Island of Rapa-Iti (George Vancouver)

The full index of our ship stamp archive
Post Reply
Anatol
Posts: 1037
Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2009 2:13 pm

Island of Rapa-Iti (George Vancouver)

Post by Anatol » Fri Nov 17, 2017 7:44 pm

In 1987, French Polynesia released a stamp dedicated to the voyage of George Vancouver in the South Pacific. Captain George Vancouver (22 June 1757 – 10 May 1798) was a British officer of the Royal Navy, best known for his 1791–95 expedition, which explored and charted North America's northwestern Pacific Coast regions, including the coasts of contemporary Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. He also explored the Hawaiian Islands and the southwest coast of Australia.(For more details about G.Vancouver to see : viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9604)
December 22, 1791, the island of Rapa-Iti was discovered by George Vancouver , who headed the British cartographic expedition on the Discovery barge . On the shore, the British did not descend, the locals went to sea, to meet the travelers on 30 canoes , which carried over 300 men - the Rapaites . The islanders offered the aliens caught fish, behaved noisily, but not particularly sociable. Vancouver notes that the natives had virtually no weapons, except for a few copies and sling, the language of the local residents, he did not understand, but confidently attributed it to the group of languages of the islands of Ostral (the islands of Tubuai , ie Polynesian ). The English captain also drew attention to the fact that on the mountain peaks of the island there are numerous fortifications that are constantly guarded by armed guards. The island was named Oparo (this was the word most often pronounced by the natives, remembered by Vancouver ), since then Rapa-Iti appeared on the sea charts, and Europeans have become frequent visitors to its coastal waters. [12] In 1802 , near the island was English captain Roger Simpson, who worked for the famous entrepreneur and explorer ofAustralia, George Bass . Simpson on the barge "Nautilus" was heading to Tahiti to purchase pork for theSydney colonists, during his journey he visited the island of Raivawae , and moving from it to the south came across the islands of Marotiri and Rapa Iti , who, in honor of their friend and patron, called the Bass Islands[13] (some sources are mistakenly called the discoverer of the Marotiri islands of Bass himself. September 6, 1813 . the island of Rapa-Iti was seen by another English entrepreneur Stephen Reynolds, bound with cargo of sea otter skins from the coast of North America to Guangzhou , which he left a record in the ship's log. On July 20, 1815, the ship Endeavor, which was sent from Sydney for a route between New Zealand and the Marquesas Islands, stopped at the island. The crew left the most unflattering comments about the Rapaites , calling the islanders thieves, dragging everything that fell into their hands on the deck of the ship. In January 1817, the English missionary William Ellis spoke with the Rapaites from the ship's side, leaving the description of the islanders who came out to meet him on canoe. June 29, 1820 , two sloops of the Russian round-the-world Antarctic expedition under the command of F.F. Bellingshausen "Vostok" and "Mirny" abandoned anchors near Rapa-Iti and spent two days off the coast of the island. Local residents went to a meeting with aliens on 22 canoes on which there were about a hundred islanders and started a stormy trade with Russian sailors. In the middle of the last century, Thor Heyerdahl visited Rapa-Iti during his expedition. On an island in the mountains, he excavated and, as he described in his book "Aku Aku," in the tenth chapter, "Moronga Uta, the city of the ruins of the ruins," discovered ancient buildings, huge for such a small island lost in the ocean.
French Polynesia;1987;130f;SG?
Source:wikipedia.org/wiki/ George_Vancouver.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapa-Iti
Attachments
img1493.jpg

Post Reply