Authors: Iain McCalman
The absence of any sexual sensation in her story helped Barbara Thompson slip into obscurity. Twenty-one months after returning to Sydney, she married a sailor, James Adams, who seems to have died within a few years. In 1876 she married another sailor, John Simpson. Barbara eventually died in Sydney in 1916, at the age of eighty-five, and is buried in Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney. Boroto probably died in 1869 on Muralag, after a brutal white reprisal conducted in error against the Kaurareg. These mass killings led to the near extinction of his Kaurareg clan.
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Brierly’s collection of illustrated journals remained unpublished in his lifetime and for long afterward, thereby making no public impact in his day. Instead Brierly sold his material to a local book collector, David Mitchell, who became the founding patron of Sydney’s Mitchell Library, thus ensuring that this story of
marki
love on the Reef survived the annihilation of the Kaurareg clan who’d made it possible.
The climate of racial opinion in colonial Australia and in Britain was hardly conducive to publishing the testimony of a castaway so at odds with the titillating traumas of Eliza Fraser. Brierly’s continuing reluctance to expose Barbara Thompson to public scrutiny might have been another thing constraining him from publishing his journals, and might explain, too, why his many sketches and paintings of the Kaurareg contain no representation of Barbara herself. Indeed, no portrait of the young castaway seems to have survived anywhere.
But perhaps another reason Brierly failed to publish was because he never found time to work up his material. Soon after docking in Sydney, he was hired as artist to the British survey ship HMS
Meander
, after which he served as naval artist to the British Fleet throughout the Crimean War (1853–56). With the coming of peace, he worked briefly on Queen Victoria’s royal yacht, before joining a series of imperial cruises in the 1860s as marine artist to the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, one of which brought him back to Australia. Oswald Brierly died in England in 1894, after having been knighted for his work with the Royal Yacht Squadron.
It was all a far cry from squatting in the sand with his Kaurareg friends. He had found, on his return to Australia in the mid-1860s, that anti-Aboriginal sentiment had hardened appreciably. The northward expansion of European settlement into New South Wales and Queensland was by now generating a virulent propaganda against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, to justify the dispossession of their lands and resources. The two young castaways who were soon to follow in Barbara Thompson’s wake would find reentering white society a much more painful affair.
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HEARTLANDS
The Lost Lives of Karkynjib and Anco
L
ONDON IN THE FINAL YEARS
of the nineteenth century had lost none of its appetite for sensationalism, and in August 1898 a new purveyor of “true-life adventure stories,”
Wide World Magazine
, began a twelve-month serial. The hyperbolic claims of the title—“The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont. Being a Narrative of the Most Amazing Experiences a Man Ever Lived to Tell”—did not disappoint, and the work soon became a bestselling sensation.
De Rougemont, a tall Swiss sailor with a seamed brown face and ready tongue, told a tale that made Robinson Crusoe’s sound prosaic. Shipwrecked on a reef north of Australia while sailing a pearl lugger, he was marooned for several years on a tiny strip of sand. With great ingenuity and courage, he claimed, he subsisted on raw fish stolen from the local pelicans, and built a hut from the piles of pearl-filled oyster shells lying on the reefs. During his long marooning he’d discovered some amazing properties of turtles: he could ride on their backs while steering with his toes, he could germinate plants in their blood-filled shells, and he could dive underwater with them to discover a marine Eden.
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Rescued by three Australian natives, he was taken to the world’s last great wild frontier, somewhere in northern Australia. Here, he maintained, he “discovered” a vast area of lush virgin wilderness where jewels and gold nuggets lay discarded for the taking, and where his genius earned the admiration of cannibal chiefs and native women.
That de Rougemont was an exaggerator will be obvious, but he was in fact a serial fantasist who would end his life performing at fairs under the title of “The Greatest Liar on Earth.” Born Henri Louis Grin on November 12, 1847, to a peasant-farmer family in Gressy, Switzerland, he migrated to Australia in 1875 to work as a butler for the new governor of Western Australia. Once there, he left his employ to live the life of a drifter and con man for twenty years, having enough real-life adventures to ensure that his later castaway tale was half plausible. During that time he married Eliza Jane Ravenscroft of Newtown, Sydney, and fathered seven children.
