The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (20 page)

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Back in the bustling fishing and trading port of Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie, Narcisse Pelletier, too, had refused to follow his father’s profession, preferring the more exotic maritime traditions of his mother’s family to the tedium of working as a village shoemaker. After an even sparser schooling than Morrill’s, he made his first sea voyage at the age of eight on a boat owned by his uncle. At thirteen, having undertaken three further voyages as a cabin boy, he was badly wounded by the first mate of the merchantman
Reine des Mers
. Whether there was a sexual element to this attack remains unknown, but it is possible: Pelletier was much later diagnosed with “venereal testicles.”
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Departing the ship at Marseille, he joined the merchantman
Saint-Paul
under the command of Captain Emmanuel Pinard, who was engaged in the same Asia–Australia trade as Pitkethly. After carrying French wine to Bombay, the
Saint-Paul
called at Hong Kong around August 1858 to load a human cargo of 317 Chinese laborers bound for the New South Wales goldfields. Having skimped on rations for the long journey, Pinard decided to risk a dangerous shortcut between New Guinea and the Great Barrier Reef. Caught in a storm, the ship hit a coral reef off Rossel Island in the Louisiade Archipelago, 125 miles southeast of New Guinea.
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Before their ship broke up, the crew and passengers managed to reach a tiny waterless strip of rock and guano—presumably the inspiration for de Rougemont’s fictive marooning. Across a shallow strait stood the picturesque wooded island of Rossel, inhabited by Melanesian tribesmen. A small contingent of sailors who waded across to obtain fresh water were first welcomed but then later attacked with arrows, clubs, and stones. Many of the sailors were killed, but the fourteen-year-old cabin boy Pelletier managed to escape, nursing a severe head wound.

After repelling a further onslaught, the captain and eight or so crewmen secretly decided to sail the longboat to Australia for help, leaving their Chinese passengers on the island with rifles and a few provisions. Guessing their plan, Pelletier managed to swim out and intercept the longboat as it was leaving. Had he not done so, he, too, would have been killed and eaten, along with the bulk of the marooned Chinese.
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For the next twelve days the longboat drifted in light winds and scorching heat. The crew survived by eating a few seabirds, drinking their own urine, and catching occasional mouthfuls of rainwater in their boots. Weaving their way through a Reef channel, they eventually made landfall somewhere near Cape Direction. Here they found a native well, which the adult sailors drank dry. While waiting for the water to replenish, Pelletier fell asleep, returning later to the beach to find the longboat gone. Near dead from blood loss, starvation, and thirst, he woke the next morning to glimpse three naked black women scurrying into the bush. Half an hour later, he faced two spear-carrying Aboriginal warriors, one of them “horrible to behold.”
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A Nantes scholar and medical man called Constant Merland, who later told Pelletier’s story in a French publication, asked readers to imagine the cabin boy’s plight, alone on the wild coast of “Endeavour Land” (Cape York Peninsula): “We can understand the anguish he must have felt when we reflect on the scenario he had before him. To die of hunger and thirst, to become the prey of fierce beasts or to be eaten by the savages, such were the dreadful alternatives that seemed to be in store for the poor child.”
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Facing the two warriors, the wounded boy held out a small tin cup and a handkerchief as overtures of goodwill. The men in turn held out their hands in reassurance, offered him water and fruit, and supported him to where their wives were seated around a fire. Falling into an exhausted sleep, Pelletier woke the next morning to find that they, too, had gone.

