QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Johann Cesar Godeffroy u. Sohn

Between 1838 and 1870 at least 43 Hamburg-based shipping companies provided over 250 departures from the Elbe River to Australia. Of these, no fewer than 150 were by ships of the firm Johann Cesar Godeffroy und Sohn. The discovery of copper reserves near Adelaide after 1843 spurred growth in Australian trade, investment in and emigration to early German communities in South Australia. These, plus later finds in Victoria, provided useful return cargoes to make round-trip commercial voyages increasingly worthwhile. Godeffroy inaugurated passenger/packet trade to Port Adelaide from 1848, with the first of over 70 voyages. By 1850 the firm was the single largest Hamburg-based fleet: 17 ships, totalling 2,758 CL (Commerzlasten) or approximately 6,300 NRT (Net Registered Tons). During 1852–58, Godeffroy ships made 16 round trips to Melbourne and Sydney, four in 1864 alone. A typical voyage during this period was about 125 130 days Hamburg-Sydney. On the east coast of Australia the former penal colony of Moreton Bay had been renamed Brisbane in 1824 and received its first German missionaries in 1837-8, five years before the colony was officially opened to free settlers. Emigrant ships began arriving in numbers from 1848. In 1849, the repeal of navigation acts by the British parliament removed the monopoly of British-flagged vessels, allowing German and other lines to carry return cargoes on Australian routes. Godeffroy ships made seven voyages to Brisbane in 1863 and eight in 1865. Selected accounts of some of these journeys appear on the following pages, including emigrant voyages to Queensland by vessels of Godeffroy’s counterpart Robert Miles Sloman. A later history recorded that “Godeffroy took particular trouble in acquiring and equipping high class modern tonnage … Contemporary reports also reveal that the treatment of emigrants on board was much above the low standard then customary.” At the firm’s peak, in the 1860s, the Godeffroy fleet numbered 27 ships. The firm’s trading interests extended to the Americas, India, Australia and throughout the South Pacific islands. As well as the Australian copper ore, copra and coconut oil, timber and tobacco were added to the homeward cargoes. Godeffroy and Sloman are counted among the antecedents of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd (NDL) and Hapag (Hamburg-Amerika) shipping lines. The global brand Hapag-Lloyd was created by the merger of the firms from 1 September 1970, and the company maintains the longstanding maritime connection with Queensland to this day. Hapag-Lloyd container ships make several weekly rotations through the Port of Brisbane on a variety of services. Australia and New Zealand are linked with east Asian hubs and onward connections to Germany, Europe and the world.

Above: a portrait of Johann Cesar (VI) Godeffroy in his early 30s, painted in about 1847; Huguenot ancestors fled religious persecution in hometown La Rochelle in France in 1737, sought asylum in Germany and settled in Hamburg. More on the family firm’s trading activities – and his role as “Südseekönig”(King of the South Seas) – appears later in this book.

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