Tales from the Quarterdeck

Tag: Aborigines

  • Narcisse Pelletier: An Extraordinary Tale of Survival.

    Narcisse Pelletier and the Saint Paul.

       In April 1875, the pearling schooner John Bull’s crew encountered a man of clearly European descent living with a group of Aborigines on Cape York Peninsula. Mistakenly thinking that the man was being held against his will, they took him on board their vessel and delivered him to the nearest Government outpost at Somerset. His name was Narcisse Pelletier.

       Pelletier spent about two weeks at Somerset before being sent to Sydney on the steamer Brisbane. During his time at Somerset, Pelletier had spoken little, but on the voyage south, he was befriended by Lieutenant J.W. Ottley, a British Indian Army officer on leave in Australia. Using his rusty schoolboy French, Ottley coaxed Pelletier to tell him his remarkable story.

       Narcisse Pierre Pelletier was the son of a Saint Gilles shoemaker. At the age of 14, he went to sea as a cabin boy on the Saint Paul under the command of Captain Emmanuel Pinard. The ship sailed from Marseille in August 1857, bound for the Far East. The following year, the Saint Paul left Hong Kong for Sydney with 350 Chinese passengers drawn to New South Wales by the lure of gold. However, the ship was wrecked in the dangerous Louisiade Archipelago off the east coast of New Guinea.

    Stranding on the Saint Paul, on Rossel Island. Auguste Hadamard, Le Tour du Monde, volume 4, 1861.

       When some of the crew, including Pelletier, went in search of water on Rossel Island, they were attacked by the local inhabitants, and the mate and several sailors were killed. Pelletier himself was struck on the head and barely escaped with his life. He claimed that the captain had then decided their best chance of surviving was for the remaining crew to make for New Caledonia, leaving the Chinese passengers to their fate. This was at odds with Captain Pinard’s own account, in which he claimed to have gone in search of help at the behest of the passengers and that he had left them with most of the provisions and firearms. The story of the shipwreck and the gruesome aftermath is told in the preceding chapter.

       Pelletier recalled they suffered greatly in the longboat, surviving on a diet of flour and the raw flesh of a few seabirds that they were able to knock out of the sky when they flew too close to the boat. The sailors’ misery was amplified several days before reaching land when they ran out of drinking water. Pelletier was unsure how long they had been at sea, but they came ashore on the Australian mainland near Cape Direction, the land of the Uutaalnganu people.

       Nine of the Saint Paul’s crew reached land, including Captain Pinard and Pelletier. The first water hole they found was so small, according to Pelletier, that by the time everyone else had drunk their fill, there was none left for him. By now, he was half dead from hunger and thirst. He was suffering from exposure to the elements, and his feet had been lacerated from walking barefoot on coral.

       He told Ottley that Pinard and the rest of the men had reboarded the boat, intent on reaching the French settlement on New Caledonia, but they set out to sea without him. There he was, abandoned on an alien and possibly hostile stretch of coast far from anything familiar.

       Again, Pelletier’s version differs from Pinard’s. The captain claimed that he and all the others had stayed with the Uutaalnganu people for several weeks before they set off and were later picked up by the schooner Prince of Denmark, which eventually took them to New Caledonia. Regardless of the precise circumstances, when his shipmates left, Pelletier remained and was adopted by the Uutaalnganu people.   

    They tended to his injuries and restored him back to good health. Pelletier said that for the first several years, he missed his parents and younger brothers and longed to return home to France. But as time wore on, those feelings faded and were replaced by a strong bond to his Uutaalnganu adopted family. From the ceremonial scars scored on his chest and arms, and the piercing of his earlobe, for which he felt great pride, it is clear he had been initiated into the society. According to a later French biography, Pelletier married an Aboriginal woman and they had several children. He would remain with the Uulaalnganu for 17 years.

    Narcisse Pelletier in 1875. Source: Wikicommons.

       Then, in 1875, his world was turned upside down for a second time. One day, the pearling lugger John Bull happened to anchor near Cape Direction. Several sailors came ashore for water and to trade with the Uutaalnganu. They noticed the white man among the local inhabitants and coaxed him to visit their ship. Pelletier told Ottley that he had only gone with them for fear of what the heavily armed sailors might do if he didn’t, rather than any desire to return to “civilisation.” What’s more, he had not expected to be taken away, never to see his family and friends again. Pelletier also confessed to Ottley that he would have preferred being returned to Cape Direction and “his people,” instead of being taken down to Sydney.

