Christmas Island: History
=== First visits by Europeans, 1643 ===
The first European to sight the island was Richard Rowe of the Thomas in 1615. Captain William Mynors of the East India Company vessel Royal Mary named the island when he sailed past it on Christmas Day in 1643. The island was included on English and Dutch navigation charts early in the 17th century, but it was not until 1666 that a map published by Dutch cartographer Pieter Goos included the island. Goos labelled the island "Mony" or "Moni", the meaning of which is unclear.
English navigator William Dampier, aboard the privateer Charles Swan's ship Cygnet, made the earliest recorded visit to the sea around the island in March 1688. In writing his account, he found the island uninhabited. Dampier was trying to reach the Cocos Islands from New Holland. His ship was blown off course in an easterly direction, arriving at Christmas Island 28 days later. Dampier landed on the west coast, at "the Dales". Two of his crewmen became the first Europeans to set foot on Christmas Island.
Captain Daniel Beeckman of the Eagle passed the island on 5 April 1714, chronicled in his 1718 book, A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo, in the East-Indies.
The first attempt at exploring the island was made in 1857 by Captain Sidney Grenfell of the frigate HMS Amethyst. An expedition crew were sent ashore with instructions to reach the summit of the plateau, but they failed to find a route up the inland cliff and were forced to turn back. During the 1872–1876 Challenger expedition to Indonesia, naturalist John Murray carried out extensive surveys.
In 1886, Captain John Maclear of HMS Flying Fish, having discovered an anchorage in a bay that he named "Flying Fish Cove", landed a party and made a small collection of the flora and fauna. In the next year, Pelham Aldrich, on board HMS Egeria, visited the island for 10 days, accompanied by J. J. Lister, who gathered a larger biological and mineralogical collection. Among the rocks then obtained and submitted to Murray for examination were many of nearly pure phosphate of lime. This discovery led to annexation of the island by the British Crown on 6 June 1888.
Soon afterwards, a small settlement was established in Flying Fish Cove by G. Clunies-Ross, the owner of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands some 900 kilometres (560 mi) to the southwest, to collect timber and supplies for the growing industry on Cocos. In 1897 the island was visited by Charles W. Andrews, who did extensive research on the natural history of the island, on behalf of the British Museum.
Phosphate mining began in 1899 using indentured workers from Singapore, British Malaya, and China. John Davis Murray, a mechanical engineer and recent graduate of Purdue University, was sent to supervise the operation on behalf of the Phosphate Mining and Shipping Company. Murray was known as the "King of Christmas Island" until 1910, when he married and settled in London.
The island was administered jointly by the British Phosphate commissioners and district officers from the United Kingdom Colonial Office through the Straits Settlements, and later the Crown Colony of Singapore. Hunt (2011) provides a detailed history of Chinese indentured labour on the island during those years. In 1922, scientists unsuccessfully attempted to view a solar eclipse in late September from the island to test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. …