Sailor rescued boys marooned on Tongan island
Peter Warner
sailor/businessman b February 22, 1931 d April 13, 2021
Peter Warner, who has died in a boating accident aged 90, was an Australian sailor who made headlines around the world after rescuing 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 with life at a boarding school in Nuku’alofa and longing for adventure, stole a fishing boat and set off for Fiji, some 800 kilometres away.
The boat had no engine and the boys had no map or compass. On their first night at sea, a 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 about 150km from where they set off and had landed on Ata, a Tongan island uninhabited since its small community was 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, fearing they might be criminals marooned as a punishment.
But when the first boy arrived at their boat, he addressed Warner in perfect English and began telling his story. Still sceptical, Warner radioed to Tonga. ‘‘The operator very tearfully said it’s true.
These boys were students. They’ve been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. And now you’ve found them.’’
The story they told was very different from Golding’s allegory of humanity’s savagery in a state of nature. The Tongan boys’ story was one of friendship, loyalty, resourcefulness, and hope.
After subsisting for a while on seabirds and their eggs, they climbed up to the island’s forested plateau where they found a clay pot, a machete and chickens, descendants of those left behind by the community taken away as slaves in the 19th century.
Warner reported that they had established ‘‘a small commune’’ with a ‘‘food garden, a gymnasium, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire’’ with a roster for keeping it going. Each day began and ended with song and prayer.
Warner took the boys back to Tonga, where they were immediately arrested for the theft of the boat, a fact Warner discovered when they failed to turn up on his boat for a party he was throwing in their honour. He soon paid off the boat owner and secured their release.
Warner was summoned to an audience by a grateful King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, who asked him whether there was anything he would like as a reward. ‘‘Yes,’’ replied Warner: ‘‘I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here.’’
After returning to Australia and commissioning a new fishing boat, in 1968 Warner moved with his family to Tonga and lived there for the next three decades, hiring the six boys as his crew. His business, Warner Pacific Shipping, provided one of the main trade links between New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji and other Pacific nations.
Mano Totau, one of the six rescued boys, told Stuff this week that Warner was a ‘‘generous and really good person’’ who helped provide more than 500 Tongans with jobs through his shipping line.
In the 1970s, he paid for about 20 boys to come to New Zealand to get an education and maritime training, before giving them jobs with his company.
Peter Warner was born in 1931, the son of a wealthy British-born Australian media magnate whose company, Electronic Industries, dominated Australia’s radio market in the 1930s. It was assumed that Peter would join the company, but he had other ideas.
Aged 17, he left Melbourne Grammar School and ran away to sea, spending the next few years travelling the world, earning a Swedish captain’s certificate on the way.
Returning home after five years, he agreed to work for his father’s company and did so for five years. Whenever he got the chance, however, he hopped over to Tasmania, where he kept a small fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Ata in 1966.
Also a keen yachtsman, Warner took part in several of the annual Sydney-to Hobart yacht races, winning the line honours three times in the early 1960s.
In January 1985, one of his ships played an inadvertent role in the antinuclear spat between New Zealand and the United States, when prime minister David Lange went to Tokelau. The Americans had asked to send the warship USS Buchanan to Wellington, but it was unclear whether the ship was carrying nuclear weapons. The Buchanan’s visit was not public knowledge, and Lange thought nothing would come of the matter while he was in somewhere as remote as Tokelau.
However, the news leaked, causing an uproar, with many Labour MPs threatening a revolt if the Buchanan was admitted.
Lange had limited contact with Wellington and was unaware the news had got out. Warner’s ship, on which he was travelling, developed engine troubles and delayed their return, causing Lange to miss the Cabinet meeting at which it was decided the Buchanan would be denied access to New Zealand waters.
Some of Lange’s Cabinet ministers later suggested he might have deliberately gone to the most remote spot in the Pacific to evade the issue.
In 1990 Warner became a member of the Baha’i faith and he was instrumental in founding a Baha’i international school in Tonga. In 1998 he returned to Australia, where he founded a company involved in nut farming.
Warner published three volumes of memoirs, and his tale, and that of the Tongan boys, was told in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A hopeful history, in 2019. ‘‘Life has taught me a great deal,’’ Warner wrote, ‘‘including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.’’
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. – Telegraph Group/additional reporting by Sophie Cornish