       Narcisse Pelletier never did return to his Uutaalnganu family. He was delivered to the French Consulate in Sydney, where officials organised passage for him back to France. When, in January 1876, he arrived at his parents’ home, the whole town turned out to greet him. He was given a job as a lighthouse keeper near Saint Nazaire and married for a second time a few years later. Narcisse Pelletier passed away on September 28, 1894, at the age of 50.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2023.

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  • The Peruvian’s Lone Survivor

    James Morrill. Source National Library of Australia 136099157-1.

       In July 1846, word reached Sydney that a ship, the Peruvian, had been discovered abandoned on the remote Bellona Shoals far out in the Coral Sea.   No one knew what had happened to those who had been on board. As the months passed with no word of any survivors, it was presumed they had all been lost at sea when the ship was wrecked or in a desperate attempt to reach land. Then, 17 years later, a naked lone survivor walked out of the bush with a remarkable story of survival.  

       His name was James Morrill, and he had been 22 years old in late February 1846 when the Peruvian sailed out of Sydney Harbour on her way to China. Morrill had only joined the crew a couple of days before they sailed. Captain Pitkethly and his crew, including Morrill, numbered 14. Pitkethly’s wife, Elizabeth, six passengers and two stowaways sailed with them. In total, there were 23 people on board.

       The Peruvian had fine weather for the first three days and made an easy time of it sailing north under full sails.   But during the third night at sea, the weather started to turn. The next morning, the ship was in the grip of a powerful storm.   For the next several days, the Peruvian was blown north under bare poles.  Then, after nearly a week, the weather began to ease again. Sail was heaped back on, and they started making up for lost time. Then, in the early hours of 8 March, an ominous line of white caps materialised out of the pitch black night directly in their path.

       The Peruvian slammed into the reef before there was any chance to change course. The waves lifted the damaged ship onto the reef, where she stuck fast. Seawater swept the deck, washing away the lifeboat and the unsuspecting second mate who had just emerged from below deck.

       The morning revealed an unbroken reef awash with turbulent white foaming water as far as the eye could see. No islet, sandbar or refuge of any sort lay in sight. Only jagged rocks jutted from the sea’s surface. Captain Pitkethly made the difficult decision to abandon his ship. When the crew lowered the jolly boat over the side, it was immediately smashed to pieces. They now only had one boat left. It was loaded with supplies and lowered away. Then the ropes got tangled and the boat filled with water. The first mate jumped in the boat to try to save it, but before he could bail it out, the stern broke away. The damaged boat plummeted into the water, and a strong current swept it away from the side of the ship. Resigning himself to his fate, the man bid the captain and crew farewell and was soon lost from sight.

       Their situation had become dire with the loss of all three lifeboats. The ship could break apart at any time, and they were stranded over 1000 km off Australia’s east coast. But Pitkethley was not about to give up. The Peruvian’s masts were brought down, and cross planks were lashed and nailed in place, forming a platform. Then the remaining 21 castaways boarded the raft for a very uncertain future.

       The raft drifted with the north-westerly current towards the Australian mainland. The days passed slowly under the blazing tropical sun. Water and food were carefully rationed, making thirst and hunger constant companions. Morrill would recall that one day blurred into the next. Had the captain not recorded the passing of each day by carving a notch into a piece of timber, no one could have said how long they had been adrift in that empty sea.

       Morrill would later recall that after they had been adrift for a little over three weeks, they had their first casualty from the raft. Captain Pitkethly prayed over the man’s body, and it was lowered into the water. To everyone’s horror, as the body floated away, it was attacked by sharks and torn to shreds. The feeding frenzy, according to Morrill, only ended when the body was completely devoured.

       By now, they had probably left the open ocean and were among the shoals of the Great Barrier Reef. Fish could be seen in the crystal clear water, and they were able to catch some with a lure they fashioned from a fish hook, a piece of tin and a strip of canvas. Nature also answered their prayers for fresh water when the skies opened up. Rainwater was collected in a sail, and they could fill their water container for the first time since abandoning the ship. However, their good fortune did not last.

       Four weeks of starvation, thirst, and exposure to the elements had taken their toll on everyone. The castaways started dying in rapid succession.  “At this time they dropped off one after the other very rapidly, but I was so exhausted myself that I forget the order of their names,” Morrill would later recall.   

