Product Description
SCWPM.#18d - TBB.#B403d - Date: ND(1977)Grade: Unc. - Signature: 3 - Series: O.1
Description: Colour: Brown, yellow, red, blue, and green.
Front: Horizontal black Nouvelles-Hébrides overprint; French text; wooden totem; aerial view of airport and ships in port of Papeete; Sommet Tohiea on Moorea Island; flowers; native girl wearing floral wreath in hair, playing guitar.
Back: Horizontal black Nouvelles-Hébrides overprint; French text; native girl among flowers; aerial view of harbor town buildings; wooden totem.
No security thread. - Size: 140 x 75 mm.
Watermark: RF and female (Marianne) head wearing Phrygian cap.
Printer: (Banque de France). - Size: 140 x 75 mm.
General information:
New Hebrides, officially the New Hebrides Condominium (French: Condominium des Nouvelles-Hébrides, lit. "Condominium of the New Hebrides") and named after the Hebrides Scottish archipelago, 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.
