Nouméa New Caledonia Island New Caledonia
Related Events
Showing 10 events out of 10 total
He names it "New Caledonia", as the northeast of the island reminds him of Scotland.
Only a few sporadic contacts with the New Caledonian archipelago are recorded from 1796 until 1840.
About fifty American whalers (identified by Robert Langsom from their log books) are recorded in the region (Grande Terre, Loyalty Is., Walpole and Hunter) between 1793 and 1887.
Contacts become more frequent after 1840, because of the interest in sandalwood.
As trade in sandalwood declines, it is replaced by a new business enterprise, "blackbirding", a euphemism for taking Melanesian or Western Pacific Islanders from New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, New Hebrides, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands into indentured or forced labor in the sugar cane plantations in Fiji and Queensland by various methods of trickery and deception.
In the early years of the trade, coercion is used to lure Melanesian islanders onto ships.
In later years indenture systems will be developed; however, when it comes to the French slave trade, which takes place between its Melanesian colonies of the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, very few regulations are implemented.
This represented a departure from the British experience, since increased regulations will be developed to mitigate the abuses of blackbirding and 'recruitment' strategies on the coastlines.
The first missionaries from the London Missionary Society and the Marist Brothers arrive in the 1840s.
In 1849, the crew of the American ship Cutter is killed and eaten by the Pouma clan.
Cannibalism is widespread throughout New Caledonia.
The French, expanding from Polynesia into western Oceania acquire New Caledonia and its dependencies in 1853.
Admiral Febvrier Despointes, under orders from Emperor Napoleon III, takes formal possession of New Caledonia on September 24, 1853.
Captain Louis-Marie-François Tardy de Montravel founds Port-de-France (Nouméa) on June 25, 1854.
A few dozen free settlers will settle on the New Caledonia's west coast in the following years.
New Caledonia becomes a penal colony in 1864, and from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897, France will send about twenty-two thousand criminals and political prisoners to New Caledonia.
To work the mines the French import laborers from neighboring islands and from the New Hebrides, and later from Japan, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina.
The French government also attempts to encourage European immigration, without much success.
The indigenous population or Kanak people are excluded from the French economy and from mining work, and ultimately confined to reservations.
This sparks a violent reaction in 1878, when High Chief Atal of La Foa manages to unite many of the central tribes and launches a guerrilla war that kills two hundred Frenchmen and one thousand Kanaks.
The Europeans have brought to New Caledonia new diseases such as smallpox and measles, of which many people die.
The Kanaka population, around sixty thousand in 1878, has begun a long decline.
As trade in sandalwood declined, it had been replaced by a new form of trade, "Blackbirding", a euphemism for enslaving people from New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, New Hebrides, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands to work in sugar cane plantations in Fiji and Queensland.
Like all the Oceanian people, the victims of this trade, which will cease only at the start of the twentieth century, are called Kanakas, after the Hawaiian word for 'man'.
The Bulletin de la Société générale des prisons for 1888 indicates that 10,428 convicts, including 2,329 freed ones, are on the island of New Caledonia as of May 1, 1888, by far the largest number of convicts detained in French overseas penitentiaries.
The convicts include many Communards, arrested after the failed Paris Commune of 1871, including Henri de Rochefort and Louise Michel.
Between 1873 and 1876, forty-two hundred political prisoners had "relegated" to New Caledonia.
Only forty of them of them had settled in the colony; the rest had returned to France after being granted amnesty in 1879 and 1880.
France ends its use of New Caledonia as a penal colony in 1897.
New Caledonia had become a penal colony in 1864, and from the 1860s until the end of the transportations in 1897, France sent about twenty-two thousand criminals and political prisoners to New Caledonia.
The Bulletin de la Société générale des prisons for 1888 indicates that 10,428 convicts, including 2,329 freed ones, were on the island as of May 1, 1888, by far the largest number of convicts detained in French overseas penitentiaries.
The convicts included many Communards, arrested after the failed Paris Commune of 1871, including Henri de Rochefort and Louise Michel.
Between 1873 and 1876, 4,200 political prisoners were "relegated" to New Caledonia.
Only 40 of them settled in the colony; the rest returned to France after being granted amnesty in 1879 and 1880.