Castaway - Robert Macklin Audiobook

Written by Robert Macklin
Read by Michael Carman
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Castaway
By: Robert Macklin
Narrated by: Michael Carman
Release date
25-06-2019
Language
English
Format
Unabridged Audiobook
Length
9 hrs and 13 mins
Publisher
Hachette Australia
Categories
Biographies & Memoirs

In 1858, 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of Bordeaux wine, they stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there they set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo.

Around the eastern tip of New Guinea, however, the ship became engulfed in fog, struck reefs and ran aground.

Scrambling aboard a longboat, the survivors undertook a perilous voyage, crossing almost 1,000 kilometres of the Coral Sea before reaching the shores of the Daintree region in far north Queensland, where, abandoned by his shipmates and left for dead, Narcisse was rescued by the local Aboriginal people. For 17 years he lived with them, growing to manhood and participating fully in their world - until in 1875 he was discovered by the crew of a pearling lugger and wrenched from his Aboriginal family.

Taken back to his ‘real’ life in France, he became a lighthouse keeper, married and had another family, all the while dreaming of what he had left behind….

Drawing from firsthand interviews with Narcisse after his return to France and other contemporary accounts of exploration and survival, and documenting 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.

©2019 Robert Macklin (P)2019 Hachette Australia Pty Ltd