´óÏó´«Ã½

The first rule of researching any story in an archive is don't get distracted by all the other stuff you see along the way.

Sadly I nearly always fail to abide by rule no.1. And so it was this week when I immersed myself in the local newspapers of the 1870's.

I was looking for any reference to a magnificent example of our heritage (sorry - any detail has to remain under wraps for the moment) but every turn of the delicate original pages left me wanting to find out more about all the other stories I came across.

peace was occasionally disturbed by my gasps of horror. The Victorian journalists thought nothing of revelling in the gory details of executions, murders, train crashes and the like. All the ghastly facts are laid before the readers in evocative and florid language.

But I wanted to share with you an uplifting tale that drew me right into its dusty yellowing pages.

It relates to a rescue by British seafarers of a white man who'd been discovered living as an .

They had called in to an island off and saw that amongst the natives there was someone who was clearly European. All were naked and he conversed with them fluently in local tongue. They lured this man onto a boat and took him away at gunpoint "for his own good".

It eventually turned out he was a Frenchman called Narcisse Pierre Peltier, the son of a shoemaker, who as a cabin-boy was shipwrecked in the Southern oceans.

The French crew abandoned their cargo of 350 Chinese slave labourers to their fate and set off for the Australian mainland. Twelve-year-old Narcisse would have been left behind too but he jumped into the small boat with them.

After many days their rations ran out but they just made it to land where all the adults lapped up the tiny pool of water they found. There was none for the boy who was left to die as they set off by boat once more. When they found civilisation they reported the loss of the ship but made no mention of the cabin boy's fate.

What that cruel crew could not know was that Narcisse was found by aboriginals who rescued him and took him in as their own. For 17 years he lived as a native Australian before the British stumbled upon him and took him back to Somerset.

With ear and nose piercings and decorative scars to his chest, he was a real novelty. He started to remember the French of his birth, but assumed that his real family were now long dead.

He remembered fondly his adopted tribe and how they had universally treated him with kindness. How that contrasted with the selfish disregard of his fellow countrymen.

Quite how the could relate this tale under the headline "17 years amongst savages" I don't understand. Just who were the savages here?

But how uplifting it is that human kindness can be seen to come not from an imposed set of social rules on how to behave, but straight from the heart.