Castaway: The Extraordinary Survival Story of Narcisse Pelletier, on Cape York in 1858 by Robert Macklin

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges, with back cover left tail corner now protected with book tape. Tear to tail of last page is protected with book tape. Minor marks inside back cover. Body text and binding are still very good.

Full title: Castaway: The Extraordinary Survival Story of Narcisse Pelletier, a Young French Cabin Boy Shipwrecked on Cape York in 1858

In 1858, fourteen-year-old French cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier was aboard the trader Saint-Paul when it was wrecked off the eastern tip of New Guinea. Scrambling into a longboat, Narcisse and the other survivors crossed almost 1000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of Far North Queensland. If not for the local Aboriginal people, Narcisse would have perished.

For seventeen years, he lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their Uutaalnganu world. Then, in 1875, his life was turned upside down once again.

Drawing on firsthand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France, as well as other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and on the spread of European settlement in Queensland and the brutal frontier wars that followed, Robert Macklin weaves an unforgettable tale of a young man caught between two cultures in a time of transformation and upheaval. (back cover)