While living in Western Australia in 1875, he acquired a small, deformed-looking cutter known on the Fremantle waterside as
The Sudden Jerk
. After fitting it out as a pearling lugger, Grin recruited some white riffraff and a few press-ganged Aboriginal divers to cruise with him for several years on the northwest coast. There he somehow managed to fail in the pearl-shell trade at a time when others were making fortunes.
Eventually he and a brutish white associate became implicated in the murder of an Aboriginal diver. Grin escaped the perfunctory notice of law officers by sailing around the top of Australia and down through the Great Barrier Reef lagoon to Cooktown, where he claimed to be the sole survivor of an Aboriginal attack. Soon after, he joined the Palmer River gold rush, inland from Cooktown, before mounting at least one further pearling expedition northward. This ended abruptly on a coral reef off the Torres Strait in 1880. Two years later Grin appeared in Sydney, where he pecked a living as a dishwasher, real estate salesman, photographer, and marketer of a patented diving suit that killed its first demonstrator. In 1897 he abandoned his Sydney family for a brief stint in New Zealand as a spiritualist, before working his passage to England.
2
Grin arrived in London with a memoir in mind. Deciding to season his adventures with a little historical fact, he trawled through a book in the British Museum called the
Australian Dictionary of Dates and Men of the Time
. Compiled by a former colonial journalist, it contained true-life castaway stories of sailors who’d lived with Aboriginal clans. Two in particular grabbed Grin’s attention, both young men who mid-century had spent seventeen years living with separate groups in the region of the Great Barrier Reef. James Morrill, an English sailor of twenty-two, had been shipwrecked in 1846 and rescued by a clan of Birri-Gubba speakers near present-day Townsville. Narcisse Pelletier, a French cabin boy of fourteen, was rescued from a shipwreck in 1858 by a group of Wanthaala near Cape Direction, midway down the Cape York Peninsula.
Though he plundered both stories, Grin found Pelletier’s the more enticing. Being a French speaker, Grin had little difficulty substituting himself for the cabin boy, though he chose to award himself a more aristocratic lineage. Thus was Louis de Rougemont, north Australian castaway, born. Had he been able to control his rampant imagination enough to steal only the factual details of the two stories, Grin might still have created a sensation in London without committing the blunders that eventually exposed him as a fraud.
For Grin had chanced on something rare: two accounts of the lives and habitats of hunter-gatherer clans in the Reef region on the verge of the engulfing experience of European contact. Both stories were rich in the Crusoe-like details that Grin itched to borrow. He decided, however, to excise their uncomfortable endings. The two boys, along with the clans and estates that nurtured them, had eventually become casualties of the predatory frontier invasions that Grin himself had helped to mount.
These are the two Reef castaway stories that
Wide World Magazine
ought to have carried.
* * *
Although Jem Murrells (later James Morrill) and Narcisse Pelletier were born twenty years apart—in 1824 and 1844 respectively—and in the continentally separated villages of Abridge in Essex and Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie in the Vendée, they were carried to the Great Barrier Reef by the same flow of European trade. Both were from artisan families living in villages linked to a rising seaborne imperial commerce centered on the present-day Asia-Pacific region.
The sailing barges of Abridge, still famous today, plied the Blackwater River a short distance to Maldon, a port where seagoing colliers and merchant trading ships abounded. Morrill’s father, a millwright, allowed his son a brief education at the local Church of England elementary school before making him join the family workshop at the age of fourteen. At a time when “the fine white sails, and the beautiful sea quite charmed me—I was always wishing I could be a sailor,” Jem one day impulsively signed on as a cabin boy with a Maldon collier, the
Royal Sailor
, a ship on which he eventually completed a full apprenticeship.
