Saga goes with Tonga’s reclamation
Largely unnoticed by the outside world, Tonga has reclaimed a disputed Pacific atoll which is at the heart of a defining event in the kingdom’s modern history. Michael Field reports.
Quietly and without any public statement Tonga has reasserted its ownership of a remote atoll in time to mark the 50th anniversary of one of the Pacific’s great survival epics.
Last month two Tongan navy patrol boats quietly left Nuku’alofa for the two uninhabited reefs known as Minerva to reinstall navigation beacons that were destroyed last year by the Fiji military regime.
Suva claims that both South and North Minerva are part of Fiji. They have sent in gunboats twice to destroy the beacons and on the second time the Fijians were chased away by the Tongans.
The $300,000 operation to replace the beacons was so secret that when an Australian yacht, Navillus, was wrecked in northern Tonga last month there were no Tongan navy ships available to look for the two missing men. Private boats searched but they were not found.
Tonga’s emotions over Minerva have always been deep and have been marked in song, particularly since the night of July 7, 1962, when the 20-ton cutter Tuaikaepau (‘‘slow but sure’’) ran into South Minerva and broke up. The crew had not been able to issue a distress call.
Under legendary captain David Fifita the 17 people on the boat survived 14 weeks before rescue by a Royal New Zealand Air Force Sunderland flying boat working out of Suva.
Built at Auckland in 1902, as Ilex, Tuaikaepau had once sailed the Sydney to Hobart race and was used in Tonga to take missionaries around the archipelago. Fall- ing into disrepair, its new owner, Tofa Ramsay, decided to send her back to Auckland to be restored.
Fifita had previously sailed the cutter the 1940km to Auckland and was hired to take it again. As well as seven crew, there were 10 passengers, most of them boxers travelling to Auckland for tournaments. Soon after they left, Fifita discovered they had no charts, but he decided to press on.
After they survived the grounding and the wreck of the yacht, the 17 men went on to the reef. At high tide most of the reef is underwater and offers no shelter. Fortunately for the men a Japanese fishing boat had been wrecked on the atoll two years before. The men managed to live on it for 14 weeks and even got oil out of the wreck to maintain a small cooking fire and a fresh water still.
On the night of July 9, the US exploded what they called a ‘‘rainbow bomb’’, a nuclear device, 320km above Johnston Atoll in the north Pacific. The castaways on Minerva saw it and knew what it was. They were deeply awed by the horizon-to-horizon effects they witnessed.
By the end of August their hope of being rescued faded and Fifita decided to use a small raft they had built to sail to Fiji. Fifita sailed off with his son Sateki and Tevita Uaisele. After several days they reached Fiji’s Kadavu and sailed into its lagoon. But within sight of land, the raft they had named Maloelelei (‘‘hi and hello’’) capsized. Sateki drowned.
Meanwhile, four men on the reef died. They were buried on the reef, sealing Tonga’s emotional connection to Minerva.
As soon as news of Fifita’s arrival reached Suva, the RNZAF base at Laucala Bay mobilised one of their white Sunderlands.
The castaways finally reached Tonga on October 22, greeted by thousands.
The epic survival story was recounted in Olaf Ruhen’s Minerva Reef, published in 1963.
Fifita went back to sea. ‘‘I don’t think the sea is cruel,’’ he told Ruhen. ‘‘I love the sea very much, and I’ll go back to it. There is no cruelty in the sea. It moves as God wants it to move.’’
He was killed 15 years later when he fell off the bridge of a tug, hitting a wharf at Apia.
Deckhand Talo Fifita, one of his sons, is believed to be the only survivor still alive.
The twin atolls were first surveyed in 1854 and named after the whaling ship Minerva, wrecked there in 1829.
A Las Vegas group, the Phoenix Foundation, founded by property developer Michael J Oliver, claimed it in 1971, shipping in sand from Australia. He proclaimed the ‘‘Republic of Minerva’’ which was to have a population of 60,000 who would have ‘‘no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism’’.
King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV sailed south in the royal barge with some prisoners and part of the royal band. He hauled down the Minerva flag and replaced it with his. The Pacific Forum recognised Tongan sovereignty, but Fiji did not.
A stopping point for yachts from the Pacific to New Zealand, it has taken on significance as its possession gives rights to lucrative undersea minerals. South Korean, Chinese and Australian interests are seeking prospecting rights in the area.
Fiji claims the reefs are known as Teleki Reefs and were the traditional fishing grounds of Ono-i-Lau, 300km away. In Polynesian tradition, Ono-i-Lau was part of Tonga’s maritime empire but was carved out by the British into Fiji.