Port Essington
 
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Port Essington in the Northern Territory |
Port Essington , also called Victoria or New Victoria , was a settlement founded by the British in 1838 on the Cobourg Peninsula on the north coast of Australia . The area is now part of the Garig Gunak Barlu National Park .
history
Even before Port Essington was founded, there had been attempts by the British Empire in the 1820s to establish some bases in what is now the Northern Territory in order to be able to trade with the inhabitants of the Indonesian islands and to prevent other colonial powers from making claims as well to elevate the Australian continent. It was mainly for the second reason that the government in London sent two ships with a company of marines under the command of Sir James J. Gordon Bremer .
Seven prefabricated wooden houses were brought with them to found the settlements, but they could only be built after the arduous clearing of the site; even then, however, the stony ground meant that the houses could only be built on wooden stakes. In addition, the soldiers built a defensive wall and a pier.
Just a month later, the settlers had to send a ship to the Dutch possession on the island of Kisar to get food there. On February 1, 1839, a ship went to the nearest European settlement, the Portuguese Dili on Timor , and from there brought water buffalo , Timor ponies and some English newspapers to Port Essington. Two weeks later, Bremer visited the Portuguese colony and secured further help from the local governor Frederico Leão Cabreira for the new settlement due to the old alliance between the two colonial powers. For the Portuguese this meant additional support against the expansion pressure from the Dutch in this region.
In November 1839, a large part of the settlement was destroyed again by a hurricane. The HMS Pelorus , which was in port at the time, also sank and its crew therefore had to spend the coming year in Port Essington. There were also some brick makers among them who made it possible to erect new buildings on brick or stone foundations. A warehouse, several furnaces and a forge could be built by 1842. A big problem for the settlers were the termites , which destroyed the last two buildings that the cyclone had spared.
At the end of 1844 a group of carpenters and stonemasons arrived in the settlement. They built a lighthouse in the harbor, additional accommodations for the soldiers and their families, and a second forge. Despite these expansions, Port Essington was already in decline. Agriculture and animal husbandry were not productive due to the unfamiliar climate and the unfavorable conditions for the livestock; the continued malaria settlers too heavy. By the time the military base was dissolved in 1849, 60 of the 200 settlers had died. Despite the extremely good relations between the British and Aborigines , with whom there was a lively barter trade, Port Essington had to be abandoned after a severe malaria epidemic in 1849 due to a lack of support from the motherland. The area around the port has not been populated since then, the ruins of the settlement are still there.
On December 17, 1845, Ludwig Leichhardt reached Port Essington for the first time by land from Brisbane .
photos
New Victoria
(Port Essington) 1839
Port Essington 1845
literature
- Paul G. Bahn: Sunken Cities . Bechtermünz-Verlag, Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-8289-0715-6
- Michael Juhran: With the eyes of the discoverer , in: Welt am Sonntag, 2./3. February 2013, pages R1-R3
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Geoffrey C. Gunn: History of Timor , available from the Centro de Estudos sobre África, Ásia e América Latina , CEsA of the TU Lisbon (PDF file; 805 kB).
Coordinates: 11 ° 21 ′ 38 ″ S , 132 ° 9 ′ 12 ″ E