ON THE MORNING OF JULY 18, 1917, U.S. Navy captain H.P. Perril saw Clipperton Island for the first and last times. He never came ashore, but he took a very careful look at it from his ship, the Yorktown, through his spyglass. He circumnavigated the isle—outside the barrier reef, and at a safe distance from it—exactly in an hour, and confirmed that it was about five miles around. “Clipperton Island,” he wrote, “is a dangerous low atoll, approximately 2 miles in diameter.”
An atoll is an astonishing formation in the shape of a doughnut, with water in its center and around its perimeter. A ring of land with a lagoon in the center, floating in the middle of the ocean. At some moment in its prehistoric past, Clipperton had been a volcanic mountain surrounded by a powerful crown of coral reefs. The mountain in time sank slowly, and disappeared under the water, and the reef wall was the only thing left above sea level. What had been the crater of a volcano was now a lagoon of brackish waters, effervescent with sulfur coming from the belly of the earth.
The captain goes on: “[The isle] has a promontory 62 feet high on its southwest coast, which at first sight looks like a ship’s sail, and on approaching it, like a gigantic castle. This promontory can be seen from a distance of 12 to 15 miles provided there is no fog: then, the promontory and the isle itself can only be seen when it is already at very close range.
“The breakers on its eastern shore do not provide early enough warning for a ship to change course in order to avoid running aground. The isle is surrounded by an uninterrupted coral reef on which the ocean pounds heavily and ceaselessly, sometimes covering the isle. There are sharks swimming around. During the rainy season, waterfalls cascade on its southwestern coast.
“While we were circumnavigating the isle, I saw more seagulls, flying fish, and butterflies than I had ever seen on a similar stretch of coastline,” Perril comments, amazed at this place which, lacking any vegetation, no blade of grass to soften the hostility of those rocks, nonetheless abounds in an unusual and alarming proliferation of animal life. “Thousands of birds fly around the island, and the guano deposits are being exploited commercially. A colony was established to operate a phosphate plant some years ago. [ . . . ] A layer of guano several feet deep covers the isle. There is no doubt that birds have inhabited it for years.”
Nine years earlier, and from the deck of another ship, the Corrigan II, the Arnauds had viewed, full of expectation, what for them was a promised land. Though that happened long before and they were seeing the isle through glasses of a different color, what they saw could not have been much dissimilar to what the American captain, H. P. Perril, saw when he accidentally approached its shores.