QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

La Rochelle

“Then came the start of the sea-sickness, where hundreds of people lay about, having great dizziness and having to vomit,” Georg Benfer noted, adding that, “I remained unaffected, however, and have had no troubles with it.” Australian landfall might be made at either Cape Leeuwin on the southwest corner of the continent, if heading for Adelaide or Melbourne, or Tasman’s Head on the coast of Tasmania, if coursing towards Sydney or Brisbane and taking maximum advantage of the prevailing westerly winds. The maiden voyage of the La Rochelle was a passage of 95 days Hamburg–Adelaide, a record for the time. From 1861, under Captain Junge, La Rochelle made at least five voyages to the South Seas – four of them, every year from 1862/63 to 1865/66, carrying emigrants to Brisbane. On her Moreton Bay inaugural in 1862, among the La Rochelle’ s complement was her captain, two mates, 24 sailors, a cook, a doctor and cabin boy. Freight included two cases of wine, two hogsheads of rum, 12 cases of perfumery and 50 cases of ale, 40 rams and four boars, 600 desks and 10,000 fire-bricks – along with 339 landed immigrants (adjusted for 14 dead children and one birth). On 17 May 1863, the La Rochelle departed Hamburg on her second passage to Brisbane. Among her 444 emigrant passengers were one year-old Ludwig Gottfried Tesch, his four year-old brother Carl Christian Friedrich and five year-old sister Marie Wilhelmine, and their parents, one uncle and two aunts, and two sets of grandparents, from the Angermünde district of Brandenburg, to the northeast of Berlin. Also aboard were 40 rams, and 2,500 bricks as ballast. A family historian noted: “One can imagine conditions on such a small ship. When weather conditions were bad all passengers would have been battened down below the hatches with the animals.”* After an even faster passage of just 81 days the La Rochelle arrived off Moreton Island on 5 August 1863, anchoring at the mouth of the Brisbane River on the 7th. “May in Prussia [on their departure] would have been equivalent to the 50 degrees Fahrenheit [10°C] that greeted them in Queensland,” the same history noted.* It was a happier arrival than her 1865 voyage, when La Rochelle reached Brisbane after an outbreak of typhus fever on board, and 73 deaths.

Four more boys and four more girls, all born to Gottfried Ludwig II in their new homeland between 1865 and 1878, completed the first Australian generation of Tesches. This branch of the family tree came to be described as “the Maleny Tesches” after they began working the forests in the Sunshine Coast hinterland north of Brisbane. Another uncle, Carl Friedrich, came out later that year, arriving on another of the Godeffroy fleet, the Susanne, in January 1864. (Surely a more remarkable difference in climatic change for the 27 year-old Carl, embarking in the crisp chill of the late northern autumn, arriving on the far side of the world at the height of a southern summer!) After 1869 the La Rochelle , under her third and final Godeffroy captain, H Witt, continued her annual voyaging to the South Seas, trading more to Samoa and other German colonies, with fewer calls at Australian ports. Supposedly converted into a warship during the Franco-Prussian War, the La Rochelle was later sold to Swedish owners and renamed Saturnus . Reports of her fate have her abandoned and sinking in the North Atlantic in March 1886 near Bermuda, which the survivors reached by lifeboat. ^CommerzLasten – weight measurement; see Style notes, p.xxvii *Extracted from the manuscript 136 Sommers in Queensland as reported by Margaret Tesch, May 2003. Research into this branch of the Tesch family tree was rendered somewhat tricky by the frequent, interchangeable re-use of ‘Ludwig’ and ‘Gottfried’ as christian names in the early generations.

Above: Saturnus seen at Helsingborg in Sweden, about 1886 Background: A contemporary image o f La Rochelle at speed, carrying an almost full complement of sail

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