SIX BOYS SPENT 15 MONTHS STRANDED ON A DESERTED ISLAND IN 1965, AND THEY ALL SURVIVED
By the time Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke, and Mano were rescued from the remote Tongan island of ‘Ata, the six teenagers had managed to create a community vastly different from the one in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. They built a permanent, continuously-burning fire. They used tree stumps that had been hollowed out to retain rainwater. They used six steel wires, half a coconut shell, and a piece of driftwood to create a makeshift guitar. They cared for a garden and captured wild hens. Until 1966, when an Australian sea captain happened to be passing by the island, they sang to each other and prayed together every day for 15 months.
Before becoming the Tongan castaways, the six boys were all students at St. Andrews, a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the capital and largest city of Tonga. They devised a plan after becoming utterly bored: they would set sail for Fiji or possibly New Zealand, which are both hundreds of miles away from their small Pacific island.
Preparations began, but they were meagre. Since none of the boys had a boat, they chose to "borrow" one from Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all detested. The boys only brought two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts, and a small gas burner. With a light wind blowing overhead, the company boarded the boat as nightfall approached and began to sail across the placid waves. The storm didn't start until later that evening, when it tore the boat's sail, rudder, and anchor rope to pieces.
“We drifted for eight days,” Mano told Rutger Bregman, who wrote a book about the group’s experiences. “Without food. Without water.”
The youngsters eventually touched down on 'Ata, a secluded and deserted island some 100 miles from Nuku'alofa. They demonstrated extraordinary patience, cooperation, and resilience in their will to live there. They drank seabird blood to quench their thirst when there was insufficient water. They swiftly put an end to any arguments or enforced time-outs. The other lads used sticks and leaves to treat Stephen's broken leg after he slid one day, and amazingly, he recovered.
“We [were] not happy where we [were],” Mano said in a 2020 interview with the Guardian. “If you were somewhere, you didn’t know where it was, and also you did not see any part of your family, I don’t think you’d be happy to be there.”
Fifteen months passed like this, and by then, funerals had already been held for the missing boys. But on September 11, 1966, everything had finally changed. As he passed the cliffs of 'Ata,' Australian sea captain Peter Warner saw areas of scorched grass.
“In the tropics, it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he explained to Bregman.
Warner decided to scope it out, only to discover a boy, naked with hair down to his shoulders, swimming toward the boat. The other five boys from the group quickly followed, screaming with joy and relief. With his two-way radio, Warner called in to Nuku‘alofa, announcing he’d come across six boys. Twenty minutes later, a tearful response arrived from the other end: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”
Upon their return to Tonga, the boys were arrested: Uhila, whose boat the boys had stolen over a year earlier, had pressed charges. Warner, fortunately, had a plan, too. In order to secure the six boys' release, he sold the Australian rights to the group's narrative and used the proceeds to purchase a new boat for Uhila. The lads were then also engaged by Warner as crew members on his new fishing boat, which would let them see a world other than Tonga, which was their initial goal when they first set out all those months ago.
Though their stories are harrowing, these Tongan castaways and their remarkable teamwork prove that Golding’s Lord of the Flies is less true to life than we might think at first.
