Georg Christoph Levison

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Georg Christoph Levison (born May 11, 1845 in Eutin , † August 6, 1879 in Kunabae, New Ireland ) was a German trading pioneer and explorer in Oceania. His main area of ​​activity was in the Carolines and in today's Bismarck Archipelago .

Training and early trips

Levison was the second child from the marriage of the Eutinian dentist Ernst Wilhelm Levison and his wife Sophie, b. Lindner. From Easter 1852 he attended the Eutin town school. Shortly before his fourteenth birthday, Levison was first hired on a ship. On June 1, 1865, he passed the Hamburg exam to become a first class helmsman (overall grade “good”). His first known arrival in the southern hemisphere was on November 21, 1865. As leader of the barque Ailsa Craig , Levison drove into Port Jackson , the main port of Sydney . His earliest activity in the South Seas is documented as a leader of the Iserbrook for JC Godeffroy & Sohn from 1872. At the beginning of this year, Levison supplied the Godeffroy'schen branches in Koror ( Palau ), Tomil ( Yap ) and on Ponape . From here he made new forays to the Western Islands and the core of the New Britain archipelago . According to the Russian naturalist Miklucho-Maklay , Levison is said to have kidnapped "five or six" young islanders on one of these trips and later sold them to the Ibedul (first man) of Koror in Palau for a few sacks of Bêche-de-mar . Around the same time Levison concluded a dealership agreement with the Englishman William T. Wawn for an agency on Satawan ( Mortlock Islands ). Following on from the Vesta expedition of his predecessor Alfred Tetens to the Exchequer Islands , in August 1872 he employed the Liverpool-based Thomas Shaw as the first stationary dealer in the Hermit Group to the east . August Grapengeter from Hamburg was landed on the Anachoreten Islands. In February of the following year, Wawn was withdrawn from Satawan in order to establish the first branches with him and the Englishman John Nash on the Gazelle Peninsula (beach village Nogai and port island Matupi ).

Discoveries in the later Bismarck Archipelago

Map of the Duke of York Islands (1879) with the Levinsohn Passage in northeast Mioko

In a second advance from Samoa with the Etienne , Levison reached the Duke of York island of Mioko on July 11, 1876 . In its northeast he found a new entrance to the natural harbor, which was entered on the nautical charts in December 1878 by Corvette Captain Bartholomäus von Werner as the Levinsohn Passage . By July 1876, Levison had placed around six Europeans on newly built stations on the northern beaches of the Gazelle Peninsula. At the end of the month, on an exploratory voyage that went west beyond Cape Luen for the first time, he discovered a bay with an anchorage, which he named "Weber Harbor" in honor of his superior on Samoa, Theodor Weber . On the eastern edge of the bay, Levison made arrangements to establish a trading post which, after its establishment, served as the business center of Godeffroy & Son on the peninsula. Levison also built a new branch on Mioko into a central station for the New Britain archipelago and the Solomon group . In the third quarter of 1877 he filled it with the half-Tongan John Knowles as director.

The Weber harbor found by Levison after initial measurements (1879)
The Weber Harbor in German colonial Atlas (1893)

Violence and homicide assignments

The violent killing of his trader in the village of Ratavul (Gazelle Peninsula) by the locals was a precedent that Levison had to face with the greatest possible severity so that attacks of this kind would not be repeated. In an alliance with the chief Buhlailai from Kabakada, Levison led a retaliatory strike against Ratavul, which failed because of the weakness of the alliance. At about the same time he used his relationship with Buhlailai for a contract killing of the Englishman Jamieson, who was acting for Godeffroy & Son in Kabakada . When HMS Conflict investigated the incident , Levison offered himself as an interpreter and incorrectly identified Buhlailai and his son Toberinge as the instigators. This and the fact that Levison had taken Jamieson's widow, a Samoan woman, on board the Etienne and made it his partner, led to upsets in trade relations, for which the trading post in the weaver harbor had to be temporarily closed. In a conflict in the surrounding area, Levison received two spear wounds, for the treatment of which he traveled to Sydney.

After Levison's return to the New Britain archipelago, his refusal to take disciplinary action against Mioko leader John Knowles led to new arguments. During Levison's absence, Knowles had killed one of his subordinate traders. Differences now arose with the Wesleyan missionary George Brown in Hunterhafen, who complained to the German consul in Samoa about Levison's refusal to remove the half-Tongan from the archipelago.

