John Fearn (explorer)
John Fearn was the captain of a British merchant ship in 1798. He is considered the discoverer of the South Pacific islands of Hunter Island and Nauru . He is often confused with the philosopher of the same name, John Fearn .
Life
In 1798 Fearn was the captain of the Schnau Hunter , a 300-ton ship with a crew of 50 and eight cannons. In June 1798 he arrived with a load of Indian goods, cows and horses from Bengal in the Australian port of Port Jackson , which he left again on August 20 for Calcutta . On the way he spent six weeks at Waihou in New Zealand , where he was loading wood. In October he left New Zealand and followed a northerly course, discovering an island that may have been sighted before but was confused with the neighboring island of Matthew Island . He named it after the ship Hunter Island . Both islands are uninhabited volcanic islands and belong to the group of Matthew and Hunter Islands , which are now claimed by both France and Vanuatu .
Sailing further north on the shipping route towards China, the Hunter came to the island of Nauru on November 8, 1798 . Fearn named the island Pleasant Island , partly because of the friendly courtesy of the residents, whose apparent willingness to do business, together with the fact that the island was on the trade route between Australia and China, led him to suspect that Europeans had previously been on landed on the island, of which there are no reports. Pleasant Island kept the name until 1888 when the island was annexed by the German Empire . Today Nauru is a sovereign republic.
The state of Nauru honored the memory of Fearns with several postage stamps that show a portrait of Fearns and the Hunter , both depictions are not authentic, in particular the Hunter as Schnau was a two-master and not a three-master as on the postage stamps. In 1994 the Bank of Nauru issued a $ 10 coin with a picture of a sailing ship and the inscription John Fearn in 1798 .
literature
- John Dunmore: Who's Who in Pacific Navigation. University of Hawaii Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8248-1350-2 , p. 102.
- Henry Evans Maude: Post-Spanish discoveries in the central Pacific. In: The Journal of the Polynesian Society Vol. 70, No. 1 (1961), pp. 81 f., Online .
- Rhys Richards: The Easternmost Route to China 1787–1792: Part II. In: The Great Circle. Vol. 8, No. 2 (October 1986), p. 111, JSTOR 41562547 .
Web links
- Hunter stamps (accessed February 11, 2018)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fearn, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British navigator and explorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 18th century |
| DATE OF DEATH | 19th century |