Second Ramu expedition

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The Second Ramu Expedition of 1898 was a German scientific expedition, supported by the New Guinea Company and sent to German New Guinea . Ernst Tappenbeck , the leader of the expedition, was commissioned to explore whether the Ottilie River at the mouth of Vice Admiral Georg von Schleinitz in 1886 when returning from an expedition to the Sepik was pushed to that of Karl Lauterbach in 1896 on his first Ramu expedition found River Ramu is identical.

The chairman of the board of directors of the New Guinea company, Adolph von Hansemann , gave Tappenbeck a free hand in the selection of the team and the equipment. Tappenbeck recruited two Australian gold prospectors, Hans Klink from Sydney and Robert Philipp from Cooktown . Other participants were Hans Blum and Hans Rodatz. Two Chinese cooks, six traders from Java and 36 local porters completed the team. The expedition ship Herzogin Elisabeth was manned by a Chinese machinist, a stoker and a helmsman from Singapore, as well as ten Melanesian seamen. It was a paddle steamer with a very shallow draft that Tappenbeck had specially designed for the shallow upper reaches of the Ramu and its tributaries in Germany.

The Johann Albrecht , a ship of the New Guinea Company under the command of Captain Sanders, transported the equipment as well as the dismantled paddle steamer and prefabricated houses from Germany to Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen . There Tappenbeck had the Duchess Elisabeth assembled and instructed the expedition team in their tasks. On April 3, 1898, the expedition members left Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen with both ships. They reached Elisabeth Bay on April 7th and Prinz-Adalberthafen on April 12th.

While the river paddle steamer had to seek shelter from the rough weather in the Bismarck Sea in the Prinz-Adalberthafen bay, 70 km northwest of Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen, Captain Sanders put the surviving goats, pigs and chickens that were to serve as provisions for the expedition. ashore at the mouth of the Ottilien River , and drove the Johann Albrecht 300 km up the river. He came to the point that Lauterbach had reached in 1896 on its way downstream and was able to prove the identity of the Ramu with the Ottilien river, which Lauterbach had already suspected. Since the ship could not go further up the river because of the low water level, the explorers unloaded their supplies and equipment on a sandbank. The Johann Albrecht returned to Adalberthafen to accompany the Duchess Elisabeth to the place of work.

In August Tappenbeck, Philipp and the planter Ernst Schirmer were able to reach the mouth of the Ramu with some newly recruited workers, but without the paddle steamer. Tappenbeck continued to wait for calm weather to enable Duchess Elisabeth to travel to Ramu, in the meantime he set up the Ramumünde expedition station and prepared house walls and roofs for the planned station on the middle reaches of the Ramu. After a few days of traveling up the Ramu, Tappenbeck left his fellow travelers in the well-equipped camp because the water level sank. He returns four and a half months later with the Duchess Elisabeth , whereupon the expedition team was able to sail the Ramu 310 kilometers upstream. You could go even further by canoe. Heavy monsoons in August and September prevented further exploration. Tappenbeck ended his trip.

On April 18, 1898, the participants of the expedition had separated. Klink and Rodatz, the latter as station managers, had stayed at the foot of the Hagen Mountains. The two prospectors cleared around 5000 m² of rainforest and had houses built for themselves and huts for the workers. The first inland station of the New Guinea company was built. They exchanged mirrors and pearls for taro , yams , coconuts and sugar cane with the locals . Rodatz collected insects, plants and art objects. He made daily records of air temperature, dew point and precipitation and measured the water levels of the Ramu. Klink examined rock formations and looked for gold in the river bed . Between 5 ° 33 'and 5 ° 45' degrees south he was able to detect gold deposits in small amounts. At the end of 1898 the Ramu intermediate station was set up on the river , mapping the Ramu and its tributaries and compiling a large botanical collection.

After his return to Germany, Ernst Tappenbeck expressed himself in official reports critical of the extensive control that the officials of the New Guinea Company exercised over the explorers. Adolph von Hansemann did not forward the reports to the Foreign Office as planned and dismissed Tappenbeck from the company.

In 1899 Karl Lauterbach reported to the Geography Society in Berlin about the second Ramu expedition. Hans Rodatz's collection is now part of the Oceania collection at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Hans-Jürgen Ohff: Empires of enterprise: German and English commercial interests in East New Guinea 1884 to 1914. ( Memento from February 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.1 MB) Dissertation University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008 p. 145
  2. ^ Tappenbeck, Ernst Cyclopaedia of Malesian Collectors, Nationaal Herbarium Nederland
  3. ↑ Nancy Sullivan & Associates Ltd .: Middle to Lower Ramu subsistence, household and culture study second revision ( Memento from April 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 7.7 MB) December 2009, January 2010.
  4. ^ Rainer F. Buschmann: Anthropology's global histories: the ethnographic frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935 , University of Hawaii Press , 2009, ISBN 0-8248-3184-5