John Wilberforce "Jack" Buckland (1864–1897), also known as "Tin Jack", was a trader who lived in the South Pacific in the late 19th century. He travelled with Robert Louis Stevenson and his stories of life as an island trader became the inspiration for the character of Tommy Hadden in The Wrecker (1892).
Early life
Jack Buckland was born in 1864 in Sydney, the eldest child of William Wilberforce Buckland and Harriet Emmeline Hopkins. His mother was born in Sydney in 1842, the daughter of John Hopkins, a ship chandler who died when she was young. Her father's business partner, John Carr, and his wife Eliza later adopted Harriet in addition to the ship chandler business. Buckland's father was from Wraysbury in England, the son of an auctioneer, William Thomas Buckland. Buckland's father worked as a merchant and shipbroker in Australia and in 1863 married the 21-year-old Harriet Hopkins in Sydney. Buckland was their first child, born in 1864. When he was 9, Buckland's family returned to England, leaving him with the now elderly John and Eliza Carr who adopted him as their son. John Carr was therefore Buckland's stepfather as well as step-grandfather.
The Carr family lived in a house called "Neepsend" in Lavender Bay, North Sydney. Part of this property was later sold and it was from this sale that John Carr made sufficient money to provide Jack with his allowance. John Carr died in 1881 and the money from the property sale was left in a trust from which Jack received an annual allowance. In 1883, now living on his own, Jack visited his parents and siblings living near London in England. Later he returned to Sydney and subsequently worked for Henderson and Macfarlane of Auckland, as a copra trader.
Life of an island trader
From the mid-1880s to about 1891, Buckland was a trader at Nonouti atoll, in Kiribati (at the time known as the Gilbert Islands) and during the 1890s he traded at Niutao and Nanumea in Tuvalu (at the time known as the Ellice Islands). The resident trader who succeeded him on Niutao was Fred Whibley.
Buckland's primary income was £700 a year, paid to him by the trustee of the trust fund established by John Carr. That amount was sufficient to allowed him to live comfortably for part of the year in Sydney. To supplement this income, Buckland worked as a trader in the central Pacific. This was an isolated existence where he was likely to be the only European on a Pacific atoll. As a trader working for a trading company, he bought copra (dried coconut flesh), and sharks fin and sea cucumbers, for sale into Asia, as well as selling islanders tobacco and other European goods.
As a trader, Buckland chose an isolated life on a Pacific atoll rather that being a castaway or beachcomber. Howe (1984) estimated that in 1850 there were over 2,000 beachcombers throughout Polynesia and Micronesia. It was not only shipwrecked sailors forced, by circumstances, into a life of beachcombing, with many choosing to escape from a life of respectability in the Victorian era.
Cruise of the Janet Nicoll
As a respite from the isolated life on a Pacific atoll Jack Buckland would spend time enjoying the high life of Sydney where, in few months, he would dissipate his income. Furnas (1951) describes Jack Buckland as spending "a short period each year in Sydney playing spendthrift on the accumulations of a small funded income and the rest of the year vegetating penniless as a petty trader out in the islands."
In April 1890 he was a passenger on the trading steamer the "Janet Nicoll", which left Sydney for a trading cruise around the central Pacific. Robert Louis Stevenson, his wife Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson, and her son Lloyd Osbourne were also passengers on that voyage. The journal of Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson was published under the title The Cruise of the Janet Nichol. Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson explained the origin of the name ‘Tin Jack’ as being the island equivalent of ‘Mr Jack’.
Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson recounts how Jack Buckland, inadvertently caused a fire on the Janet Nicoll. In Auckland, New Zealand, Jack Buckland purchased ten pound of ‘calcium fire’ (fireworks); cartridges, grease paint, and false nose and a wig for the entertainment of the islanders at Jack's trading station on Nonouti atoll. However, on leaving harbour the ‘calcium fire’, which was promised by the chemist to be "safe as a packet of sugar", spontaneously caught alight causing the fireworks to explode in technicolour flashes endangering the ship – until the crew put out the fire.