A very good copy of a rare and desirable work. Decades before the likes of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard revolutionised anthropology, this account of Narcisse Pelletier's seventeen years living with Indigenous Australians is a vital document of nigh-on pre-contact ethnography in the guise of a shipwreck account.
Pelletier (1844-1894) was sailing on the Saint-Paul when it was wrecked near Rossell Island off New Guinea in 1858. He sailed the long boat to Cape York where he was rescued by an Uutaalnganu (Pama Malngkana) family and lived with them for the next seventeen years.
"The Uutaalnganu people are commonly known as the 'Night Island people' after an island situated approximately in the middle of their coastal territory. This extends down the coast from the mouth of the Lockhart River at Lloyd Bay, north of Cape Direction, to Friendly Point, just north of Cape Sidmouth" (Anderson).
They are also referred to as Sandbeach people, which as Athol Chase clarifies: "Beach people are 'beach people' not only because they occupied the beach strip in precontact times, but because they are the proper human exploiters of such major marine resources as dugong, turtle, fish and shellfish and the plants and animals of the littoral. They alone are the inheritors of the special knowledge of dugong and turtles, and the bush medicines requires to facilitate capture. They are people who say the proper mode of living for them involves the feel of the seabreezes on their faces, saltwater on their bodies, and the ocean vista before their eyes" (ibid).
This vivd and detailed account of Pelletier's life with them is augmented by the inclusion of four plates of Uutaalnganu music plus another of wooden weapons. The portrait frontispiece also shows his tribal scarification on his chest.
In 1875 the crew of the John Bell, a pearler, discovered him and brought him back to France where his life was once again upended.
Very rare with just a handful of copies located in libraries and none at auction.
Anderson, Stephanie, Pelletier: the Forgotten Castaway of Cape York (Melbourne, 2018) accessed online 10 June, 2025.
