James Morrill (castaway)

Summary

James Morrill 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 the site of the modern city of Townsville 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.