Isla Del Coco

Cocos Island () is a volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean administered by Costa Rica, approximately southwest of the Costa Rican mainland. It constitutes the 11th of the 15 districts of Puntarenas Canton of the Province of Puntarenas. With an area of approximately , the island is roughly rectangular in shape. It is the southernmost point of geopolitical North America if non-continental islands are included, and the only landmass above water on the Cocos tectonic plate.

The entirety of Cocos Island has been designated a Costa Rican National Park since 1978, and has no permanent inhabitants other than Costa Rican park rangers. As a result, it has been labelled as the world's largest uninhabited tropical island. Surrounded by deep waters with counter-currents, Cocos Island is admired by scuba divers for its populations of hammerhead sharks, rays, dolphins and other large marine species. The wet climate and oceanic qualities give Cocos an ecological character that is not shared with either the Galápagos Archipelago or any of the other islands (for example, Malpelo, Gorgona or Coiba) in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Because of the unique ecology of the island and its surrounding waters, Cocos Island National Park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The island can only be reached by sea, which usually takes 36 to 48 hours.

History

Prehistory

The island is believed to have been uninhabited by humans prior to European discovery. However, there has been little archaeological investigation into oceanic eastern Pacific islands, including Cocos Island. This is due to the fragile environments on such islands, which for many years have been untouched by humans, and because these islands are at a considerable distance from islands that had Polynesian populations. Likewise, Indigenous Americans on the west coast of the continent were not known to inhabit any remote eastern Pacific islands. In 2008, Cocos Island, the Desventuradas Islands, Galápagos Islands and Juan Fernández Islands (all uninhabited when discovered by Europeans) were surveyed by archaeologists from the Australian National University. Their investigation found that the Galápagos Islands may have been visited by a Polynesian vessel, but it is unclear what their findings were for Cocos Island.

Discovery and early cartography

In his ''Historia general y natural de las Indias'' (1535, expanded in 1851 from his previously unpublished papers), Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés discusses the discovery of the island by his contemporary, Spanish navigator Juan de Cabezas (also known as Juan de Grado), in 1526. D. Lievre, ''Una isla desierta en el Pacífico; la isla del Coco'' in ''Los viajes de Cockburn y Lievre por Costa Rica'' (1962: 134) tells that the first document with the name "Isle de Coques" is a map painted on parchment, called that of Henry II, that appeared in 1542 during the reign of Francis I of France. The planisphere of Nicolas Desliens (1556, Dieppe) places this ''Ysle de Coques'' about one and a half degrees north of the Equator.

Willem Blaeu's ''Grand Atlas'', originally published in 1662, has a colour world map on the back of its front cover which shows ''I. de Cocos'' right on the Equator. Frederik De Witt's ''Atlas, 1680'' shows it similarly. The ''Hondius Broadside map'' of 1590 shows ''I. de Cocos'' at 2 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude, while in 1596 Theodore de Bry showed the Galápagos Islands near 6 degrees north of the Equator. Emanuel Bowen, in ''A Complete system of Geography'', Volume II (London, 1747: 586), states that the Galápagos islands stretch 5 degrees north of the Equator.

The island in modern times has been thickly overgrown with jungle. "That the island formerly merited its descriptive name, however, is apparent from the verbal accounts given to Captain Dampier by the contemporary Spanish discoverers. Dampier writes: 'The Island Cocos is so named by the Spaniards, because there are abundances of Coco-Nut Trees growing on it'...prehistoric planters must have found the location of Cocos Island worthy of the vast amount of labor spent in clearing the natural jungle for the planting of coconuts...make it an ideal port of call for aboriginal merchants trafficking the open sea off Panama.

With the notable exception of the Galápagos Islands, there was a lack of scientific research into oceanic eastern Pacific islands prior to the 20th century. Publication ''The American Naturalist'' stated in 1891, "we know nothing at all about the fauna and flora of the isolated Clipperton Island and Malpelo; we hardly know anything about Cocos Island, which seems to be in many respects quite different from the others, having a more tropical appearance."

Administrative history

Cocos Island was annexed by Costa Rica in 1832 by decree No. 54 of the Constitutional Assembly of the newly independent country. Whalers stopped regularly at Cocos Island until the mid-19th century, when inexpensive kerosene started to replace whale oil for lighting.

In October 1863, the ship ''Adelante'' marooned 426 Tongan former slaves on the island when it was discovered that they had contracted smallpox and were a danger to her crew. By the time the vessel ''Tumbes'' arrived to rescue them one month later, only 38 survivors were found, the rest having perished from smallpox (see ʻAta).

In 1897, the Costa Rican government named the German adventurer and treasure hunter August Gissler the first Governor of Cocos Island and allowed him to establish a short-lived colony there.

On May 12, 1970, the insular territory of Cocos Island was incorporated administratively by means of Executive Decree No. 27, making it the eleventh district of Puntarenas canton of the Puntarenas Province.

As a district, the island has the postal code of 60110.

The island's 33 residents, all of them Costa Rican park rangers, were allowed to vote for the first time in Costa Rica's February 5, 2006, election. However, the rangers are not considered permanent residents of the district, therefore the census data considers the island to be uninhabited.

Piracy and hidden treasures

Cocos Island has featured heavily in many tales of pirate lore and buried treasure. The first claims of treasure buried on the island came from a woman named Mary Welch, who claimed that 350 tons of gold (about $16 billion in today's money) raided from Spanish galleons had been buried on the island by Captain Bennett Graham, a naval officer who had become a pirate in 1818. She had been a member of a pirate crew led by Captain Graham, and was transported to an Australian penal colony for her crimes. She possessed a chart showing where Graham's treasure was supposed to be hidden. On her release, she returned to the island with an expedition but had no success in finding anything, as the points of reference in the chart had disappeared.

Another pirate supposed to have buried treasure on the island was the Portuguese Benito Bonito, who began terrorizing the west coast of the Americas around 1818. Though Bonito was hunted down and executed, his treasure was never retrieved.

Perhaps the best-known of the treasure legends tied to the island is that of the fabled Treasure of Lima. In 1820, with the army of José de San Martín approaching Lima, Viceroy José de la Serna is supposed to have entrusted treasure from the city to British trader Captain William Thompson for safekeeping until the Spaniards could secure the country. Instead of waiting in the harbor as they were instructed, Thompson and his crew killed the viceroy's men and sailed to Cocos, where they allegedly buried the treasure. Shortly afterwards, they were apprehended by a Spanish warship. All of the crew except Thompson and his first mate were executed for piracy. The two said they would show the Spaniards where they had hidden the treasure in return for their lives, but after landing on Cocos, they escaped into the forest and were never recaptured.

Hundreds of attempts to find treasure on the island have failed. Several early expeditions were mounted on the basis of claims by a man named Keating, who was supposed to have befriended Thompson. On one trip, Keating was said to have retrieved gold and jewels from the treasure.MacInnis, pp. 29–30. German adventurer August Gissler lived on the island for most of the period from 1889 until 1908, hunting the treasure, but only found a few gold coins. British Antarctic explorer Aeneas Mackintosh launched a treasure-hunting expedition to Cocos in 1910, without success.

Present status and international distinctions

Cocos Island was declared a Costa Rican National Park by means of an executive decree in 1978 and designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997. In 2002, the World Heritage Site designation was extended to include an expanded marine zone of . In addition, it is included in the list of Wetlands of International Importance

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