South seas

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The term South Seas is a common name for the South Pacific . Geographically, all areas south of the latitude of Panama belong to the South Pacific .

Central island groups are the Society Islands ( French Polynesia / Tahiti ), the Samoa Archipelago and the Fiji Islands. The term South Seas is often used synonymously with Oceania and in a narrower sense with Polynesia ( Polynesian triangle ). The cornerstones of this are formed by the Hawaii Islands, New Zealand ( Aotearoa ) and Easter Island ( Rapa Nui ).

history

Vasco Núñez de Balboa

The term "South Sea" was coined in 1513 by the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa , when he had crossed the isthmus of Panama and called the sea ( Pacific ) in front of him Mar del sur (" South Sea ").

Of Núñez de Balboa's 190 soldiers, only 69 were left when they came to the mountain, from the top of which one should see the great lake. At that moment he ordered the crew to stand still. Nobody should follow him because he didn't want to share this first view of the unknown ocean with anyone. On September 25, 1513 he was the first European to see the Pacific. After looking at the sea for a long time, he called his comrades over to share his joy and pride.

Four days later Núñez de Balboa took a few steps into the sea at the mouth of the Saban River and, when he discovered salty sea water, took possession of the southern sea for his king.

South Seas paradise

In a figurative sense, the South Pacific is a distant - often idealized - world region.

When James Cook came to Tahiti for the second time in 1773, he was accompanied by the two scientifically educated Germans Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster .

"It was a morning, no poet has ever described it more beautifully when we saw the island of O-Taheiti two miles ahead of us."

For a long time, the reports of the early explorers determined the Europeans' image of the South Seas. For example, Joseph Banks wrote :

"An Arcadia whose kings we will be."

Louis Antoine de Bougainville's romantic travelogue Voyage autour du monde and Georg Forster's travelogue A Voyage Round The World , published in 1777, seemed to confirm Jean-Jacques Rousseau's image of the “ noble savage ” that Europeans believed they had found in Tahiti . He describes it as “jardin d'Eden” ( Garden of Eden ), which offers its inhabitants everything they need to live. He saw the islanders as friendly people who had not yet been corrupted by civilization. The report inspired Denis Diderot to write his essay Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, a defense of sexual freedom.

The French painter Paul Gauguin also contributed to this picture . His pictures do not reflect reality, but the exotic paradise that the painter dreamed of.

The German writer Erich Scheurmann also profited from these longings with his fictional travelogues of a South Sea chief, which he published between 1915 and 1920 under the title Der Papalagi . Fifty years after its publication, the book became a cult book and sold more than 1.7 million times in German alone.

The South Seas in painting

Joseph Banks hired Sydney C. Parkinson as a nature draftsman and the landscape painter Alexander Buchan to accompany James Cook's first expedition to the Pacific (1768–1771) and to record the discoveries. They depicted the people living on the Society Islands , on the coasts of New Zealand and on Easter Island and their habitat in drawings and paintings. The painter William Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second expedition to the South Seas. a. to New Zealand, Tonga , the Society Islands, Melanesia and Easter Island. During Cook's third South Sea expedition, John Webber held South Sea motifs a. a. in the Cook Islands , Tahiti and Hawaii .

Paul Gauguin , reached Tahiti in April 1891, painted 66 paintings there, left the island again due to health and financial difficulties in early 1892 and returned from Paris to Papeete in September 1895 . He died in the Marquesas in 1903 . With his pictures of the South Seas, Gauguin paved the way for Expressionism . Emil Nolde took part in an expedition to Papua New Guinea (then German New Guinea ) in 1913/14 . Max Pechstein lived on the Micronesian Palau Islands from May 1914 until the outbreak of the First World War . Henri Matisse visited Tahiti in 1931. Per Kirkeby traveled to Polynesia and New Zealand in 1988. In 1995 Bernd Zimmer went to the Marquesas ( Hiva Oa ) on board a cargo ship and then painted pictures of the South Seas in his studio. Ingo Kühl painted in 2001/2002 on the Cook Islands , in French Polynesia , in Fiji and Vanuatu , followed by working stays in Papua New Guinea a. a. in the Trobriand Islands (2012).

literature

  • Dirk Sangmeister: The fairy land of the imagination. The South Seas in German literature between 1780 and 1820. In: Horst Dippel u. Helmut Scheuer (Ed.): Georg Forster Studies II. Berlin: Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz, 1998. pp. 135–176.
  • Markus Schindlbeck : Waves of the South Seas. In: Ingo Kühl North Sea - South Sea. Pp. 18, 20, Verlag der Kunst Dresden, publishing group Husum 2004, ISBN 3-86530-001-4 .
  • Christiane Küchler Williams: Erotic Paradises: For European South Seas reception in the 18th century . Wallstein Verlag 2004, ISBN 978-3-89244-808-2 . Williams received his PhD in German and Philosophy from Northwestern University in 2001 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Südsee  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The GND leads South Seas as a different name for Oceania , that the islands throughout the Pacific between Australia, the Philippines and America, between the Northern Tropic and 50 ° s. Br. Is defined (URL: http://d-nb.info/gnd/4044257-3 ).
  2. ↑ Francisco de Xerez : History of the discovery and conquest of Peru - Chapter 4 ( Project Gutenberg-DE , translator: H. Külb).