Austrian expedition trips
In the second half of the 19th century, Austrian merchants and the Austrian Navy undertook expeditions to the north polar region and to South Asia with colonial ulterior motives. Despite its connection to the Adriatic Sea from 1374 and the subordination of the port city of Trieste in 1382 to Austrian rule, the Habsburgs, as rulers of the great power of Austria, were not interested in expanding their rule overseas for centuries - in contrast to most other European powers. It was not until the 18th century that Austria undertook modest approaches to a colonial policy directed at the world's oceans, but these were abandoned in the same century.
Austrian colonial history (18th century)
Emperor Joseph II had allowed Wilhelm Bolts and Count Proli to found the East India Company with its seat in Trieste. Wilhelm Bolts was appointed lieutenant colonel by the emperor. The Austrian East India Company sent the ship Theresia and Joseph on a voyage in 1777/78 to acquire land and establish trading establishments on the coasts of Africa and Asia. In the Delagoa Bay in East Africa Wilhelm Bolts founded a trading post and acquired the coast of Kanara in southwestern India. Bolts also took possession of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal for the Ostindische Compagnie. Delagoa Bay was lost again in 1781, and after the collapse of the company in 1785, the other branches of the Austrian East India Company also dissolved again.
Austrian colonial history (19th century to 1866)
In 1802 the Austrian-West African Maritime Trading Company was founded in Vienna . The German Emperor Franz II granted the company a trading privilege for 25 years and in 1803 a ship of the company left Trieste with the destination Africa to explore West Africa for the establishment of trading posts and the establishment of a colony. But when the ship returned and the appropriate conclusions were to be drawn from the explorations, the war situation with Napoleonic France made it impossible to continue the enterprise.
Expedition against Morocco
In 1829 there was an Austrian naval expedition against Morocco to free a ship and its crew that had been hijacked by corsairs . However, there were no goals of occupation connected with it.
Novara expedition
Under the command of the Commodore von Wüllerstorf-Urbair , the frigate Novara set off from Trieste on a research trip around the world in April 1857. The aim of the expedition was to take the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean as an Austrian colony. In 1858 the Novara went to the Nicobar Islands, but the islands were not taken over by Austria. In August 1859 the ship returned from its circumnavigation with extensive research results.
Austro-Hungarian expedition trips with a scientific focus
Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition
In 1872 an Austrian expedition went on a trip to the Arctic with the schooner Admiral Tegetthoff . After the ship was trapped in the pack ice for over a year, part of the crew was able to reach the archipelago in the Arctic Ocean , which they called Franz-Joseph-Land , on November 2, 1873 , and claimed them by hoisting the red-white red flag for Austria-Hungary . However, Austria renounced the exercise of its supposed right of ownership of the islands in favor of Russia.
Austro-Hungarian deep sea expeditions
The Austro-Hungarian deep-sea expeditions from 1890 to 1898, also known as the Pola expeditions , belonged to the oceanographic expeditions carried out by various states at the end of the 19th century under the influence of the scientifically fruitful British Challenger expedition (1872 to 1876) were. The voyages organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences took the SMS Pola to the eastern Mediterranean , the Adriatic and the Red Sea . The Pola expeditions are closely linked to the name of their scientific director, the Viennese ichthyologist Franz Steindachner . Most of the material brought along is now in the collections of the Natural History Museum Vienna .
Colonial expeditions and gunboat policy since 1867
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In the early 1870s, the Austrian businessman Gustav Freiherr von Overbeck wanted to acquire land in the northeast of the island of Borneo for the Austrian monarchy and asked the government in Vienna to take over the land as an Austrian colony. Austria then sent the corvette Archduke Friedrich to Asia to explore the country intended by Overbeck. After a skirmish with natives on the coast of Borneo, at the mouth of the Siboku River, on May 7, 1874, Vienna's interest in a colony on Borneo ended and the local ruler, the Sultan of Sulu, ceded the area to a British society in 1878 what became the English colony of British North Borneo .
In 1884 the Austrian corvette Helgoland went on an exploratory trip to West Africa without buying any land. In 1884 and 1885 the Austrian corvette Aurora visited Brazil and the La Plata states in order to conduct commercial studies for the purpose of establishing trade relations.
The Austrian Congo Expedition , led by Oskar Lenz from 1885 to 1887, traveled and mapped large parts of the Congo River . Lenz had been commissioned by the kk geographical society . The expedition did not lead to any Austrian ownership claims.
In 1893 the corvette Saida and in 1896 the gunboat Albatros explored the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific in the hope of finding nickel there. The expedition of 1896 was led by the scientist Heinrich Freiherr Foullon de Norbeeck and left the Austrian port of Pola on October 2, 1895. This expedition took place after a battle with locals in the interior of the island on August 10, 1896, with five Austrians , among them de Norbeeck, perished, their end. In 1901 the Austro-Hungarian Navy erected a stone cross on the island with the inscription: "In memory of the members of the SMS Albatros expedition who heroically fell in the service of science in the battle at the foot of the Tatube mountain ."
In 1899 the Austrian government sent the cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth to China, considering “whether Austria should lease a Chinese port according to the German model in order to promote trade with East Asia”. In 1897 Germany had acquired the Tsingtau area in China as a lease area. Austria then contented itself with acquiring a concession area in the city's international settlement on February 11, 1901 , like other European powers in the Chinese port city of Tientsin . During the First World War , China withdrew this and also the German concession in 1917.
Individual evidence
- ^ Percy Ernst Schramm: Germany and overseas , Georg Westermann Verlag, Braunschweig 1950, pages 168–169
literature
- Köhlers Flottenkalender 1996 The German Yearbook of Seafaring, Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg 1995, article: The development of the maritime domains of the Habsburg hereditary lands from the 14th century to 1806 and the Empire of Austria and Austria-Hungary from 1804 to 1918. by Heinz Christ, ISBN 3-7822-0625-8 , pages 163-168 and 214-215