Background History of Kerguelen Crown Territory:
The POD is the 1776 visit of Captain Cook and his scientific colleague, Joseph Banks, accepted at the last minute by the Admiralty, as Banks wished to investigate Antarctic species. The voyage was marked by the first visit of a British ship to the island later investigated by Ross, but the volcanic Mount Banks [Erebus] marks the event. More significant was the advice of Banks and Cook that the French be excluded from Kerguelen Island by a British base at Port Resolution (Port-aux-Francais) and that an effort be made to establish a settlement 'to support the local fishery of whales, seals and other marine resources'.
The 'other marine resources' became remarkably significant, when Royal Society correspondents in the Channel Islands and Bantry Bay in Ireland reported on the use of seaweed as a fertiliser for potatoes and a fodder for livestock. Irish, Hebridean Scots and other hardy settlers, were encouraged to voyage to Kerguelen at Government expense, to set up fishing and farming communities in an area that resembled St. Kilda off the Hebrides. The collection of sea birds and their eggs, the use of edible seaweeds, the growth of limited crops of potatoes and vegetables, were augmented by work and supply of sealers, whalers and Navy vessels, but it was a harsh existence. The Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties allowed a fast ocean passage from Capetown to Australia and New Zealand, ships watering at Port Resolution. Convict labour was briefly used in the 1850s to mine the local lignite (brown coal) deposits, but these were mostly unsuitable for steamships although locally useful for domestic heating and cooking in the absence of wood.
The lack of forests and good coal were the death-knell of the local shipping support industry, for with the annihilation of the local seals and whales, the South Georgia bases at Grytviken and Leith Harbour were preferred. What saved Kerguelen was its fishing industry and name of 'The Iceland of The Indian Ocean', for fish-processing became an important local industry. The sealing and whaling industry left its mark in the local inhabitants, half of whom have common Norwegian surnames such as Larsen and Erickson, also in the Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and the Calvinist 'Norwegian Church', both in Port Resolution. The little Roman Catholic Chapel of Maria Stella in Molloy was founded by fishermen from Britanny and St Pierre et Miquelon, continuing a French connection.
Wind being a constant problem - and a subject of Kerguelen's famous wild cabbage - the locals were to use it for powering various small mills for Australian grain, for pumping water, for spinning, weaving and fulling of cloth, the powering of metalworking machinery, finally producing their first wind turbines for electricity in 1903. They also came up with one of the strangest applications of a windmill ever discovered - the super-cavitation water-heater, that used a perforated impeller to boil water almost instantaneously - all because a centrifugal pump impeller was badly made and heated water. This idea was a fluke, but gave Kerguelen modern central heating and guaranteed supplies of hot water; what it was also to do, was to make fireless locomotion standard on the narrow-gauge railways used in the Port and in the mines. The Royal Navy went as far as to fit a fireless boiler to a harbour launch, but decided to convert it back to a standard boiler burning lignite; what the fireless boiler engines were perfect for, was working in explosives factories - another task for which Kerguelen had plenty of room available. The lignite could be distilled to provide water, creosote and tars, leaving a high-carbon residue suitable either for grinding up to mix with sulphur and purified nitre for gunpowder, or for replacing steam coal in boiler furnaces.
Distance meant that, although the French grumbled routinely about Kerguelen, it remained a Crown Territory and formed a codicil in the agreements of the Congress of Vienna; France - equally routinely - hoped the drain on the Crown purse would make Britain abandon the islands. Instead, it became a watering-point, a minor whaling and sealing station, a haven for ships in distress, a cable relay station for the Capetown to Perth telegraph cable, a minor high-security prison, a minor explosives factory and the home for two thousand hardy souls. They had overcome problems with plants, animals, storms and isolation, thriving as much as Falkland Islanders and the Hallunders of Heligoland.
The Boer War saw some Boers in the Cook Prison, but that was nothing in comparison with the effect of the Great War, when eleven men went to sea with the Navy and only seven returned, but the manufacture of explosives was increased and there was a serious risk of attack by the raiders SMS Emden and SMS Cormoran II. Emden had captured the collier Buresk and might look for a remote coaling anchorage, although Kerguelen was remote, defended and equipped with a powerful radio station; in fact, the Emden headed for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and was there intercepted, heavily damaged and forced to run aground, whilst Cormoran II never left the Pacific. The Second World War was a different matter, with fears of Japanese attacks, commerce raiders and German U-boats that were actually to affect Kerguelen - first the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, then the raiders Atlantis, Kormoran and Pinguin, the Gruppe Monsun of U-boats and some Japanese submarines. The significance of Kerguelen was that its possession by Britain opened up the stormy southern direct route to Australia from South Africa, so steamers on this Great Circle route could have some air cover and escort support from the
Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force, using the airfield built in 1938 as RAAF Kerguelen - one of the first official signs of a link with Australia that continues to the present. HMANB Port Resolution, fielding escorts, a destroyer and some seaplanes, was an auxiliary base using the port and harbour. Both would be seriously outmatched in the 1940s.
At first there were fears that the tiny Territory would be attacked by Admiral Graf Spee, but the pocket battleship returned to the South Atlantic; more serious was the trouble caused by Atlantis which seized a ship off Capetown and her charts of the approaches to Kerguelen. Rogue certainly contemplated attacking tiny Port Resolution and would have outgunned the destroyer, the escorts and the pitiful 12-pounder guns rigged as harbour defences, but the seas around India offered better prizes; he nevertheless briefly put in to a fjord at the northern tip of Kerguelen to alter his ship's disguise, the grave of a dead crewman being discovered a month later. The RAAF then set up a training and recce Petrol about the Kerguelen area and posted coast watchers in hides on the Crozet, Amsterdam and Isle Saint-Paul islands, claiming them as Australian Protectorates, to later French dudgeon. The dead sailor was reburied and his grave notified to the War Graves Commission, for protection and maintenance. SMS Kormoran was to approach Kerguelen, but veered off after sighting the patrolling aircraft, unaware that Royal Australian Navy authorities were informed, in the first steps of the search that ended with the sinking of the raider and HMAS Sydney. Admiral Scheer was to be a different prospect and gave poor Kerguelen its first taste of modern warfare; the Battle of Kerguelen tied the island Territory to Australia in perpetuity.
You wanted it - you've got it - now, what about info on Australian forces in the Southern Indian Ocean at the time?
