Barbara Thompson: Prisoner of the Aboriginal

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 .