In 1965 in one of the most remote locations on earth six teenagers were enduring a school day much like any other boys their age. Well, sort of. Natives of Tongatapu, the main island of the Kingdom of Tonga – not only were they trapped on an itty-bitty idyll in the blue abyss, they were equally trapped in their strict Catholic boarding school.
It was a horrid place run by nasty old nuns who loved nothing more than to hit pupils over the head with Bibles. As any feisty fifteen-year-old would, one day, sick of prayers and Latin they decided to run away. Come lunchtime the six-strong gang had gathered on the beach and “borrowed” a boat from a grumpy fisherman whom they had a particular disdain for.
Their plan? To somehow navigate their tiny vessel to Fiji to start a new life, hopefully somewhere with less bastard nuns knocking around. They packed some bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner.
Amazingly not one of the teens thought to pack a map or compass, evidently fancying themselves as little Marco Polos. Now, I don’t know if you’ve recently checked the distance between Tonga and Fiji – I know it’s been a busy year – but let me remind you, it’s about 474 miles! So yeah, sans map or compass, I don’t think much of their chances in this case.
To make matters worse they were all exhausted, from late-night study sessions and early starts. So, only a few klicks out from land, they dropped anchor for the evening and before they knew it, the gentle rocking of the boat sent them all to sleep. When they awoke the weather had turned, and the violent waves snapped the boat’s sail and rudder clean off, leaving the group to drift helplessly for eight days, without food or water.
They tried catching fish. They tried collecting rainwater in their hollowed-out coconut shells, allowing everyone just one sip in the morning and another in the evening. With their boat rapidly falling apart it was only a matter of time before they sank.
But mercifully, on the ninth day, they saw it: a glimpse of a small, deserted island, only half a mile squared, with steep cliffs, rocky beaches and a low-lying coral reef. They desperately swam ashore, using planks from the boat for buoyancy. Exhausted, starving, thirsty, they collapsed onto the island: little did they know it at the time, but here these naive teens would spend their next 15 months.
The boys had drifted an astonishing 200 miles until they eventually reached the island of ‘Ata. Now ‘Ata was beautiful, but also completely barren: it had been uninhabited since 1863, after slavers evacuated it. The incredible tale of these six school boys was only recently discovered by a Dutch author and historian called Rutger Bregman whilst researching for his own book, called Humankind: A Hopeful History.
Bregman tracked down and interviewed the survivors, and the captain who found them: Peter Warner. Now Peter was the youngest son of one of the richest men in Australia, Arthur Warner. Back in the 1930s Arthur Warner ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which manufactured radios – as the main source of home entertainment, that was a pretty big deal back then.
Poor old Peter was under a lot of pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps. But Peter, much like the Tongan boys, wasn’t great at the whole work thing, and so apparently, like all teenage boys seemed to do back then, ran away to sea in search of adventure. He spent the next few years sailing all over the world, visiting Hong Kong, Stockholm, Shanghai and St.
Petersburg, an extended gap year, if you will. He promised his dad he would learn something sensible like accounting, and although it’s not exactly clear how he spent his time whilst travelling, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t bean counting – more like beer counting. After Peter’s 5 year long holiday he finally decided to return home, but still went on frequent fishing trips for a taste of freedom.
In the winter of 1966 he took a trip to Tonga, and on his way home made a little detour. When, lo and behold, what should he stumble upon but the little old isle of ‘Ata. However, as Peter passed the island, he noticed something odd.
Through his binoculars he could see burnt patches on the cliffs, and thought this was strange because it was unusual for forest fires to start spontaneously in this humid part of the world. Suddenly, he saw a boy emerge from the bushes, looking full on Rambo, except probably skinnier. He was naked, with hair down to his shoulders and covered in mud.
The boy jumped into the water, and started swimming towards his boat. At this point Peter got a bit worried. At the time criminals were sometimes marooned on desert islands as punishment, and so he wasn’t sure if things were actually about to go full on Rambo, or if he was about to become somebody’s dinner.
Instead, a scraggly but well-spoken kid came on board, and said, in perfect English: “My name is Stephen. There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months. ” Peter still thought better safe than sorry, and so radioed back to the capital.
The operator confirmed he had indeed found the lost boys, who’d been presumed dead for over a year. The families had even held funerals for their missing sons, assuming they’d drowned at sea. Captain Warner and Stephen went ashore to collect the other boys, and Peter was shocked at what he discovered.
Not only had the boys managed to survive on the island, but they had actually thrived. Even in the sixties most teenagers would have been lost without spam and mostly black and white television, but these were not ordinary teenagers. Growing up on tropical Tonga they possessed skills more suited to surviving on a small island.
Warner wrote in his memoirs that “the boys had set up a small commune with a food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gym with weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade, and much determination. ” I’m not sure what’s more impressive, the fact they had built a badminton court or that they had any time to play, given they seemed to be pretty darn busy. The six boys had split up into teams of two, drawing up a strict rota for garden, kitchen and guard duty, and so were working virtually all day long.
It would be easy for a bunch of teenagers to bicker and whine all the time, but the boys had sussed it out - if they ever started to argue, they had a strict ‘time-out policy’, where they would spend four hours alone to cool off. They kept their spirits up by singing and praying, and one of the boys even managed to make a guitar from a bit of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires taken from the boat (I told you they were nifty). They survived by eating fish, coconuts, birds and bird-eggs, and even drank the blood of the animals for extra nutrients.
