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In the mid-19th century, two European sailors were shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. Both were rescued by and integrated into Aboriginal tribes. However, when they were eventually 'rescued', neither man had an easy time readjusting to western life, writes Iain McCalman.
This is a story of shipwreck, near death, rescue and unexpected friendship. In the mid-19th century, two European youths were separately lost at sea off the Great Barrier Reef, 1000 kilometres apart. Both were rescued and nurtured by Aborigines and by a strange coincidence, each lived with their separate rescuers for 17 years.

At the end of those 17 years, the English sailor chose to leave his adopted people and join the invading British colonists around Bowen, while the other was kidnapped by British trepang (sea cucumber) hunters near today's Lockhart River on Cape York and returned to his native France. The British men, brandishing guns, believed they were rescuing him. He regarded himself as kidnapped.

Though initially welcomed in his home village of Saint Gilles, he [Pelletier] was exorcised by a priest at the request of his family and taunted by locals for his 'savage' appearance and ways.

At the time this story begins, the English sailor was 22-year-old James Morrill. He was shipwrecked in 1846 and rescued by a clan of Birri-Gubba speaking people near the modern north Queensland reef ports of Bowen and Cardwell. They named him Karckynjib Wombil Moony.

The other was Narcisse Pelletier, a French cabin boy of 14 who had been at sea since he was a child. Pelletier was shipwrecked in 1858 and adopted by a group of Wanthaala maritime Aborigines on the coast of Cape York Peninsula. They named him Anco. Each castaway later gave unique and moving accounts of their adopted tribes on the cusp of European frontier invasions of the northern Great Barrier Reef region.

Although Morrill and Pelletier were born 20 years apart-in 1824 and 1844 respectively-and in the continentally separate villages of Abridge in Essex and Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie in the Vendée, they were carried to the reef by related flows of European trade. Both were from artisan families in villages linked to a rising sea-borne imperial commerce centered on today's Asia-Pacific region. Both became sailors at a young age.

Having been rescued and adopted, both boys lived on small Great Barrier Reef estates situated 1000 kilometres apart. Morrill roamed, fished and hunted around the coastal and inland fringes of the Burdekin river region near modern Townsville. Pelletier's hot, wet, and remote coastal country, known as the Sandbeach, was situated halfway along the Cape York Peninsula, near to the modern Aboriginal settlement of Lockhart River.
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His Wanthaala clan practiced a maritime way of life based on fishing and dugong hunting. Both boys learned every rock, tree, plant and animal within their country, and believed them to be animated by the 'mythic charter' of their clan's spiritual origins. Physically strong, both took easily to their new way of life: Morrill as a fisherman and trapper, Pelletier as a sailor, dugong hunter and initiated warrior.

Each of their clans was eventually overtaken by waves of frontier resource hunters. Morrill became entangled during the 1850s and '60s in a pastoral frontier that was pushing into the Burdekin region and on to the Gulf of Carpentaria. His hunter-gatherer range lay at the epicentre of this invasion, forcing him to experience one of northern Australia's most intense bouts of frontier conflict. He witnessed the dispossession and murder of many of his adopted people and the rapid destruction of their ecology through the introduction of cattle and sheep. Fearing for his life, he voluntarily rejoined European society in 1863, and was given government work in Bowen.

Pelletier, by contrast, made forced contact with Europeans just over a decade later as a result of the incursions of a growing frontier industry of trepang and pearl-shell seekers based in the Torres Strait. From there, luggers were beginning to push southward into the resource-rich coastal waters of Cape York. In early April 1875, a trepang fishing brig anchored off Night Island and its sailors 'rescued' at gunpoint a naked, spear-carrying white man with chest scarifications and an elongated earlobe. Distressed and incapable of remembering his native tongue, Pelletier was tied up and taken to the frontier settlement of Somerset before eventually being sent back to France.
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Neither castaway experienced an easy reintegration into white society. Morrill lived and married in Bowen and tried to mediate on behalf of his clan, proposing an area of land be set aside for them north of the Burdekin River. However, he found himself caught in cultural cross-fire.

He was suspected by many settlers of being a covert agent of Aboriginal resistance. In 1863, soon after he joined the British community, he published a pamphlet describing his time with the Birri-Gubba. In it he wrote of his feelings of love and friendship for them and the difficulties of leaving them. Nevertheless, they were disappointed at his inability to alleviate their suffering. Morrill died in 1865 at the age of 41, less than three years after returning to colonial society.

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Pelletier, having joined Aboriginal society at 14, was more deeply naturalised into it. On the ship that took him south to Sydney, before he was sent to France, he struggled to regain his mother tongue and remember his birth family. Curious observers who encountered him soon after he was captured believed he had decided to communicate as little as possible about his adopted people, wishing to protect them.

Though initially welcomed in his home village of Saint Gilles, he was exorcised by a priest at the request of his family and taunted by locals for his 'savage' appearance and ways. Angry, isolated and yearning for his Aboriginal past, he married but had no children. In 1894, at the age of 50, he died of unknown causes. Locals believed he'd succumbed to primitive nostalgia for the life and people of the Sandbeach.
Iain McCalman is professorial research fellow at the University of Sydney and the author of The Reef: a Passionate History. Hindsight presents history in a new light, offering insights and perspectives on the past through stories, some well known and some, till now, unheard.

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Shipwrecked and kidnapped: a tale of two castaways on the Great Barrier Reef

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In the mid-19th century, two European sailors were shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. Both were rescued by and integrated into Aboriginal tribes. However, when they were eventually 'rescued', neither man had an easy time readjusting to western life, writes Iain McCalman. This is a story of shipwreck, near death, rescue and unexpected friendship.

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Biography - James Morrill - Australian Dictionary of Biography

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G. C. Bolton, 'Morrill, James (1824-1865)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/morrill-james-2484/text3339, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 19 April 2018.

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Narcisse Pelletier (1 January 1844 - 1894), born in Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in the Vendée, was abandoned at the age of 14 in late September or early October, 1858, during the dry season, on eastern Cape York Peninsula in Australia.

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Article on Morrill

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THE WILD WHITE MAN - 17 YEARS WITH THE BLACKS Shipwrecked Sailors' Ordeal - The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995) - 31 Dec 1929

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Your group can download the audio here and read a summary of all three castaways.

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Barbara Crawford Thompson (1831-1916) was a Scottish woman who as a teenage girl survived a shipwreck in the Torres Strait Islands of Australia and spent five years living with the local Kaurareg people. She was possibly the sole survivor of the November 1844 wreck of the cutter America, which ran onto Madjii Reef at Horn Island in Endeavour Strait near Cape York, Queensland.