Historic site
Peruvian (1846)
A Dundee barque, owned and sailed by her captain, struck a reef of the Bellona group in the Coral Sea before dawn on 8 March 1846. Twenty-one people drifted for forty-two days on a raft of her masts; seven reached Cape Cleveland, near today's Townsville. Aboriginal people found the last four starving on the shore, nursed them and took them in. About two years later illness killed the apprentice and then the captain, and his wife died four days after him. The able seaman James Morrill lived seventeen years among his adoptive kin before walking up to a Burdekin sheep station in 1863. The wreck was found and burned by a whaler. ==🔴A misprinted latitude later moved it 500 miles south.