Penloom History · The stories they left out
Eastern Pacific, 1906–1917
A Mexican colony the ships stopped visiting, and the two years afterwards that the US Navy scrubbed out of its own report.
Mexico garrisoned Clipperton Atoll in 1906 to work the guano and hold it against French claims. A supply ship came every two months. Then the Revolution consumed the mainland, the ships stopped, and the colony began dying of scurvy.
By 1917 the captain and the last men had rowed out toward a ship on the horizon; the boat capsized and all of them drowned. That left the women, their children, and one man with a rifle: Victoriano Álvarez, the lighthouse keeper.
Careful here. By the survivors' accounts he declared himself king of the island and held them for nearly two years, killing at least two of the women. On 18 July 1917 two of them killed him with a hammer, and within hours the USS Yorktown appeared and took eleven survivors off. The rescue, the date, the eleven survivors and the Navy's silence are documented. Nearly every detail of Álvarez's two years comes from survivor testimony given long afterward and published in the 1930s press. That is testimony, not record, and we are not going to print it as though it were.
Commander Harlan Perrill's official report says nothing about Álvarez. He and his navigator scrubbed the record to protect the women and stayed silent for seventeen years — which is the reason almost nobody has heard of this.
Part of this story is labelled DISPUTED above, in the paragraph it belongs to. We label rather than cut: a claim the record does not carry is still part of how the story was told, and you are entitled to know which part is which.
Penloom History — dark history you can trust. Every claim traced to a named archive, monograph, report or paper, and everything the record does not carry labelled where it sits. How we check a history fact before we repeat it →