James Morrill (20 May 1824 – 30 October 1865) was an English sailor aboard the vessel Peruvian which became shipwrecked off the coast of north-eastern Australia in 1846. He survived a journey in a makeshift raft to the mainland near where the modern city of Townsville is now situated, and was taken in by a local clan of Aboriginal Australians. He adopted their language and customs and lived as a member of their society for 17 years. By the early 1860s, British colonisation had reached the area and Morrill decided to return to the European way of living. Morrill wrote a memoir of his experiences and died soon after in the town of Bowen in 1865. Morrill is regarded as the first white man to have resided permanently in North Queensland and is one of only a few European people to have lived for an extended period completely within traditional Aboriginal culture.
Early life
Morrill was born in 1824 at Heybridge in the English county Essex. His father was a millwright. He left school at the age of 13 to pursue a career as a sailor, obtaining an apprenticeship in a local shipping company. In 1844, Morrill went to London and was induced to sign up to sail aboard the troopship HMS Ramillies which was bound for Australia carrying soldiers of the Royal Artillery and the 11th and 99th Regiments. In December 1845, HMS Ramillies arrived in Sydney where Morrill obtained permission to leave the ship. He decided to continue an adventurous lifestyle and joined the crew of the vessel Peruvian which was to sail to China.
Shipwreck of Peruvian
In February 1846, Peruvian commanded by Captain George Pitkethley departed Sydney with 130 cedar logs for export. On board were 16 officers and crew including Morrill, as well as six passengers including the captain's wife and two other families. Just over a week into the voyage, at around 4 o'clock in the morning, the vessel crashed into a submerged reef near Minerva Shoal in the Coral Sea. The ship was unable to be floated off the rocks and of the two long boats, one was smashed to pieces and the other detached prematurely, floating away with the first mate and a sheep. A raft equipped with a sail was constructed and the remaining 21 people were placed on board with only a few tins of meat and a small keg of water as provisions.
The raft and its occupants set off in an attempt to reach safety, supplementing their meagre rations with rainwater and fish and bird meat. After about 4 weeks adrift in the ocean, the castaways started to die off. During the following days, legs of the dead were used as bait to catch sharks for the consumption of the remaining survivors. Eventually they encountered and sailed through the Great Barrier Reef, and about a week later they made landfall at Cape Cleveland. After 42 days on the raft, only seven people had survived which included Morrill, the captain, the captain's wife, two other crew members, a male passenger and a boy. Despite the survivors being able to construct a camp on the beach and finding water and oysters, the two crew and the passenger soon died.
Inclusion into Aboriginal society
After two weeks onshore, people from the local Cape Cleveland and Mount Elliot Aboriginal clans came to find out who they were. They were given food and water and were assisted in travelling to the nearby main camp of one of clans. Here over the next few days they were introduced to numerous members of local and distant tribes and became the subject of several corroborees. During the following months, Morrill and the other survivors were taught how to gather food, snare wildfowl and were able to speak some of the language.
After a time, a large gathering occurred, which consisted of over a thousand people, some of whom were from tribes a fair distance to the south. Morrill, together with the captain and his wife, decided to join with these people when they returned south. They subsequently lived with a group of Biri Gubba people who resided in the Port Denison area. The boy went to live with a tribe further to the south. After two years, the boy, the captain and his wife had died and Morrill, now the only survivor of the shipwreck, became lonely and returned to live with the clan at Mount Elliot.