Richard Parkinson (explorer)

Richard Parkinson (* 1844 in August Borg on the island of Als, Denmark, † 1909) was a German South Seas explorer and colonist. He went in 1875 as a representative of the Hamburg trading company JC Godeffroy & Sohn to Samoa, where he remained until 1882, in order to settle then on the Gazelle Peninsula in Neu-Pommern ( New Britain ). From there he undertook larger and smaller traveling through the Bismarck Archipelago, according to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, which were part of the German colony of German New Guinea.

His major work, Thirty Years in the South Seas, published in several editions ( first in 1907 and in 1911 by Bernhard anchor man, then 1926 edited by August Eichhorn ). It describes in detail Neu-Pommern with the archipelagos Neulauenburg ( Duke of York Islands), New Ireland ( New Ireland ) and New Hanover ( Lavongai ), St. Matthias Islands, the Admiralty Islands and the German Solomon Islands, as well as secret societies, totemism, masks and masked dances, legends and fairy tales of the region and the languages ​​of the indigenous population.

Works

• In the Bismarck Archipelago. Leipzig: Brockhaus 1887 ( Repr 2006 by Verlag Fines Mundi, Saarbruecken )
• Thirty years in the South Seas. Country and its people, customs and traditions in the Bismarck Archipelago and on the German Solomon Islands. Edited by Dr. B. Anchorman, directorial assistant at the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. Strecker & Schröder, Stuttgart 1907 ( ibid. edition 1911, 2nd edition edited and published by Prof. Dr. August Eichhorn, ibid 1926)
• Superstition and magical creatures of the South Sea Islanders. Ensslin & Laiblin, Reutlingen 1932