Exhibition: Narcisse Pelletier, a young moss lost in Australia

Narcisse Pelletier was a young sailor from Vendée who was hired on the ‘Le Saint-Paul’ in 1857. He was abandoned on the north-east coast of Australia when the merchant ship sank.
Taken in by the Wanthaalas aboriginal community, he lived for seventeen years completely integrated into this group, until the crew of an English ship ‘rescued’ him by force in 1875 to take him back to France. Back with his family, he got a job as a lighthouse keeper in Saint-Nazaire, then as a harbour worker. He married, but had no children, and died in 1894 at the age of fifty.

Narcisse Pelletier's life is as much a story of romance as it is of tragedy, and it is representative of the way in which Westerners viewed Aboriginal communities in the 19th century, when they were described as ‘savages’.
Initiated by historian Thomas Duranteau and richly illustrated by his drawings and watercolours, this exhibition raises the essential question of respect between cultures, which has been discussed at length at the Musée Hèbre.