Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
HOW AUSTRALI The IAN SAILOR FOUND MISSING TEENS real Lord of the Flies
Burnt patches amid the lush green were the first things to catch Peter Warner’s eye as he sailed alone past a deserted Pacific island.
Then he blinked in disbelief as through his binoculars he saw a naked teenage boy, with shoulder-length hair, darting along the cliff.
Next the lad and others had jumped into the water and were swimming in his direction, screaming at the top of their lungs.
“My name is Stephen,” the first boy said in perfect English as he reached Peter’s boat.
“There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”
Peter was already a well-known figure in his home country, the youngest son of one Australia’s richest men who, aged 17, had spurned his chance to take over his dad’s electronics company and ran away to sea in search of adventure.
Over the next few years he became a celebrated sailor, winning the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race three times in the 1960s, although he did eventually reluctantly join his father’s firm.
But it was his encounter on September 11, 1966, with a group of marooned boys at ‘Ata, a minuscule island at the far end of the Tonga archipelago, which would earn him worldwide fame.
The shipwrecked schoolboys had been stuck on the remote island for 15 months, and had been given up for dead by their families who had even held funerals.
The incredible story, which was compared to William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, has been remembered after Peter, still sailing aged 90, died earlier this month when his yacht capsized off New South Wales, Australia.
Speaking of the moment he first saw the six teenage castaways, Peter remembered: “The first figure was swimming towards me and then another five bodies leapt off the cliff and followed him.”
Peter knew that ‘Ata hadn’t been inhabited since 1863, when a slave ship had arrived and kidnapped the natives, taking them to Peru and leaving the island cursed and deserted ever since.
At first wary of the boys’ claims, the skipper radioed Tonga’s capital,
Nuku’alofa, to verify the story.
“The operator very tearfully said, ‘It’s true’,”
Peter later recalled. “‘These boys were students. They’ve been given up for dead’.”
As more details emerged of how the boys – Sione, Stephen,
Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – had found themselves shipwrecked, and how they had survived for so long, the more incredible the story became.
Sick of life at their strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku’alofa, the boys – aged between 13 and 16 –took a boat from a local fisherman and tried to escape to Fiji, some 500 miles away. Taking with them two sacks of bananas, coconuts and a small gas burner, they sailed away.
Mano Totau later explained the boys’ desire to leave their boarding school: “We were not happy . If you were in a place, you don’t know where it is, and also you did not see any part of your family, I don’t think you’d be happy to be there.”
But that night, after all the boys had fallen asleep, a huge storm ripped the boat from its anchor, tearing off the sail and rudder and leaving the vessel drifting directionless on the open ocean.
Sione Fataua said they were sure they
Boys stranded on island after boat wrecked ..but unlike book had made it a liveable paradise
would die. “No food, no water,” he added. “We were just drifting around by the wind. And after eight days we saw the island.”
The boys had drifted more than 100 miles off course and landed on ‘Ata. The boat ended up crashing into the rocky shore and shattering as the boys scrambled to safety. Mano remembered: “We were very happy, but the first thing we did, we say a prayer.”
Desperate to quench their thirst, they hunted sea birds, drank their blood and drained their eggs.
What happened next was very different to the ANARCHY Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies story, in which the British schoolboys stranded on a deserted Pacific island proved incapable of governing themselves.
In the real-life survival story the teenage castaways organised themselves into teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for kitchen and garden duty, and after managing to light a fire tended the flame so it never went out.
They survived at first on fish, coconuts and birds, but later found an ancient volcanic crater where they discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens, reproducing since the last Tongans had left.
When one boy fell off a cliff and broke his leg, the others managed to set it with sticks.
One of the boys, Kolo, even made a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument
Peter kept for the rest of his life.
Peter wrote in his memoirs how the boys “had set up a
They’d set up chicken pens, a food garden & gymnasium
commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from an old knife and determination.”
Of the moment he finally stepped aboard Peter’s yacht, Mano said: “All of us, we are full of tears, happy, and like we walk through to heaven.”
But their adventure didn’t end there. On their return to Nuku’alofa the boys were imprisoned after the owner of the boat they had taken decided to press charges. Peter was eventually able to secure their release from jail by selling the Australian film rights to their story and using the money to pay for a replacement boat.
When the boys were returned home the sailor was proclaimed a national hero.
Peter remembers arriving at the little island of Ha’afeva where most of the boys were from: “The whole population of this little island were on the beach, hugging the boys. Parents were crying. Then the party started. Six days of feasting.” Peter was also invited to an audience with Tonga’s King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV, a meeting which meant his lifelong wish to turn his back on his father’s electronics firm and live his life on the sea finally came true.
After the king granted Peter’s request to trap lobster in Tonga’s waters and start a business there, he commissioned a new ship then hired the boys he had rescued as the crew of his new boat. Incredibly, eight years later, Peter was involved in the rescue of more castaways, finding four sailors shipwrecked on a reef in the Tasman Sea. The crewman who saw their distress flashes was Mano, by then a deckhand.