Clipperton Island

If you are looking for a tale of pirates, buried treasure, death by starvation and murder, slavery and forced violation then Clipperton Island has it all, even though this pitiful guano-covered flyspeck of an atoll has no permanent residents, no drinkable water, no harbors, and is infested by millions of poisonous crabs.

Unfortunately due to space limitations, I must confine myself here to the rather mundane philatelic aspects but there are several books available at Amazon.com which will fill you in on the other stuff.

Clipperton Island, named for John Clipperton, an English pirate, is a small speck in the Pacific Ocean, about 700 miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico. It has been claimed at various times by France, Mexico and the United States. After the US gave up its claim, the dispute between France and Mexico was arbitrated by the King of Italy, who, in 1931, ruled in favor of France. The island was formerly part of French Polynesia, but is now administered directly from Paris.

The island is a flat coral atoll with a central lagoon containing stagnant, undrinkable water. Surrounded by coral reefs, it is very difficult to approach. There are only a few palm trees and there is a single large volcanic rock about 50 feet high. It is about 2 miles in diameter.

Clipperton is home to large numbers of birds and immense deposits of guano. Around 1895 the Organic Phosphate Company of San Francisco began to mine the guano. Their agent in San Francisco was the W. Frese Company, and in 1895 the Organic Phosphate Company authorized the Frese Company to prepare a set of 10 local stamps which were purportedly to be to be used as postage on mail between the mining operation and the continental United States. The stamps were printed in denominations from one cent to one dollar, and showed a map of the island with the year in the center, as well as birds and lobsters. The one-dollar value is for express mail, which would have been totally useless since the only communication between the island and the mainland was by ship.

When issued these stamps were roundly condemned as an attempt to bilk collectors, although this was denied by their issuers. There are covers known with both Clipperton Island stamps and regular US postage – all of them cancelled in San Francisco. It is not known whether these covers originated on Clipperton Island or were prepared in San Francisco as philatelic souvenirs.

A complete set of these stamps is shown in the top and middle rows of the nearby illustration. There are also crude forgeries out there, as shown in the bottom left portion of the illustration. These would not fool anyone familiar with the genuine stamps.

As mentioned above, Mexico has also had a claim to this island since Mexico is the closest large land mass. At one time the Mexican government set up a lighthouse atop the rock and a garrison of soldiers was stationed there with their families. But during the Mexican Revolution the island was forgotten, the supply ship was sunk as the result of a mutiny and most of the men perished. One account is that they died of starvation and/or scurvy, another version is that they left in an open boat to seek help and were never seen again.

The one remaining man on the island, the lighthouse keeper, then declared himself to be “King of Clipperton” and turned the women and children into slaves. Ultimately one of the women killed him and the surviving three women and eight children were rescued in 1917 by a United States naval vessel.

During the period of Mexican interest in the island, some enterprising individual used a rubber stamp to overprint Mexican stamps with the name of the island. They are known with both diagonal and horizontal overprints, often on top of the cancellation. Several of these stamps are shown at lower right in the illustration. These, and other types of overprints on Mexican stamps, are interesting but completely bogus. There are also French stamps overprinted “Ile Clipperton” which are also fake.

There’s a lot more to the history of Clipperton Island, including its use as a weather and observation post during World War II, visits to the area by an American president, and its temporary use as a research station. It has been invaded several times by amateur radio enthusiasts who set up temporary broadcast facilities. It was even visited by Jacques Cousteau who made a documentary about the island in 1980.

An excellent philatelic reference is a book by Wolfgang Baldus entitled, The Postage Stamps of Clipperton Island. It is available in the library of the American Philatelic Society.

Benedict A. Termini, M.D.