipperton Island
- Damn Interesting — The Tyrant of Clipperton Island
- Futility Closet — The Clipperton Survivors
- Historic Mysteries — The Tyrant King of Clipperton Island
- The Mazatlan Post — The Tragic History of Clipperton
- History Defined — The Tragedy of Clipperton Island
- Jimmy Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
- Laura Restrepo, La Isla de la Pasión (1989, Planeta)
/This article is based on documented historical accounts. Some details – particularly regarding Álvarez’s mental state and the precise sequence of events on 18 July 1917 – rely on accounts that were recorded years after the fact and may contain minor inconsistencies between sources. The core historical record of the colony, the survivors, and the rescue is well established./
