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History Of Vanuatu
The history of Vanuatu spans over 3,200 years. Premodern history The pre-European history of Vanuatu can be reconstructed by combining insights from linguistics (particularly historical linguistics), anthropology, archaeology and human genetics. Archaeological evidence supports that peoples speaking Austronesian languages first came to the islands some 3,300 years ago. Pottery fragments have been found dating back to 1300 BC. The first inhabitants of Vanuatu were carriers of the Lapita culture, speakers of the Proto Oceanic language. That first wave of migration was likely followed, about 500 BC, by a second wave of Melanesian populations. Around the 16th or 17th century AD, the last chief with the title Roi Mata, died in central Vanuatu. He was buried in a large mound with several retainers – a place which is now one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The memory of Roi Mata is still told today in oral histories and legends. European contact The Vanuatu group o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Hebrides
New Hebrides, officially the New Hebrides Condominium () and named after the Hebrides in Scotland, was the colonial name for the island group in the South Pacific Ocean that is now Vanuatu. Native people had inhabited the islands for three thousand years before the first Europeans arrived in 1606 from a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós. The islands were named by Captain James Cook in 1774 and subsequently colonised by both the British and the French. The two countries eventually signed an agreement making the islands an Anglo-French condominium that provided for joint sovereignty over the archipelago with two parallel administrations, one British, one French. In some respects, that divide continued even after independence, with schools teaching in either one language or the other. The condominium lasted from 1906 until 1980, when New Hebrides gained its independence as the Republic of Vanuatu. Politics and economy The New Hebrides ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pedro Fernandes De Queirós
Pedro Fernandes de Queirós () (1563–1614) was a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain. He is best known for leading several Spanish voyages of discovery in the Pacific Ocean, in particular the 1595–1596 voyage of Álvaro de Mendaña y Neira, and for the 1605–1606 expedition that crossed the Pacific in search of '' Terra Australis''. Early life Queirós (or Quirós as he signed) was born in Évora, Portugal in 1563. As the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies had been unified under the king of Spain in 1580 (following the vacancy of the Portuguese throne, which lasted for sixty years, until 1640, when the Portuguese monarchy was restored), Queirós entered Spanish service as a young man and became an experienced seaman and navigator. In April 1595, he joined Álvaro de Mendaña y Neira on his voyage to colonize the Solomon Islands, serving as chief pilot. After Mendaña's death in October 1595, Queirós is credited with taking command and saving the only remaining sh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polynesia
Polynesia ( , ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including Polynesian languages, linguistic relations, Polynesian culture, cultural practices, and Tradition, traditional beliefs. In centuries past, they had a strong shared tradition of sailing and Polynesian navigation, using stars to navigate at night. The term was first used in 1756 by the French writer Charles de Brosses, who originally applied it to all the list of islands in the Pacific Ocean, islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a narrower definition during a lecture at the Société de Géographie of Paris. By tradition, the islands located in the South Seas, southern Pacific have also often been called the South Sea Islands, and their inhabitants have been called South Sea Islanders. The Hawai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erromango
Erromango is the fourth largest island in the Vanuatu archipelago. With a land area of , it is the largest island in Tafea Province, the southernmost of Vanuatu's six administrative regions. Name The endonym for Erromango in Erromangan is ''Nelocompne''. There are several accounts of how 'Erromango' came into common usage: firstly, an oral history from the Potnarvin area tells of how Captain James Cook was given a yam during his visit in August 1774, and was told in the (now-extinct) Sorung language ''armai n'go, armai n'go'' ('this food is good'), and mistakenly assumed this to be the name of the island. A second account is related by the naturalist Georg Forster, who accompanied Cook. He writes that he learned the name 'Irromanga' from a man named Fannòko, while visiting the neighbouring island of Tanna five days later. Cook himself does not name the island in his account of his visit, but writes later that he got the name, which he spells as 'Erromango', from Forster. His ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Island
An island or isle is a piece of land, distinct from a continent, completely surrounded by water. There are continental islands, which were formed by being split from a continent by plate tectonics, and oceanic islands, which have never been part of a continent. Oceanic islands can be formed from volcano, volcanic activity, grow into atolls from coral reefs, and form from sediment along shorelines, creating barrier islands. River islands can also form from sediment and debris in rivers. Artificial islands are those made by humans, including small rocky outcroppings built out of lagoons and large-scale land reclamation projects used for development. Islands are host to diverse plant and animal life. Oceanic islands have the sea as a natural barrier to the introduction of new species, causing the species that do reach the island to evolve in isolation. Continental islands share animal and plant life with the continent they split from. Depending on how long ago the continental is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sandalwood
