Lot # : 89 - 1977 100 Francs New Hebrides Institut d'Emission

P-18d 1977 100 Francs, New Hebrides, Institut d'Emission d'Outre, PMG 66EPQ This listing is for a 100 francs note from New Hebrides issued in 1977. New Hebrides, officially the New Hebrides Condominium (French: Condominium des Nouvelles-Hébrides) and named after the Hebrides in Scotland, 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 colonized 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.