Background History of Kerguelen Crown Territory:
The key event was 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. Banks and Cook advised the Admiralty that Kerguelen was strategically upwind of Australia and that the Van Diemen's Land and Port Sidney settlements could only succeed if the French were excluded from holding the Kerguelen Islands by a British base at Port Resolution (Port-aux-Francais). They also most strongly recommended that an effort be made to establish a settlement 'to support the local fishery of whales, seals and other marine resources', as whaling and sealing were the two principle commercial activities in that area.
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, but unable to obtain timber for repairs from local sources, so the community resembled the peat-fuelled and poverty-stricken parts of the Hebrides and Western Ireland. The local seal and whale population was also unable to sustain the depredations of British, French, Norwegian and American ships, commercial whaling moving west to South Georgia and to South Africa, leaving Kerguelen with a precarious existence and government neglect.
France was unwilling to give in to British demands that it abandon Kerguelen, using fishing and the discovery of some lignite (brown coal) as its excuse; the lignite deposits were on Presque'Il Ronarc'h, an almost-island that the British called Ronarch Island, in a straight Anglicisation of the mainly French-origin names. The French use of convicts to mine the lignite seemed to border on slavery, so it caused a lot of bad feeling between the French and Anglo-Scots settlers. This was to have serious repercussions for the French in later years.
As indicated, 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 had 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, as did Eglise de Sainte Vierge in Porte Douzieme on Ronarc'h. The fish was mostly dried or salted for winter food or as an export to buy grain from Australia and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania),
The 1860s saw Kerguelen divided by nationality but united against the common foes of cold and hunger, the French Prefect and the British Lieutenant-Governor informally holding monthly meetings to co-ordinate activities such as fishing, trading and medical care. At one stage, the Collective d'Outremer de Kerguelen had a dentist and a surgeon, whilst the Crown Territory of Kerguelen had two doctors and the only boatyard. It was a difficult situation, echoed only by the situation that was to occur later in Svalbard (Spitsbergen), with some Norwegians and a handful of Americans living amongst the French and British settlers.
German interest in Kerguelen only emerged in 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War erupted, the Germans defeating the French after the Siege of Paris. Kerguelen was a mere side-issue, but was offered in hopes that the Germans would annoy the British by being there. The King of Prussia and his Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck nearly avoided this trap, but agreed to take Kerguelen for reasons of their own; they wanted to show that Germany was an advanced scientific state and could be a worthy continental partner to an increasingly-suspicious Britain. The consequences for Kerguelen were that Porte Douzieme was renamed 'Wilhelmstadt' and the very correct Colonel Ludwig Von Beck became Governor, with a small sloop and the supply-ship SMS Polaris bringing supplies from Hamburg via Lisbon, Walvis Bay and Capetown. Oberleutnant zur See Karl Huss was a decent man who was well respected as a seaman and a commander, so was welcomed in Port Resolution as much as in Wilhelmstadt. Beck was by contrast a bit of a martinet, so his replacement after four years by Korvettenkapitan Friedrich Von Kahn was welcomed by all on Kerguelen. Von Kahn was no high flier, but had replaced an Army officer because the Kaiserliche Marine had intent to deploy a squadron to Chinese waters and saw Kerguelen as being important to that and other plans. Not having its own mines of steam-coal, the Wilhelmstadt anchorage had to import coal from Port Elizabeth in Natal to fuel visiting ships, so was considered a supplemental port for ships en route to the Far East.
Wind being a constant problem - and a reason for the tallest plant being Kerguelen's famous wild cabbage - the locals of all nationalities were to use it for powering various small mills for Australian grain, for pumping water, for spinning, weaving and fulling of cloth and the powering of metalworking machinery. The Germans 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 spread rapidly and 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. The German powder works used Chilean saltpetre and sulphur, but was only a pilot project and closed down by 1900.
Distance meant that, although the French and Germans grumbled routinely about Kerguelen, it remained a British 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 (French, then German), a fish-processing factory and the home for four thousand hardy souls. They had overcome problems with plants, animals, storms and isolation, thriving as much as Falkland Islanders and the Hallunders of Heligoland. What was most unusual was that the British Lieutenant-Governor and the Kriegsmarine Kapitan-zur-See formed a highly-unorthodox partnership that kept the peace and encouraged joint support between their settlements, the Lieutenant-Governor being recognised as senior. The Kaiser knew of this arrangement, regarding it as a good diplomatic partnership, but the British Colonial Office considered that Germany was 'muscling in', particularly after the 1890 deals in Africa that were to exchange Heligoland for some nebulous frontiers in Africa. This followed the First Boer War of 1880 with its inconclusive end and the unconnected formation of the German African Cruiser Squadron in 1885.
Perhaps the most disturbing times in Kerguelen during the last decade of the 1800s were connected to the Kaiserliche Marine East Asia Squadron (Ostasiengeschwader), which expanded from two gunboats in 1885 to four larger cruisers in 1896, the ships occasionally watering at Kerguelen and coaling from colliers from Natal. When in 1897 the Chinese killed two German missionaries, the bay and lands of Kiautschou (Tsingtao) were seized to become Germany's Far Eastern base. The East Asia Squadron was to grow by 1900 to two heavy and two light cruisers, whose passage to and from China was to worry the Royal Navy; Kerguelen acquired two destroyers and half a dozen torpedo-boats, serviced and supplied by HMNB Simonstown in South Africa. During the Second Boer War, which finally broke Boer resistance, the Kaiser was careful not to arouse British anger and his warships kept to German possessions, with only a brief visit by the SMS Kaiserin Augusta to Kerguelen on its way to Chinese waters. But, in 1897, the Kaiserliche Marine seized Tsingtao and established its base for China and Pacific operations, to the dismay of Russia, Japan, Britain and - of course - China.
"Just a watering and refuelling base - no coastal batteries -" Lieutenant-Governor William Shane was told by the phlegmatic Fregattenkapitan Alberich Moeller. " - We rely upon you for defence of Kerguelen... No, we don't trust the French and Russians." Shane nodded his understanding. "We have bases at Luderitz, Dar es Salaam and Tsingtao, we coal commercially at Durban and Singapore. My duties are thus mostly for Kerguelenvolk." Moeller was much lower in rank than his predecessors, passed over for promotion, but content enough to be little more than Naval Governor and Harbourmaster.
The Siege of the Legations in Peking briefly improved international relations between the European Great Powers and gave tiny Kerguelen a degree of respectability, but the gradual buildup of the Kaiserliche Marine in the China Sea and the Indian and Pacific Oceans was to worry Shane's successor, Sir Robert Baxter Llewellyn, a competent but not influential administrator who had spent most of his career in the warmer climate of the Caribbean. Llewelyn had agreed to serve out the remainder of his career in sleepy Kerguelen, but he was already 61 in 1906 and his wife Lady Theodora Louisa Llewelyn was herself ageing. They did not expect to be in Kerguelen more than eight years and could then look forwards to an easy retirement in South Wales; unfortunately, they faced a turbulent time.