Kerguelen Islands

The Republic of the Kerguelen Islands, commonly shortened to the Kerguelen Republic, is an island country located in the southern Indian Ocean. It is the world's most southerly country and the only country to lie entirely in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic. While nominally independent, the Kerguelen Republic maintains a compact of free association with its parent country, France, and is subordinate to the French government in matters of foreign policy and defense.

The Kerguelen Republic was granted associate nation status in 1970 as a spinning-off of France's colonial interests in the Kerguelen, Crozet, St. Paul and Amsterdam Islands. All areas of the country were uninhabited prior to their selection by colonial France as a prison colony based around coal extraction. The country maintains a small but growing population year-round despite what is broadly considered the world's most inhospitable climate.

History
The Kerguelen Islands form the largest proportion of the Kerguelen Republic's land area. They were discovered in 1772 by the explorer Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec on 12 February and claimed for France the following day.

France's focus on the Kerguelen Islands materialized following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The loss of Guyana in the Seven Years' War left France hungry for places to send prisoners and political undesirables. The Kerguelens offered an easy way to dispose of prisoners: The islands were considered so inhospitable that banishment there was a death sentence. A prison camp was established during the Napoleonic period with the aim of utilizing forced labour to extract coal.

Life for prisoners in the Kerguelen camp was miserable and cold. With no trees growing anywhere on the island and little by way of indigenous wildlife, the prisoners largely subsisted on what food could be imported, usually mutton derived from a small population of bizet sheep brought in by the French administration. Diet was supplemented by fish, seal meat and, eventually, cochayuyo (a type of seaweed). Coal extracted from the mines, along with peat, were utilized to heat the prison. Nevertheless the islands remained a miserable place to live even for the jailers, raked by the heavy winds of the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties and plagued by chilly temperatures year-round. The French presence, at least, had spinoff benefits for the prison administrators in that the primary port of entry - Port-Trémarec, located in the sheltered Bay of Morbihan - proved a useful base for whalers operating in the southern ocean.

Significant numbers of political prisoners flooded into the Kerguelens in the years following the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting split with New France. Assignment to the islands for members of the French government and military remained highly undesirable, but in the 1820s an enterprising administrator by the name of Rónán Le Tallec devoted significant research and effort to trying to make the islands livable. Le Tallec's report resulted in a new allocation of funding to try and import cold-tolerant species from Europe. Upon assignment to the islands in 1829, Le Tallec and his crew brought along a large number of domestic ducks and a stock of wild mallards. The former formed the basis of an egg hatchery and duck farm that managed to get off the ground despite significant losses to the cold in the first year, while the latter were released into the wild in the hopes they would establish a domestic population. The French would go on to introduce rabbits, reindeer and trout, some of which managed to establish populations. Attempts to seed Arctic white birch and Swiss pine in sheltered areas were less successful, largely due to extreme winds and perennial cold. An effort was made to establish a rye farm with prison labour, though this produced only a marginal yield.

The imported wildlife managed to eke out niches in the local ecosystem, the ducks in particular interbreeding with the endemic Eaton's pintails, while the rabbit population steadily increased, providing at least some new options for the colonists' diet. The prison population steadily increased despite the degredation of local Kerguelen cabbage populations. The population of seasonal citizens also grew marginally as whalers and sealers utilized the islands as a base. While the Clipper Route ran slightly northerly, Port-Trémarec nevertheless became a useful stopover for ships bound for New Caledonia, setting up a trade lifeline for the little settlement.

The Kerguelen colony persisted through the 1800s as a small prison base dealing primarily in coal, supplied by regular trade missions from the mainland. A large infusion of political prisoners arrived through the middle of the 1800s, but the establishment of New Caledonia saw the island used mainly as a dumping ground for the most hardened prisoners, including most of France's murderers. Most of these prisoners would stay after being emancipated and integrate into the colonial society, largely because France made it as hard as possible for them to actually get home.

An infusion of actual colonists came during the Great Depression, when hundreds of Breton nationalists were arrested following violent protests and shipped south to Kerguelen. Other Bretons would follow over the years, mainly families and dissidents discontent with the French government. This inflow both strained the island's resources and led to a distinctly Breton-speaking cultural cluster.

Kerguelen received another infusion of people in the years leading up to the Second World War, when several shiploads of German Jews were redirected to the island as a means of averting migrants from mainland France. About 1,500 Jews settled on Kerguelen, and more would arrive in the years following the war. The conflict would later see the island slot into the Vichy camp and used as both a dumping ground for Jews from the north of France and a base for German commerce raiders to attack ships following the Clipper Route. The sole combat the region saw during the war (or really ever) came when the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis torpedoed a Norwegian supply ship near entrance to the Gulf of Morbihan in early 1942. The islands would be recaptured by a small Royal Navy detachment in 1944, and the German and Vichy detachments would be put to work in the coal mines.

Population growth after the war resulted mainly from the importation of new cold-resistant crops - barley being the main one - and the establishment of colonies of refugees, including a group of European Jews who saw the islands as a potential Zion stand-in following the failure of the Israel project. Disagreements with the French government over energy and domestic policy saw the southern islands granted a limited form of independence, remaining subject to France in defense policy but able to control their own domestic and diplomatic policy.