Three months in, they also discovered the ruins of a village from when the island had been inhabited, and found bananas, chickens and wild taro, an edible plant with giant, spinach-like leaves. It wasn’t all smooth-sailing though. They spent months building a raft only for it to be smashed to pieces by waves crashing over the coral reef.
One of the boys also slipped off a cliff and broke his leg. By some miracle the other boys managed to clamber down the cliff and bring him back up, where they set his legs using sticks and leaves, but he was unable to work for several months. What’s even more remarkable though is what happened after they got off the island.
Peter took the boys back to Tonga, and just as they were coming into the harbour, a police boat arrived. Were they coming to reward Captain Warner, or safely deliver the boys to their families? Nope.
They had arrived to arrest the boys for “borrowing” the grumpy old man’s boat fifteen months earlier. Turns out grumpy old men don’t just like to shout and wave their walking sticks; they also like to press charges. The boys were thrown in jail, and at this point, may well have been wishing they were back on the island, where they had more space and probably better food.
Peter had a plan though. He knew that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood material, and he could make some money by selling the rights to the story. And that’s exactly what he did, using his family’s connections to flog them to one of the biggest TV channels in Australia.
Peter paid the grumpy old man back, and got the boys released as long as they agreed to co-operate with the movie. The King of Tonga also rewarded Warner with the right to trap lobsters and start a fishing business in the local waters. Warner used his new privilege to hire the boys to crew his fishing boat (although you would’ve thought they might want to spend some time at home for a change).
It was a win-win situation; Peter didn’t have to go back to boring old accounting, and the boys didn’t have to go back to boring old boarding school. 54 years later, this story has made headlines all over the world, and the boys have since been dubbed ‘The Real Lord Of The Flies. ’ Now, in case you haven’t read Lord of the Flies, or like the Tongan boys, prefered to piss off to Fiji rather than study, let me give you a quick recap.
The book was written by William Golding in 1954, and tells the story of a group of British schoolboys who are in a plane crash, and end up stranded on an uninhabited island. At first they are super excited because, you know, no adults, but soon their tale takes a dark turn. They fight over who is going to be leader, they struggle to keep the signal fire going, and start to become frightened of a mysterious monster in the jungle, which they call the ‘beast.
’ Some of the boys become obsessed with hunting, and think that if they sacrifice pigs as tributes to the ‘beast’, it’ll leave them alone. After a couple of failed attempts they do eventually manage to kill a pig, and hold a celebration, where they go full on tribal. They paint their faces and dance around the fire whilst chanting “Kill the pig!
Cut its throat! Spill her blood! ” - which is pretty creepy for a bunch of seven year olds.
The problem is they get so carried away pretending to be savages that they actually become savages - in the dark they become so hysterical they accidentally mistake one of the other boys, Simon, for the beast, and beat him before literally ripping him apart limb from limb. Did I mention this is a children’s book? Things only get worse from there.
Civil war breaks out and one of the factions kills another boy, Piggy, by squishing him under a boulder. Pretty gruesome, but in boarding school they probably call that character building. They let the fire run rampant, almost burning the whole island down, and they are just ready to kill another boy, Ralph, when they are finally saved by a British navy officer who saw the fire from afar.
The officer comes up to them and simply says “I should have thought a pack of British boys would have put up a better show than that. ” Quite. Now this story is often used as a metaphor for the human condition, a visceral argument for the innately evil nature of human beings.
To be fair to Golding, this was just after World War Two and the Holocaust, during which he served as a Lieutenant aboard a Royal Navy destroyer involved in sinking the Bismark, so he’d seen, first hand, how wicked human beings could be to one other. He was also a schoolteacher, but if that’s how he thought his pupils behaved in their spare time, you really have to wonder what the hell he was teaching. The thing is though, the story of the Tongan boys was nothing like the book, and so perhaps it’s unfair to call them ‘the real Lord of the Flies’ – they were so much better than that.
They didn’t kill each other, quite the opposite- they were actually kind to each other. What happened on ‘Ata was not about survival of the fittest, but survival of the friendliest. But how did such a hopeful, heart-warming story go unheard of for so long?
It’s not as if people aren’t interested in stories about desert island survival – think about Lost, Shipwrecked, Castaway, or books like Robinson Crusoe. Well, Bregman, the historian who wrote about the Tongan boys for his book, has one theory – that people are simply not that interested in stories with happy endings. Bregman argues that stories with pleasant messages are overlooked in favour of stories about conflict and trauma, which isn’t hard to believe when you look at the daily news.
Newspapers and TV broadcasts are filled with disaster, corruption and incompetence – it’s all rather depressing. Mind you, if the news reported every time a train doesn’t explode, it’d take longer than your morning coffee to get through the headlines. Science says there's a good reason for all this doom and gloom – humans are fundamentally wired with a negativity bias.
I’ve covered why this is on the channel not too long ago, but in short, evolution has programmed our brains to always favour negative events. That’s why it’s so important to celebrate stories like these though. They provide hope in humanity, which is increasingly rare in these strange and uncertain times.
Despite the pessimism peddled by Golding in Lord of The Flies, I like to believe that when the chips are down, most people are hard-wired to help rather than harm each other. And those brave Tongan boys give me some hope that may just be true. Thanks for watching.
