Naval interests did not monopolise his attention. In the autumn of 1890 he paid one of many visits to America, commissioned by ‘The Times’ to study racial difficulties in the southern states. The results appeared first in a series of ten letters to ‘The Times’ (November and December 1890), and then in 1891 in ‘Black America: A Study of the Ex-slave and his Master.’ In view of the growing birth-rate and exclusion from political power of the black, Clowes foretold a race war incomparably terrible between black and white in America.
Clowes gradually gave up journalism for research in naval history. Between 1897 and 1903 he compiled ‘The Royal Navy: its History from the Earliest Times’ (7 vols.) in collaboration with Sir Clements Markham, K.C.B., Captain A. T. Mahan, W. H. Wilson, and others. The value of this work was generally recognised. He was knighted in 1902, but owing to ill-health was compelled to live abroad, settling for some years at Davos. He was granted, in 1904, a civil list pension of 150l. He was awarded the gold medal of the United States Naval Institute in 1892, was an associate of the Institute of Naval Architects, and in 1896 was elected an honorary member of the Royal United Service Institution, where he gave several lectures. In 1895 he was elected a fellow of King's College. He died at Eversleigh Gardens, St. Leonards-on-Sea, on 14 Aug. 1905.
Clowes married in 1882 Ethel Mary Louise, second daughter of Lewis F. Edwards of Mitcham, by whom he had one son, Geoffrey S. Laird (b. 1883). A civil list pension of 100l. was granted to his widow, 30 Nov. 1905.
An excellent linguist, Clowes contributed frequently in his later years to reviews in England, France and Germany. Besides his historical and technical books he wrote many tales, mainly of the sea, and some verse. He was part-author of ‘Social England’ (6 vols. 1892–7), and founded in 1896, and for some years edited, the ‘Naval Pocket Book.’ He also edited Cassell's ‘Miniature Encyclopædia’ (16mo, 1898), and did much to promote the issue of cheap reprints of standard literature, being advisory editor of the ‘Unit Library,’ 1901.
Besides the works cited, Clowes's long list of publications includes: 1. ‘The Great Peril, and how it was Averted,’ a tale, 1893. 2. ‘The Naval Campaign of Lissa,’ 1901. 3. ‘The Mercantile Marine in War Time,’ 1902. 4. ‘Four Modern Naval Campaigns,’ 1902.
[Who's Who, 1905; The Times, 16 Aug. 1905; Standard, 15 Aug. 1905; Army and Navy Gazette, 18 Aug. 1905; Men and Women of the Time, 15th edit. 1899; the New International Encyclopædia, 1910.]
CLUNIES-ROSS, GEORGE (1842–1910), owner of Cocos and Keeling Islands, born on 20 June 1842, in the Cocos Islands, was eldest son in the family of six sons and three daughters of John George Clunies-Ross by his wife S'pia Dupong, a Malay lady of high rank. His grandfather, John Clunies-Ross, born in the Shetland Islands, of a family which had taken refuge there after 'being out in 1715,' landed in 1825, after many adventures as captain of an East Indiaman during the English occupation of Java, on Direction Island, one of the Cocos or Cocos-Keeling Islands; there he settled with his whole family. In 1823 an English adventurer, Alexander Hare, had settled on another of the islands with some runaway slaves. The islands, till then uninhabited, had been first sighted and named in 1609 by Captain William Keeling [q. v.]. Hare soon departed, and Clunies-Ross alone obtained permanent rights by settlement. Although the Dutch government professed a vague and informal supremacy, Clunies-Ross regarded himself, and was apparently regarded by others, as not merely the owner of the soil but as also possessed of sovereign authority over the islands. These Cocos Islands the name is now commonly applied to the whole group, but should, strictly speaking, be reserved for the more southern islands, the name of Keeling being correspondingly reserved for the more northern are a tiny group of very small coral islets, some twenty in number, 'extraordinary rings of land which rise out of the ocean' (Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, iii. 539), strangely isolated in the Indian Ocean about 700 miles S.W. from Sumatra and 1200 from Singapore. Clunies-Ross's original intention was to form a depot on the islands whence the spices collected from the surrounding East Indies might be dispersed to the markets of the old world. This scheme failed; but the coconut palm, almost the only plant which really flourishes on the bare coral atolls of the tropics, yielded sufficient oil and other products to maintain the fortunes of the family. In 1857, in the time of John George, the first settler's son, the islands were first declared a British possession, and subjected to British sovereignty but without detriment to the Ross family's ownership of
