The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

by Iain McCalman

  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.

  6

  HEARTLANDS

  The Lost Lives of Karkynjib and Anco

  LONDON 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.1

  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.3

  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 mea
t 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.6

  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.7

  * * *

  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.”8

  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.9

  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.10

  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.”11

  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.”12

  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.”13

  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 primit
ive state.”14

  * * *

  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.15

  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.16

  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.17