Indonesia High Sea

The waters around Christmas Island entered surviving European navigational records during the seventeenth century. English and Dutch charts showed the island from the early 1600s. On Christmas Day 1643 William Mynors, commanding a vessel of the English East India Company, sighted it and gave it the name that endured. The island thus became a named point in the eastern Indian Ocean long before a permanent settlement developed there.

The first known landing followed in 1688, when the Cygnet reached the western shore near the Dales. William Dampier was aboard and recorded that members of the crew brought large robber crabs back to the ship for food. These episodes give the surrounding sea a history of charting, shipboard observation and brief landfalls. A sighting, a place-name and a landing were distinct events: the seventeenth-century record describes passing vessels and visits to the shore, rather than an established colonial harbour.