    James Morrill. Photo courtesy State Library of Queensland.

       By now, the raft was continuously circled by sharks drawn by the regular supply of corpses. Half-starved and desperate to fill their aching bellies, the survivors resolved to catch one of their tormentors.

       “The captain devised a plan to snare them with a running bowline knot, which we managed as follows,” Morrill would later claim, “We cut off the leg of one of the men who died, and lashed it at the end of the oar for a bait, and on the end of the other oar we put the snare, so that the fish must come through the snare to get at the bait.   Presently, one came, which we captured and killed with the carpenter’s axe.”

       And so Morrill and a few others clung to life. After being adrift for about five weeks, they sighted land for the first time. When Captain Pitkethly examined his chart, he took it to be Cape Upstart. But with no way to steer the raft, they could only watch and pray that they reached shore sometime soon.

       “Two or three days afterwards we saw the land once more, and were driven towards Cleveland Bay,” Morrill recalled, “but just as we were preparing to get ashore, in the hopes of getting water, a land breeze sprang up and drove us out to sea again.”

       Then, around midnight, the raft washed ashore, likely on the southern point of Cape Cleveland. After so long at sea, no one had the strength to do anything but drag themselves off the raft and collapse on the beach. In the early hours of the morning, it began to rain. Morrill and the other castaways quenched their thirst by drinking directly from shallow depressions in nearby rocks.   Cold and wet, they huddled together and waited for dawn.

       They had been adrift on the raft for 42 days according to the captain’s tally of nicks in the piece of wood. Only seven of the 21 people who had left the Peruvian were still alive, and two of those would die from exhaustion within hours of reaching land.

       For the next couple of weeks, the survivors sheltered in a cave and foraged for shellfish among the rocks. One of the castaways found a canoe pulled up on the beach one day. He would set off south in it alone after Morrill and everyone else refused to join him. Morrill would later learn that his emaciated body was found by Aborigines not far from where he had left.

    Memorial to James Morril, the last survivor of the Peruvian shipwreck who lived with Aborigines for 17 years. Bowen Cemetery.

       As their strength slowly returned, the castaways began ranging further afield in search of food. And their presence soon came to the attention of the local Aborigines, the Bindal and Juru peoples. One evening after Morrill and Captain Pitkethly had returned to the cave from a day’s foraging, they heard strange jabbering and whistling sounds. When they went to investigate, they found several naked black men staring at them with keen interest.

       “At first they were as afraid of us as we were of them,” Morrill later said. “Presently, we held up our hands in supplication to them to help us; some of them returned it. After a while, they came among us and felt us all over from head to foot. They satisfied themselves that we were human beings, and, hearing us talk, they asked us by signs where we had come from. We made signs and told them we had come across the sea, and, seeing how thin and emaciated we were, they took pity on us. …”

       By now, only Morrill, Captain Pitkethly, his wife Elizabeth and a young apprentice were left. They were taken in by the Aborigines and assigned to different groups. The captain and his wife never fully recovered and struggled to adapt to the arduous life among the Aborigines. They died within a few days of each other and were buried together. Morrill would also later learn that the apprentice had also died.

    .   Morrill would live among the Bindal people of the Burdekin region for the next 17 years. Every so often, his new friends told him that they had sighted a ship out on the ocean, but he was never close enough to try signalling for help. But the sightings served to remind him of his past life.

       By 1863, the frontier of European colonisation had reached the lower Burdekin River. By then, he was nearly 40 years old. One day, Morrill approached a hut, calling out to its occupants, “What cheer, shipmates?” The shepherds came out, one of whom was armed with a gun, to find a naked, dark-skinned man standing before them. “Do not shoot me, I am a British object, a shipwrecked sailor,” Morrill yelled.  He was invited inside and told the shepherds his story in broken English. He only then realised how much he wanted to return to his old life. Morrill made one final visit to his Bindal family and friends, begging them not to follow him. Aborigines were frequently shot on sight if they seemed to pose a threat, and Morrill did not want that fate to fall on his loved ones.

