"Sammy Cox", "The Wild White Man of Tasmania" 1773
‘Sammy Cox’,, whose real name was Samuel Emanuel Jervis, was the first white man, as far as is known, to live with Aboriginal Australians, and the first European resident of Tasmania. He claimed to be the son of Squire Jervis of Shenstone Park, near Lichfield, England. Born in November, 1773, he was ten years of age when his father fell from a horse and died, leaving him to the care of his uncle, the Squire's brother, Captain John Jervis, who took the lad to sea. In 1789 Jervis's ship, Regent Fox, while on a voyage to the South Seas, put in to the Tasmanian shore in the vicinity of what are now known as the Tamar Heads, and a boat's crew was landed to look for water. Sammy was among the crew. Being afraid that his uncle intended to maroon him on some desert island, so that he could claim title to the Shenstone Park estate, he hid in the bush until the ship was forced to leave without him. He became frightened when he met a party of natives, and hid from them. However, they soon caught him and he became one of their tribe, being treated with great kindness, he lived with them in the Quamby region of Tasmania..
Some twenty-five or twenty-six years later, in the Hadspen district he saw a white man for the first time since deserting ship. He left his Aboriglnal friends to live with a family of settlers named Cox, assuming their surname.
He told his strange story to mostly disbelieving ears. Eventually, after an extraordinarily long life (118 years !) much of it spent as a gardener and odd-jobs man, he died in June, 1891, at the Home for Invalids, Launceston (Tas). He wrote down the main events of his life as a black', and these were incorporated in Henry Button's Flotsam and Jetsam. An investigation of his story, said to have been carried out by a representative of the Jervis family, confirmed the truth of his statements.
Ref: L Norman, Sea Wolves and Bandits (Hobart, 1946) ; Charles Barrett, White Blackfellows (Melbourne 1948).
Source: Charles Gossage: www.centralhighland.com – ‘The Ol Codger’