Around 1845, again seeking wider pastures, Morrill joined the crew of the
Ramalees
, which was carrying troops to Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania), on the other side of the world. After some local voyaging in the South Seas, he set sail from Sydney in February 1846 to return to England on Captain George Pitkethly’s Dundee-based merchantman, the
Peruvian
, which was following a standard colonial pattern by carrying a cargo of hardwood to China en route for home. Three nights later, caught in heavy seas, the ship hit the Horseshoe Reef, one of a deep-sea chain at the southern end of the Great Barrier.
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When the twenty-two-year-old able seaman woke on the splintered deck at daybreak on February 28, 1846, “a terrible scene presented itself, as far as the eye could reach there were the points of the rocks awash, but no friendly land in view.” Having already lost several men when the cutter and jolly boat were pulverized on the rocks, pious Captain Pitkethly gathered the survivors to pray, and then ordered them to build a raft from masts and spars. Twenty-one surviving “souls,” including several women and children, clambered onto this precarious craft, along with a little keg of water, a few tins of preserved meat, and some brandy. Promising not to eat one another should they run out of food, each agreed to a daily ration of one tablespoon of preserved meat and four measured sips of water.
4
Supplementing this fare with fresh blood and raw meat from the occasional seabird, they drifted for twenty-three days before the older men and the women and children began to die from hunger and thirst. The remaining sailors, who had fishing hooks but no lines, improvised a snare using an oar baited with a freshly severed human leg. By this means they caught and ate several of the voracious sharks that continually circled their raft. When the current eventually crashed them onto the Great Barrier Reef, they could barely drag the raft across the coral into the lagoon.
Two or three days later they beached on the southern point of Cape Cleveland, near modern-day Townsville. Too weak to crawl in search of food and water, several sailors died almost immediately. Four survivors—Morrill, an unnamed cabin boy, and Captain and Mrs. Pitkethly—managed to subsist for a further ten days on rock oysters and rain pools, before they heard Mrs. Pitkethly suddenly cry out one evening, “Oh George, we have come to our last now, here are such a lot of the wild blacks.” Twenty or thirty naked warriors had emerged from the scrub and were staring at them edgily.
5
Morrill braced himself while the warriors prodded him and his three emaciated companions to find out whether they were truly human. Apparently satisfied, the men “took pity on us.” Half a dozen older warriors lay down beside them in a nearby cave; the remainder brought them delicious, nutlike roots to eat. Too weak to join in a celebratory corroboree, Morrill croaked a heartfelt rendition of some lines from a half-remembered hymn, “Light Shining Out of Darkness.”
Prior to moving off to a small nearby camp, some members of an inland clan from Mount Elliot (the Bindal) formally claimed Morrill and the cabin boy, while others from a coastal Cape Cleveland clan adopted the Pitkethlys. One warrior carried the half-dead cabin boy; others supported the three hobbling adults. Once they were at the camp, two or three senior men gently reassured Morrill by pressing their fire-warmed hands against his shivering body.
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A few days later the castaways were moved again, some five miles farther inland to a more permanent camp of around fifty people. Here they were given a
gunyah
(hut) to sleep in and plenty of food and drink. With the onset of the dry season their hosts decided to settle at this place for several months, to stage what Morrill called a “
boree
”: the ritual of initiating young males into manhood undertaken at gatherings of local clans. The rescuers also took the opportunity to perform a succession of corroborees to tell the strange story of the castaways to the incoming clans, who eventually numbered a thousand individuals.
During this period, the four castaways picked up a smattering of Birri-Gubba language and food-gathering practices. It was probably around this time, too, that Morrill was given the name Karkynjib Wombil Moony, after one of the Aboriginal elders. “We spent our time in wandering about with them on their fishing excursions,” he recalled, “and in learning to snare ducks, wild turkeys, geese, and other wild fowls, which I became very expert in after a while.” At the completion of the initiations, when the clans began returning to their own districts, the castaways asked permission to attach themselves to southerly based clans, which were likely to be situated closer to European settlements. For two further years, Morrill thus lived with a clan of Jura, or Gia, people based around Port Denison, before a quarrel induced him to rejoin the Mount Elliot Bindal.
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