It’s the real-life ROBINSON CRUSOE
Revealed in a new book, the saga of the Victorian man who forced his family to live on a deserted Pacific island – for 35 years!
THE lure of life-changing fortune is a heady thing, it can bring out determination and sheer bloody mindedness in people. Thomas Bell, a doctor’s son, was such a man. He hatched a plan to strike gold and become the king of his own country.
However, his madcap scheme ended in catastrophe when he was marooned, with his wife and six children, on a Pacific island – where they stayed for 35 years.
The fact they all survived was due not so much to Thomas’s stubbornness as to the resilience of his wife, Frederica.
This story of a real-life Robinson Crusoe, dating from Victorian times, is a castaway tale so extreme that it seems like fiction.
The reason it has come to light now is because it was unearthed by author Lydia Syson, who was entranced by the stories told by her husband’s great-aunt, who was descended from the Bells, and she has used it as the basis for a novel.
The remarkable story begins in 1865 when Frederica, 21, the daughter of a wealthy London silk merchant, left Britain with the rest of her family to begin a new life in New Zealand.
Within a year, she had met and married the charismatic Thomas Bell, six years her senior and full of impractical schemes for fortune-hunting.
Educated at a private school in Yorkshire, he had run away aged 16 to see the world. Plans to join the Australian gold rush came to nothing. As did his dreams of sheep farming.
Ever loyal, Frederica stuck by him, as their family grew: Hettie, then Bessie, Mary, Tom, Harry and Jack.
It was after their sixth child was born that Thomas heard sailors’ tales about Sunday Island – a volcanic rock halfway between New Zealand and Tonga, where the soil was said to be so rich that any plant would grow overnight.
And because no humans had ever lived there, the wild animals were also ‘as tame as kittens’.
Thomas Bell dreamed that this paradise offered him the chance to be monarch of all he could see and where be could begin his own dynasty. Nothing Frederica said could dissuade him. Dutifully, she prepared their children for a voyage.
THOMAS found a schooner captain named McKenzie and somehow found the money – £200 (about €28,000 today) – to drop them on the Pacific island, one of the Kermadec chain, in 1878.
However, the unscrupulous captain dumped the family ashore, leaving them with boxes of rotting supplies. Without food or shelter, they faced immediate starvation.
Thus maltreated, it was inevitable that McKenzie would renege on his promise to return and collect them after a couple of months, if they decided not to stay.
And as for Sunday Island there was no sign of the promised cornucopia of fruit trees, edible plants and wildlife of which Thomas Bell had heard.
The fact is the Bells had landed on a stretch of beach hemmed by high cliffs. The little harbour was a deathtrap.
To survive the first few nights, the family built a shelter in the lee of the cliffs. It was cold and damp, but at least it was somewhere to tend a fire and huddle at night.
Without lines or bait, fishing was impossible. But the children successfully foraged limpets, as big as dinner plates, which they found on the rocks at low tide. Among the trees, they found edible roots and a few citrus fruits. They had just enough to subsist. Already they had given up hope of ever seeing McKenzie again. And as the days passed with no sign of any ship on the horizon, they realised it might be years before they were rescued... if ever.
Bell, always reckless, decided that if they couldn’t escape the cove by sea, they would have to scale the cliffs. And so, with his two oldest daughters, aged about nine and 11, he began to climb.
The girls’ nimble feet and agile hands meant they could cling to the rock face, 100ft above the stony beach, and reach eggs in nests that they wrapped in their dresses before climbing down. Scrambling over the top of the cliffs, Thomas discovered something even better: wild goats — descended from animals brought earlier in the century by whalers.
With milk from the goats, fresh water from a spring and a sturdy hut that the family had built from sticks and thatched with palm leaves, the Bells were able to weather their first stormy season.
But they had little defence against another of the invaders brought by man: rats. The rodents ate their stores, tore through the walls of their shelter, and even ran over their faces as they slept.
In desperation, the family abandoned their hut and climbed the cliffs in search of somewhere the rats could not reach. And then, on the other side of Sunday Island, they began again.
Thanks to Frederica’s ceaseless vigilance, and her selfless determination to see her children fed and clothed, the family all survived.
After 16 months on Sunday Island, the Bells saw a ship on the horizon, an American whaler, and signalled for help.
The captain sent provisions ashore but refused to rescue them – saying that he had neither room nor time.
It would be almost another year before a passing schooner, called the Sissy, spotted their campfire and sent a boat to investigate. The Sissy had room for just one passenger. Bell duly left his family to seek help in New Zealand, leaving Frederica and the children to fend for themselves.
But instead of returning with a rescue ship, he brought back supplies for them to continue their solitary Crusoe-style life on Sunday – including a sewing machine for Frederica.
He had decided unilaterally that the family were staying put on the island.
Over the next decade, the couple had five more children. One died in infancy but the others thrived: Roy, Freda, Ada and William.
Over the years, they had regular visits from passing ships, and a tutor stayed for a time to help the children with their reading.
‘The tales I heard of that Robinson Crusoe existence enchanted me,’ says novelist Lydia Syson. ‘However much I found out, I wanted to learn more.’ She managed to visit the island, now known as Raoul Island, thanks to a scientific expedition organised by The Pew Trusts.
‘My book is inspired by their story, but it isn’t factual history,’ she explains. ‘The Bells kept no journals or diaries – they were too busy surviving.’
As for Thomas and Frederica Bell and their desert island brood, after 35 years, they abandoned it in 1913. Perhaps not surprisingly, the family that had weathered so much together could not withstand this final blow: Thomas left Frederica to wander New Zealand, dying aged 90 in 1928.
For her part, Frederica lived to be 85 . . . hoping till the end of her days to return to Sunday Island.
LYDIA SYSON’S novel, Mr Peacock’s Possessions, based on the story of the Bell family, is published by Bonnier Zaffre at €18.99 (easons.com).