Sandalwood is a class of woods from trees in the genus ''Santalum''. The woods are heavy, yellow, and fine-grained, and, unlike many other aromatic woods, they retain their fragrance for decades. Sandalwood oil is extracted from the woods. Sandalwood is often cited as one of the most expensive woods in the world. Both the wood and the oil produce a distinctive fragrance that has been highly valued for centuries. Consequently, some species of these slow-growing trees have suffered over-harvesting in the past. Nomenclature The nomenclature and the taxonomy of the genus are derived from this species' historical and widespread use. Etymologically it is ultimately derived from Sanskrit ''Chandana'' (''čandana''), meaning "wood for burning incense" and related to ''candrah'', "shining, glowing" and the Latin , to shine or glow. It arrived in English via Late Greek, Medieval Latin and Old French in the 14th or 15th century. True sandalwoods Sandalwoods are medium-sized Parasitic pl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Dillon
Peter Dillon (15 June 1788 – 9 February 1847) was a sea captain engaged in the merchant trade, explorer and writer. Dillon discovered in 1826–27 the fate of the La Pérouse expedition. Early career Peter Dillon was born in Martinique, France, the son and namesake of an Irish immigrant. Not much is known of his early life. He claimed to have joined the Royal Navy at one point and to have served at Trafalgar. He left the Royal Navy and made his way to Calcutta as a young man, eventually becoming a trader in the South Seas. In 1813, he sailed to Fiji as third mate in the ''Hunter'' under Captain James Robson to look for sandalwood. While there, tensions between the Europeans and the Fijians escalated into violence that cost the lives of many on both sides. Dillon recounted the events of this battle in his ''Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage to the South Seas'' (1829). In it he describes holding out with five other people, including Charles Savage, on a rock later ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Captain Cook
Captain James Cook (7 November 1728 – 14 February 1779) was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer famous for his three voyages of exploration to the Pacific and Southern Oceans, conducted between 1768 and 1779. He completed the first recorded circumnavigation of the main islands of New Zealand and was the first known European to visit the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1755. He served during the Seven Years' War, and subsequently surveyed and mapped much of the entrance to the St. Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec. In the 1760s, he mapped the coastline of Newfoundland and made important astronomical observations which brought him to the attention of the Admiralty and the Royal Society. This acclaim came at a crucial moment in British overseas exploration, and it led to his commission in 1768 as commander of for the first of three ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyclades
The CYCLADES computer network () was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking. The CYCLADES network was the first to make the hosts responsible for the reliable delivery of data, rather than this being a centralized service of the network itself. Datagrams were exchanged on the network using transport protocols that do not guarantee reliable delivery, but only attempt best-effort. To empower the network leaves the hosts to perform error-correction, the network ensured end-to-end protocol transparency, a concept later to be known as the end-to-end principle. This simplified network design, reduced network latency, and reduced the opportunities for single point failures. The experience with these concepts led to the design of key features of the Internet Protocol in the ARPANET project. The network ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Antoine De Bougainville
Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (; 12 November 1729 – 31 August 1811) was a French military officer and explorer. A contemporary of the British explorer James Cook, he served in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War. Bougainville later gained fame for his expeditions, including a circumnavigation of the globe in a scientific expedition in 1763, the first recorded settlement on the Falkland Islands, and voyages into the Pacific Ocean. Bougainville Island of Papua New Guinea as well as the flowering plant '' Bougainvillea'' are named in his honour. Biography Early career Bougainville was born in Paris, the capital of the Kingdom of France, the son of notary Pierre-Yves de Bougainville (1688–1756), on 12 November 1729. In early life, he studied law, but soon abandoned the profession. In 1753, he entered the French Army in the corps of Musketeers of the Guard. At the age of twenty-five he published a treatise on integral calculus, as a supplement to G ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller islands. It has a total area of , making it the list of countries and dependencies by area, sixth-largest country in the world and the largest in Oceania. Australia is the world's flattest and driest inhabited continent. It is a megadiverse countries, megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and Climate of Australia, climates including deserts of Australia, deserts in the Outback, interior and forests of Australia, tropical rainforests along the Eastern states of Australia, coast. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south-east Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, last glacial period. By the time of British settlement, Aboriginal Australians spoke 250 distinct l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terra Australis
(Latin for ) was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere.John Noble Wilford: The Mapmakers, the Story of the Great Pioneers in Cartography from Antiquity to Space Age, p. 139, Vintage Books, Random House 1982, This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who used the term ' on his maps. Names Other names for the hypothetical continent have included and (), and (). Other names were (), and (). Matthias Ringmann called it the () in 1505, and Franciscus Monachus called it the ''Australis orę'' (Austral country). In medieval times it was known as the Antipodes. The French writer Guillaume Postel proposed the name ''Chasdia'', after Noah's grandson C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
