When Captain Joseph Frazer rescued Narcisse Pelletier from Aboriginal people in 1875, it was not the first time a white captive had been recovered from Australia’s bushmen. A quarter of a century earlier, sailors from a British naval vessel had carried out a similar rescue, this time of a white woman shipwrecked in the Torres Strait, who had been compelled to live among Aboriginal people as the wife of one of their men. Through Barbara Thompson’s story, we glimpse not only an extraordinary personal ordeal, but also the everyday realities of Aboriginal life as observed by someone who lived within it.
HMS Rattlesnake, the ship that rescued Barbara Thompson. Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
Barbara Thompson was born Barbara Crawford in Dundee, Scotland, in the late 1820s. In 1837, her father, a tinsmith by trade, took his family to New South Wales where he hoped to start a new life for himself and his children in Sydney. At some point, Barbara left the family home in Pyrmont, married a man named William Thompson and started living in Moreton Bay.
In 1845, William Thompson learned that a ship named Clarence filled with whale oil had run aground on Bampton Shoals, over 1,000 km away in the Coral Sea. Thompson thought that he could make some easy money if he could locate the shipwreck and retrieve as many barrels of oil as possible.
The salvage rights to Clarence had already been sold to a man named Cole, who dispatched the schooner Elizabeth, under the command of Captain Riley, to Bampton Shoals to make good on his investment. However, a ferocious storm swept the Elizabeth from her moorings and out to sea while the crew was aboard the Clarence. After being stranded on the stricken ship for six weeks, Captain Riley and his men took a longboat and set sail for Moreton Bay. The passage took them 37 gruelling days.
At Moreton Bay, Captain Riley sold the longboat to William Thompson, who named the three-ton cutter-rigged vessel America. The salvage rights to the Clarence and her cargo, likely still belonged to Cole. Despite that, Thompson set sail from Moreton Bay intending to reach the wreck site, fill his hold with the Clarence’s whale oil before continuing through Torres Strait and on to Port Essington with his spoils.
Fate, however, had different plans. Not only was Thompson unable to find the Clarence or even Bampton Shoals, for that matter, he soon ran out of provisions, forcing him to abandon the search and make for Port Essington via Torres Strait.
While trying to clear the tip of Cape York, the America struck a reef off the eastern end of Prince of Wales Island and sank. Thompson drowned but Barbara was rescued by the Islanders.
One of her captors, a man named Boroto, claimed Barbara as his wife, almost certainly against her wishes. Although she appears to have been treated well, she was forbidden from making contact with any of the many ships that passed through the Torres Strait each year, a restriction that effectively made her a prisoner. An elder of the group declared that Barbara was the reincarnation of his deceased daughter, Giaom, a belief that secured her place within the community. In her honour, she was renamed Giaom.
Giaom, as she was now known, lived among the Kaurareg for the next four years. She learned their language, customs, and way of life, sharing in both their hardships and their moments of ease, and seems to have been generally well liked. Yet life with the Kaurareg would have posed formidable challenges for any white person of the era.
Barbara never abandoned the hope of returning to her former life, but escape was difficult. She was constantly in the company of other women, who would almost certainly have alerted the men had she attempted to flee. After several years, however, an opportunity finally presented itself.
In October 1849, Barbara learned from a friend that a ship had anchored near the tip of Cape York. Determined to leave the Kaurareg behind, she told the women with whom she lived that she wished only to meet the white men and shake their hands. Reassured by this explanation, they accompanied her across to the mainland. When her husband, Boroto, discovered her intentions, he and several companions set out in pursuit.
On 16 October, Barbara Thompson and the women with her encountered a party of sailors from the British survey ship HMS Rattlesnake. Naked except for a fringe of leaves tied about her waist, Barbara went unrecognized as a white woman. Her skin, darkened and blistered by years of exposure to the tropical sun, made her indistinguishable from the Aboriginal women around her. The sailors passed her by without a second glance. Only then did Barbara cry out, “I am a white woman. Why do you leave me?”
HMS Rattlesnake. Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
Barbara pleaded the startled sailors to take her with them. The sailors gave her a shirt to cover herself and took her to the Captain who listened to her story. When Boroto came alongside in a canoe and demand that she be returned to him, Captain Owen Stanley replied that the choice to stay or go was hers alone to make.
John MacGillivray, the ship’s 26-year-old naturalist, recorded the incident in his diary which was later published as Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake. MacGillivray wrote:
Asked by Captain Stanley whether she preferred remaining with us to accompanying the natives back, she was so agitated, making use of scraps of English with Kowrarega language, and then, not understood, the poor creature blushed all over, and beat her forehead with her hand, as if to assist in collecting her thoughts.
At length she found words: “Sir, I am a Christian and would rather go back to my own friends”.
Boroto tried to lure his wife to go back to him, but when she refused, he grew furious and threatened to kill her.
During the voyage back aboard HMS Rattlesnake, Barbara spoke at length with the ship’s naturalist, John MacGillivray, describing the customs, beliefs, and language of the Kaurareg. Her account of relations between the Islanders and the mainland Aboriginal people was of great interest to the naturalist.
HMS Rattlesnake arrived back in England in 1850. After her rescue, she returned to mainland Australia and reunited with her parents in Sydney. She is said to have remarried, and died in 1916, aged 85.
References:
# Four Years in Torres Strait: The Extraordinary Tale of Barbara Thompson. Tales from the Quarterdeck
# The Scot who was a real-life Robinson Crusoe. Scottish Field Magazine
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