In December 1878 Levison gave two leaders of the island of Matupi (Blanche Bay, Gazelle Peninsula) the next murder assignment. The seaman "Tom" of the brig Adolph , whose command Levison had taken over after his return, is said to have pursued Levison's Samoan partner. John Knowles became a confidante of the crime and was probably therefore transferred from Levison to the Kunabae outstation in New Ireland .

Death in New Ireland

Report of Georg Christoph Levison's death in the Sydney Morning Herald , October 18, 1879

During a stay by HMS Renard in Mioko Harbor, Levison claimed that Knowles had left his New Ireland station without authorization and went aboard the warship to tell "stories" there. With them Knowles wanted to distract from his own person, his possible role in the murder case "Tom" and the accusation of manslaughter still pending against him. During a visit to Kunabae on August 6, 1879, Levison tried to intimidate Knowles with a death threat, but, according to him, grabbed a rifle at the same moment. After a scuffle that, according to Knowles, involved possession of the gun, Levison struck a bullet that Knowles had fired in affect and killed him.

Crew members of the brig Adolph , with which Levison had come to Kunabae, captured Knowles and handed him over to Commander Richards of HMS Renard in the port of Mioko . Levison's body was buried under the porch of the station building in Kunabae. She was later reburied in the Inabui Cemetery on the Duke of York Islands.

Notification of the Fiji Times about the arrival of John Knowles as prisoner the HMS Emerald to summons to the court of the British High Commission in Fiji, edition dated November 15, 1879

A trial in the Tonga Islands , where Knowles was being taken to Fiji by order of the British High Commission, found him guilty of the murder of Levison and sentenced him to banishment to Namukaiki . According to a letter to the editor of the Pacific Islands Monthly , Knowles was able to obtain a revision and was acquitted in a new trial around 1888.