       Morrill would eventually be taken to Brisbane, where he met the Governor. He asked that the Aborigines be allowed to live on their land unmolested by settlers, but his plea went unheeded. He was given a job as an assistant storeman in Bowen, where he married, fathered a child and became a much-liked member of the local community. But the hardships he had endured over the years had taken a toll on his body. An old knee wound, which had never properly healed, became inflamed, and he died, probably of blood poisoning, just two years later.    A modest memorial to the last survivor of the Peruvian shipwreck can be found in the Bowen Cemetery.

    James Morrill’s full story is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison, Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2022.

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  • Thomas Pamphlett and the Remarkable Castaways of Moreton Bay

    Source: ‘The Finding of Pamphlet’, Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, vol. II, 1886, nla.cat-vn1654251.

    Most Queensland school children are taught that the first non-Aboriginal people to settle in their state were convicts and their gaolers who arrived in September 1824.   But actually the first white-skinned people to live in what would become Queensland were three castaway ex-convicts who came ashore 18 months earlier.

    In 1823 Governor Brisbane sent the NSW Surveyor General, John Oxley, to determine if Moreton Bay, 800 kilometres north of Sydney, would make a suitable penal settlement to house the colony’s worst and most incorrigible convicts.

    On 29 November the small government cutter Mermaid, carrying Oxley and his party, dropped anchor in Pumicestone Passage separating Bribie Island from the mainland.   To their astonishment, among the Aborigines they could see on shore stood a taller, lighter-skinned man excitedly haling them.    His name was Thomas Pamphlett and he and two mates had been living with the local Aboriginal peoples for the past seven months.

    This is their story.     On 21 March 1823 four ticket-of-leave men, Thomas Pamphlett, John Finnegan, Richard Parsons and John Thompson, sailed from Sydney in a 10-metre-long open boat bound south to the Illawarra to gather cedar logs for sale in Sydney.

    However, they were caught in a ferocious storm which battered the craft mercilessly for five days.   They were driven far from the coast under a bare mast and when the storm finally cleared five days later they had no idea where they were.     They thought they had been blown south towards Van Diemen’s Land but in fact they had been taken north.    So, when they could finally hoist a sail they bore north in search of Sydney.  

    Their water had run out days earlier and they only had rum to quench their thirst.    All four were in a bad way but John Thompson became delirious and died from thirst.   They kept him in the boat for several days until the smell drove them to bury him at sea.  

    They finally sighted land about three weeks after setting off from Sydney.   This turned out to be Moreton Island though that was not known to them at the time.   They could see a freshwater stream flowing across the beach so Pamphlett swam ashore with the water keg in tow.   He drank his fill but was too weak to swim back to the boat.    The others, crazed with thirst, brought the boat closer to shore but it got caught in the surf and was smashed to pieces.

    The three men were alive but stranded.   They salvaged some flour, a bucket, an axe, a pair of scissors, the water keg but little else.    They soon came across an Aboriginal camp in the sand dunes and were befriended by the people.    The three castaways lived with their hosts for a couple of months then they decided to set off north thinking they would eventually reach Sydney.

    First they went south to cross over to Stradbroke Island then onto the mainland where they ventured north around Moreton Bay   All the time they were accompanied by different bands of Yuggera.   Pamphlett and Finnegan decided to stop at Bribie Island on the northern edge of the bay and lived with the Joondoobarrie people until they were found by Oxley and his party.     Parsons, still determined to return to Sydney kept heading north and may have gone as far as Harvey Bay before it was made clear to him his presence among the Butchella people was not welcomed.  

    The cutter Mermaid. Photo State Library of Queensland

    He returned to Bribie Island many months later only to find his comrades had been taken away on the Mermaid.   However, the party of explorers left a message in a bottle for Parson should he ever pass that way again.   Unfortunately, he was illiterate and could not read the message that had been left for him, but he remained in that area in the hope that another ship might pass that way.    He was in luck.   The brig Amity sailed into Moreton Bay in September the following year with 30 convicts and their guards to establish the first settlement at Redcliffe.   When they came ashore Parsons was standing on the beach waiting for them.  

    Richard Parsons was returned to Sydney and found work as a bullock driver. John Finnegan later returned to Moreton Bay and took up a post piloting ships in and out of the bay. Thomas Pamphlett also returned to Moreton Bay, but it was not of his own choosing. He stole two bags of flour in 1826 and was sentenced to spend seven years toiling at Moreton Bay penal settlement.

    For more interesting stories from Australia’s maritime past check out  A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters, available now as a Kindle eBook or paperback through Amazon.

    (c) C. J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2021.

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