1. Jack Buckland travelled with Robert Louis Stevenson and his stories of life as an island trader became the inspiration for the character of Tommy Hadden in The Wrecker.
17 Facts About Jack Buckland
1. 2.
Jack Buckland was born in 1864 in Sydney, the eldest child of William Wilberforce Buckland and Harriet Emmeline Hopkins.
3.
Jack Buckland's mother was born in Sydney in 1842, the daughter of John Hopkins, a ship chandler who died when she was young.
4.
Jack Buckland's father worked as a merchant and shipbroker in Australia and in 1863 married the 21-year-old Harriet Hopkins in Sydney.
5.
When he was 9, Jack Buckland's family returned to England, leaving him with the now elderly John and Eliza Carr who adopted him as their son.
6.
John Carr died in 1881 and the money from the property sale was left in a trust from which Jack Buckland received an annual allowance.
7.
In 1883, now living on his own, Jack Buckland visited his parents and siblings living near London in England.
8.
Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson explained the origin of the name 'Tin Jack Buckland' as being the island equivalent of 'Mr Jack Buckland'.
9.
Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson recounts how Jack Buckland, inadvertently caused a fire on the Janet Nicoll.
10.
Jack Buckland is acknowledged by Robert Louis Stevenson, as the inspiration for the character of Tom Hadden in The Wrecker, for which Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne shared the writing.
11.
Jack Buckland receives a dedication in Island Nights' Entertainments a collection of short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1893.
12.
Jack Buckland stayed at Vailima with Robert and Fanny Stevenson in 1894.
13.
Sixty-five years after the publication of The Wrecker, a television series episode of Maverick starring James Garner and Jack Kelly was produced, featuring Errol Flynn-lookalike Patric Knowles as the character based upon Buckland.
14.
Jack Buckland was still at Vailima on 6 February 1894.
15.
Jack Buckland then became the island trader on Nanumea in Tuvalu in about 1895.
16.
Meri Matavaka refused to move to Nanumea, the oral history of the Luaseuta family is that Jack Buckland abandoned Meri Matavaka in Sydney, Australia; her father travelled from Niutao to bring Meri back to Niutao.
17.
Whereupon poor Jack Buckland put a pistol to his head and blew out what brains he possessed.