Mrs Fraser on the Fatal Shore - Softcover

In 1836,the barque Stirling Castle was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef and the crew and the captain's wife, Mrs Fraser, were cast ashore on the coast of what is now Queensland. Captured by aborigines with cannibalistic tendencies, Captain Fraser and his wife were stripped naked and driven into the bush. Fraser was then murdered and his wife, a lady of genteel upbringing, was tortured and made to perform humiliating tasks as the slave of the tribe. Having given birth in an open boat, her baby was immediately drowned and she was forced instead to mother an aboriginal child 'one of the most deformed and ugly looking brats my eyes ever beheld'. A remarkable rescue by an Irish convict, posing as a 'ghost' of a dead warrior, saved Mrs Fraser whose subsequent misadventures in England provide an intriguing finale to this extraordinary story.

Michael Alexander was educated at Stowe and Sandhurst. He was in the Commandos during the war, was captured behind the German line in North Africa and imprisoned for two-and-a-half years in the notorious Colditz Castle. He wrote about his adventures as a hostage of the Nazis in The Privileged Nightmare. After the war he became Assistant Private Secretary to Sir Alec Douglas-Home and James Callaghan MP, and was Private Secretary to prime minister Margaret Thatcher.