Sapper Friederici Expedition

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The Sapper Friederici expedition of 1908 was a German scientific expedition sent to German New Guinea by the Regional Studies Commission to research the protected areas of the Reich Colonial Office. The commission was founded in 1905 and had drawn up a plan for the unified exploration of the German colonies . The geographer Karl Sapper and the ethnographer Georg Friederici were commissioned to explore the islands of the northern Bismarck Archipelago , Neumecklenburg , Neuhannover , Neulauenburg, the smaller islands as well as Bougainville and Buka , and to check whether the soil was suitable for a plantation culture. Geographical and geological observations were made on the islands.

On April 17, 1908, the participants reached the Blanche Bay on the island of Neupommern and on April 27, Namatanai , the main town for the Neumecklenburg-Süd district. Sapper and Friederici crossed the island at its narrowest point on two different routes. Since Friederici was primarily supposed to make ethnological observations and therefore had to stay in individual inhabited places as long as possible, while Sapper carried out geographical and geological investigations that required extensive expedition trips, the trips were made separately, with each taking on the tasks of the other if possible.

The first joint base of the expedition members was in May 1908 Kung , one of the small islands off Neuhannover in the northwest, which was used as a starting point for excursions to Neuhannover. In mid-June, the station manager Franz Boluminski's house in Käwieng was the headquarters, and in the first half of July the Lamusong rest house in Nordneumecklenburg. The attempt to move into a fourth joint stand in Namatanai in August was thwarted by unfavorable circumstances.

In July 1908, Sapper, together with Governor Albert Hahl , August Doellinger, the station manager of Kieta , and George Amos Dorsey from the Chicago Field Museum , accompanied by 20 police soldiers and 30 porters, made the first crossing of the island of Bougainville .

Karl Sapper left Neumecklenburg at the end of August 1908, Friederici at the beginning of September. Friederici traveled to other parts of German New Guinea for almost four months to make ethnological comparisons. Sapper and Friederici worked for several years evaluating the results of the expedition. They published this in three parts under the title: "Scientific results of an official research trip to the Bismarck Archipelago in 1908".

literature

  • Georg Friederici and Karl Sapper: A crossing of Bougainville . Messages from the German protected areas. No. 23, 1910 pp. 206-217
  • Karl Sapper: Scientific results of an official research trip to the Bismarck Archipelago in 1908 , Vol. I Contributions to regional studies of New Mecklenburg and its neighboring islands. Supplementary booklet No. 3 of the communications from the German protected areas , Mittler und Sohn, Berlin 1910
  • Georg Friederici: Scientific results of an official research trip to the Bismarck Archipelago in 1908 , Vol. II: Contributions to ethnology and linguistics of German New Guinea. Supplementary booklet No. 5 of the communications from the German protected areas , Mittler und Sohn, Berlin 1912
  • Georg Friederici: Scientific results of an official research trip to the Bismarck Archipelago in 1908 ,

Vol. III Investigations into a Melanesian hiking road. Supplementary booklet No. 7 of the communications from the German protected areas , Mittler und Sohn, Berlin 1913

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Markus Schindlbeck: German scientific expeditions and research in the South Seas until 1914 . In: Hermann Joseph Hiery (ed.): The German South Sea. A manual . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2001, pp. 132-155, ISBN 3-506-73912-3 , pp. 150f.
  2. ↑ a b c d Karl Sapper: Report on a research trip to New Mecklenburg. In: Negotiations of the Seventeenth German Geographers 'Day in Lübeck, from June 1 to 6, 1909, published by the managing director of the Central Committee of the German Geographers' Day Georg Kollm. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1910 pp. 141f.