Alexander Hare

Who is Alexander Hare?

Alexander Hare was a British merchant and colonial administrator whose turbulent career preceded the permanent settlement of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Born in England, Hare made his early fortune trading in Southeast Asia and, during the brief British administration of Java under Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Raffles from 1811 to 1816, was appointed British Resident of Banjarmasin in southern Borneo, where he acquired a vast personal estate. After the Dutch resumed control of the East Indies, Hare's fortunes declined, and his conduct as a landholder, including his practice of keeping a large retinue of enslaved and indentured Malay, Javanese and other Southeast Asian dependents, drew lasting criticism from contemporaries and later historians. In 1826, seeking a remote refuge, Hare landed on the uninhabited Cocos (Keeling) Islands with a large group of these dependents, intending to establish a private settlement. His plan unravelled the following year when the Scottish sea captain John Clunies-Ross arrived with his own family and crew; over the following years, most of Hare's followers left his service for the more structured Clunies-Ross household. Hare abandoned the islands around 1831 and died in Bencoolen, Sumatra, in 1834, a marginal but well-documented figure in the islands' founding history.

Sources: Gibson-Hill, C.A., "The Cocos-Keeling Islands", Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 25 (1952) · Bunce, Pauline, The Cocos (Keeling) Islands: Australia's Atolls in the Indian Ocean, Cambridge University Press (1988) · Reid, Anthony, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia, University of Queensland Press (1983)