Australian rescued six Tongan schoolboys
Teens had been stranded for a year on island
Peter Warner, who has died in a boating accident aged 90, was an Australian sailor who made headlines around the world when he rescued six Tongan schoolboys who had been marooned on a remote Pacific island for more than a year.
The story, widely compared to that of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s dystopian 1954 novel about a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island, began in 1965 when the boys, aged between 13 and 16, bored of life at a boarding school in the Tongan capital Nuku’alofa and longing for adventure, stole a fishing boat and set off for Fiji, an island about 800 kilometres from Tonga.
The boat had no engine and the boys had no map or compass. On their first night at sea, a violent storm ripped the sails from the mast and tore off the rudder. For more than a week they drifted in the swell, convinced they were going to die, surviving by collecting rainwater in coconut shells.
But on the eighth day they saw a volcanic island jutting out from the sea. As the boat neared, a wave sent it crashing on to the shore, breaking it in pieces. The exhausted boys struggled ashore.
They later discovered that they had drifted 160 kilometres from where they had set off and had landed on the island of Ata, a lump of rock uninhabited since its small Tongan community had been abducted by slave traders a century earlier.
Fifteen months later, in September 1966, Warner was looking for new fishing grounds near Ata when he spotted burnt patches on the cliffs. Knowing it was unusual for fires in the tropics to start spontaneously, he peered through his binoculars and saw a naked boy with hair down to his shoulders leap from the cliff and plunge into the water: “And this first figure was swimming towards us ... And then another five bodies leapt off the cliff and into the water and followed him.”
They looked so savage that Warner’s crew loaded their guns. But when the first boy arrived at their boat, he addressed Warner in perfect English and began telling his story.
Peter Warner drowned after his boat capsized off the northern coast of New South Wales. He is survived by his wife Justine and their two daughters and a son.