Historical appreciation

During the visit of SMS Ariadne to the New Britain archipelago in December 1878, Levison served the corvette as a pilot and guide. In retrospect, the commanders honored him as one of those men whose nautical information about the island area could be trusted “without reservation”. Regardless of his achievements as a seaman, trading pioneer and explorer, Levison was considered morally suspect by most of his contemporaries. Reverend Benjamin Danks, head of the Wesleyan mission on the Gazelle Peninsula, said after Levison's violent death that there was little doubt about the “badness” of the captain in the archipelago in general. The colonial writer Hugo Zöller considered it unquestionable that Levison would have achieved "a certain fame" in the South Seas, but not in a positive sense. According to his biographer Jakob Anderhandt, the South Sea merchant Eduard Hernsheim saw Levison as a "dodgy and jealous" man. The Godeffroy biographer Gabriele Hoffmann describes Levison as the "cold-blooded" of all the captains who worked for Joh. Ces. Godeffroy & Son were busy.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jakob Anderhandt: Murder of an Eutin South Seafarer? : Captain Georg Christoph Levison (1845–1879) . In: Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde Eutin , 47th year, Association for the care and promotion of Heimatkunde im Eutinischen eV, Eutin 2013, pp. 113–145, here: p. 114.
  2. ↑ Sydney Morning Herald , November 25, 1865, p. 6 , above. (English, accessed December 6, 2012).
  3. ↑ An arrival of the Iserbrook on Pohnpei in June 1872 is documented in: Francis X. Hezel: Foreign Ships in Micronesia: A Compendium of Ship Contacts with the Caroline and Marshall Islands 1522–1885. Trust Territory Printing Office, Saipan 1979, p. 78 . (English, accessed December 6, 2012).
  4. ↑ Richard Parkinson: Thirty Years in the South Seas: Country and People, Manners and Customs in the Bismarck Archipelago and on the German Solomon Islands . Strecker & Schröder, Stuttgart 1907, pp. 850ff. (English, accessed December 6, 2012).
  5. ^ N. de Miklouho-Maclay [sic] to Commodore Wilson, undated, in JC Wilson: Labor Trade in the Western Pacific , Thomas Richards (Government Printer), Sydney 1881, pp. 10-13, here p. 10 .
  6. ↑ Cf. Peter Corris: Foreword to the reprint: William T. Wawn: The South Sea Islanders and the Queensland Labor Trade… . Swan Sunshine, London 1893. Reprint: (= Pacific History Series No. 5). Australian National University Press, Canberra 1973, ISBN 0-7081-0822-9 , pp. Xxiv.
  7. ↑ Jakob Anderhandt: Eduard Hernsheim, the South Seas and a lot of money : biography in two volumes. MV-Wissenschaft, Münster 2012, Volume 1, ISBN 978-3-86991-626-2 , p. 87.
  8. ↑ Stuart G. Firth: German Recruitment and Employment of Laborers in the Western Pacific before the First World War . Dissertation, Oxford University 1973. British Library Document Supply Center, Wetherby [19--] (microfilm), p. 14.
  9. ↑ Cf. Peter Corris: Foreword to the reprint: William T. Wawn: The South Sea Islanders and the Queensland Labor Trade… . Swan Sunshine, London 1893. Reprint: (= Pacific History Series No. 5). Australian National University Press, Canberra 1973, p. Xxv, also Australasian , September 20, 1873, here by mistake Tyrebrook .
  10. ^ A b Arthur Wichmann: Nova Guinea: Vol. II. History of the discovery of New Guinea 1828-1885 . Leiden: Bookstore and printer EJ Brill, 1910, p. 226.
  11. ↑ Peter Sack: Traditional land tenure and early European land acquisitions: the clash between primitive and western law in New Guinea . Australian National University, 1971, p. 66.
  12. ↑ Bartholomäus von Werner: A German warship in the South Seas . Brockhaus, Leipzig 1889, p. 386.
  13. ↑ Jakob Anderhandt: Eduard Hernsheim, the South Seas and a lot of money : biography in two volumes. MV-Wissenschaft, Münster 2012, vol. 1, p. 152 f.
  14. ↑ Cf. George Brown, "Collection of Newspaper Cuttings Pacific Islands", without document d. Newspaper and edition held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.
  15. ↑ Quoted from Jakob Anderhandt: Eduard Hernsheim, the South Seas and a lot of money : biography in two volumes. MV-Wissenschaft, Münster 2012, vol. 1, p. 256.
  16. ↑ Wilfred Powell: Wanderings in a Wild Country; or, three years amongst the cannibals of New Britain . Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London 1883, p. 268.
  17. ↑ also: Hunabai Eu ... (?), Cf. Heinz Schütte: "'Stori Bilong Wanpela Man Nem Bilong Em Toboalilu': The Death of Godeffroy's Kleinschmidt, and the Perception of History". In: Pacific Studies , Vol. 14, No. 3 (1991), pp. 69-96, here: p. 74.
  18. ↑ Jakob Anderhandt: "Murder of an Eutin South Seafarer?" In: Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde Eutin , Volume 47 (2013), pp. 113–145, here: p. 143.
  19. ↑ Wilfred Powell: Wanderings in a Wild Country; or, three years amongst the cannibals of New Britain . Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London 1883, pp. 268 f.
  20. ↑ Testimony before Reverend Benjamin Danks, recorded in his "Diary written in New Britain, 1878-1882", Methodist Church Papers No. 616, Mitchell Library, Sydney, on August 21, 1879.
  21. ↑ Burial under the veranda: See Benjamin Danks' diary entry on August 13, 1879 in “Diary written in New Britain, 1878-1882”, Methodist Church Papers No. 616, Mitchell Library, Sydney; Reburial cf. Heinz Schütte: "'Stori Bilong Wanpela Man Nem Bilong Em Toboalilu': The Death of Godeffroy's Kleinschmidt, and the Perception of History". In: Pacific Studies , Vol. 14, No. 3 (1991), pp. 69-96, here: p. 74.
  22. ↑ Jakob Anderhandt: Murder of an Eutin South Seafarer? : Captain Georg Christoph Levison (1845–1879) . In: Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde Eutin , 47th year, Association for the care and promotion of Heimatkunde im Eutinischen eV, Eutin 2013, pp. 113–145, here: pp. 142 f.
  23. ^ Pacific Islands Monthly , January 1947, p. 10.
  24. ↑ Bartholomäus von Werner: A German warship in the South Seas . Brockhaus, Leipzig 1889, p. 411.
  25. ↑ Benjamin Danks' diary entry on August 21, 1879, “Diary written in New Britain, 1878-1882”, Methodist Church Papers No. 616, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
  26. ↑ Hugo Zöller: Around the world:… descriptions of customs and cultures from the most outstanding colonies , Volume I. DuMont-Schauberg, Cologne 1881, p. 129.
  27. ↑ Jakob Anderhandt: Eduard Hernsheim, the South Seas and a lot of money : biography in two volumes. MV-Wissenschaft, Münster 2012, Volume 2, p. 466.
  28. ↑ Gabriele Hoffmann: The house on the Elbchaussee . Piper, Munich 2000, p. 335.
personal data
SURNAME Levison, Georg Christoph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Levinsohn, Christopher
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trading pioneer and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Eutin , Germany
DATE OF DEATH August 6, 1879
Place of death Kunabae, New Ireland