Despairing at having again been abandoned, the boy was overcome with joy when the warriors suddenly reappeared, carrying breakfast. “[H]e and the two men eagerly rushed to greet each other,” a reunion capped by his reciprocal gift of some ship’s blankets that produced “shouts of joy and … the most vigorous displays of friendship and affection.” This bond was to prove permanent: one of the two warriors, Maademan, having no children, decided to adopt the boy. He called him by a name that Constant Merland transcribed as “Amglo” or “Anco.”
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Pelletier was taken to a camp of thirty to fifty individuals, the temporary headquarters of a small maritime clan of Wanthaala people who spoke the Uutaalnganu language—the same group whose members had in 1843 killed a man in Joseph Beete Jukes’s survey party at Cape Direction. Here Anco was introduced to his future kin and companions, and “little by little … he took on all the ways of the people with whom he was living. After a certain time all that distinguished him from them was the color of his skin and the shirt and trousers which covered his body. It was not long before this last feature disappeared … So there he was, he, too, in the primitive state.”
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Despite both shipwrecked boys being rescued within the Reef region, the estates of their clans were 620 miles apart. Morrill roamed, fished, and hunted very widely around the Burdekin and Herbert rivers region, but his primary clan was located inland, eighteen to thirty miles southwest of modern-day Townsville, around Mount Elliot. This heartland was rich and varied, a mix of steep mountainsides and deep ravines studded with patches of high-growing open eucalyptus forest and dense lower reaches of rainforest, all of it intersected by fast-running streams that fed into freshwater lagoons. During the dry season, Morrill also spent periods camped at his clan’s regular fishing spots on the Burdekin River and among the Cape Cleveland coastal swamps. In between these two zones of mountain and coast, he hunted on stretches of grassy open plain, created, as the explorer Augustus Gregory observed in 1856, by the Aborigines’ regular firing of scrubby undergrowth in order to promote grasses on which kangaroo and wallaby would feed.
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Such biodiversity meant abundant food resources in both dry and wet seasons, despite inevitable periods of drought and cyclone. Morrill was particularly proud of his skill in weaving and setting string snares and wild flax nets for capturing geese, wild fowl, and duck, as well as fish and wallaby. His published memoir also mentions collecting breadfruit, procuring honey from the tree hives of native bees, and, in his early years, digging regularly for yams and roots. He describes the small children of the clan “setting roots” in the swamps, presumably so they would sprout the following season—surely a mode of farming by anyone’s standards.
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His diet also encompassed shark, alligator, shrimp, shellfish, kangaroo, rat, snake, grubs, snails, pigeon, and turkey. On top of all this protein, his vegetable intake included three “delicious” root staples, one mountainous, the others scrub-based; two small, turniplike roots that grew in open grass; a leafy riverbank creeper; another, smaller creeper with a turniplike root; a blue-flowered creeper which ran among grass; “and many more or less like them.” Along with breadfruit, common fruits included a native plum; blue, white, and red native currants; a wild banana; a wild apple; and a red and a black fig.
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Even so, managing this habitat was not for the fainthearted, as is suggested by the fact that Morrill’s three fellow castaways died from natural causes within a few years of their adoption. Morrill was burly and strong, like “the fine race of people” that adopted him. Still, he was unable to avoid being bitten by a crocodile, which damaged his knee permanently, and by a whip snake, which caused him to swell up for several days. These, he said, were commonplace occurrences: he’d seen “dozens” of natives taken by saltwater and freshwater crocodiles, or bitten by venomous snakes, though he didn’t mention whether his Bindal and Jura companions shared his affliction of acute rheumatism, the result of lying for long periods on hard wet surfaces. When he first returned to the European world, Morrill was described as having “holes in his forehead, arms and body, and marks of sores and scurvy.”
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Pelletier’s “country,” a coastal estate, was situated halfway along the Cape York Peninsula, not far from the modern Aboriginal settlement of Lockhart River, a hotter, wetter, and more isolated region than Morrill’s. This area, within which Pelletier knew every rock, tree, and bush, was for him also animated by the “mythic charter” of the clan’s spiritual origins. Known today as Sandbeach country, it consisted of a belt of white, sandy, dune-filled coastline, riverine mangroves, and fringing scrub. North to south it extended about seven miles, then twenty-five miles eastward across the sea to the edge of the Barrier Reef, and another six miles or so inland through scrub and grassland to the foothills of a rainforested mountain chain.
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Beyond this small family estate, the larger influence of Uutaalnganu-speaking peoples probably stretched for some forty-odd miles, from Lloyd Bay at the mouth of the Lockhart River to Cape Sidmouth in the south. At its midpoint lay a small, resource-rich, and sacred offshore cay called Night Island.

Modern anthropological authority Athol Chase has called this region “possibly one of the richest and most varied environments for hunter gatherers anywhere in the world.” Pelletier described to Constant Merland a way of life that included hunting on land, often with the aid of dogs and nets, for snakes, crocodiles, lizards, echidnas, parrots, cockatoos, wild fowl, pigeons, cassowaries, and emus. Women and children of the clan developed specialized skills in collecting eggs of all kinds, including those of megapodes, turtles, and crocodiles. They also gathered some sixty or seventy fruits in different seasons, greens, yams, edible mangroves, and a dozen or so other vegetable staples, as well as a large range of estuarine and reef shellfish.
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Armes en bois
by Narcisse Pelletier. In
Dix-sept ans chez les sauvages: Narcisse Pelletier
by Constant Merland, 1876
(Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

A Sandbeach man and canoe in the 1930s
(Lockhart Images 1930, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

Firing the scrub was the method male hunters favored to drive animals into ambushes, and entice them to graze on freshly cleared and sprouted grasslands. On this subject, even Merland, who shared the opinion of most Europeans that Aboriginal people lacked any concept of cultivating or managing crops, made a significant exception: “unless from the agricultural viewpoint, we wish to consider the care the savages take in firing the woods where the yams grow so that the tubers of these plants develop more extensively and their crop is more plentiful.” He was describing what Australian ecologists now call firestick farming.
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Yet for Wanthaala menfolk like Anco, all of this was subsidiary to hunting and fishing in the Barrier Reef lagoon. They paddled as far as twenty-five miles out to sea in small outrigger canoes to harpoon the clan’s most prized foodstuffs: huge, shy dugong, four species of turtle, some fourteen species of ray, and a variety of large meaty fish like rockfish and grouper. Such activities were viewed as the most dangerous, skillful, and desirable of all male pursuits. Thanks to being a
pama watayichi
, or dugong man, Anco became “quite a personage in his tribe.” He owned his own boat, was a famed manufacturer of ropes, harpoons, spears, and spear throwers, and probably worked as a skilled shipbuilder. Certainly he impressed Merland with his account of how the Wanthaala built seagoing craft by felling trees, cutting planks, and hollowing out logs with saws and blades made by grinding the edges of shells and stones.
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Aside from the threats posed by sharks and saltwater crocodiles, sudden storms made these craft vulnerable to capsizing, something that happened to Anco and his inseparable “cousin” Sassy when hunting green turtle after dark. Both were strong swimmers, but had to spend harrowing hours clinging to their detached outrigger floats until a lull in the storm enabled them to make it to the beach, where the community waited with lighted torches.
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