FRENCH CASTAWAY WAS TAKEN IN BY ABORIGINALS, THEN KIDNAPPED BY BRITISH SAILORS
During the early years of colonisation there were many ships wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef and there are three well documented accounts of the shipwrecked castaways living with First Nations tribes, this is one of the known stories.
A French cabin-boy named Narcisse Pelletier was abandoned by his captain and crew to die beside a dried up waterhole on Cape York when he was just fourteen years old. He lived for seventeen years with his rescuers near what is now the Lockhart River, and living the full Aboriginal life.
He only left them at gunpoint – the British sailors holding the guns on his adopted Uutaalnganu family thought they were rescuing him. He regarded himself as being kidnapped.
True story accounts