One of the best reads over the weekend was a story in The Guardian about what happened when a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island on their own for over a year in 1965.
William Golding’s famed 1951 novel “Lord of the Flies” set up a fictional story of British schoolboys being stranded on a deserted island for months and resorting to tribalism and savagery in the process. Of course, the late Golding himself was a depressive and abusive alcoholic.
The author of the article, Rutger Bregman, went in search of a real life equivalent event to see if Golding’s supposition was correct – turns out he wasn’t. Golding found a story from fourteen years later in late 1966 about six boys who had been found on a rocky islet at the very southern end of the Pacific archipelago of Tonga.
The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for around 15 months. The boys were all boarding school students (ages 13-16) who took a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Authorities had searched for them and ultimately given them up for dead to the point that funerals had been held.
They managed to make it to the island, not a sandy paradise but a “hulking mass of rock” atop of which was an ancient volcanic crater where people had lived a century before but was now abandoned – the natives taken away by slave ships a century earlier. By the time the Aussie captain had arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire.
They worked in two with strict rosters, any arguments were solved by imposing a time-out. An attempt to build a raft failed, and one of the boys fell off a cliff and broke his leg but the others were able to rescue him and set it. Surviving on fish, coconuts, bird eggs and sea birds themselves initially before finding wild taro, bananas and chickens later.
Upon rescue they were imprisoned for boat theft, but the sea captain got the boys released on condition that they would co-operate with filming a movie for Australian TV news including a recreation of the rescue and their arrival back to their home island of Ha’afeva.
As Bregman says, “The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other”. Today though he says that with the story having gone viral, there’s a big push to get it to the screen. He tweeted: “Getting bombarbed with emails from producers and directors inquiring about the film rights of this story. I’m so glad the ‘boys’ from The Real Lord of the Flies are finally, after 50 years, getting the attention they deserve.”
Spanish explorer Alvaro Cerezo, who revisited the island in 2015 with one of the six teenage castaways, is launching both a documentary and a book about the incident this Summer. Expect to hear more on this story in coming months.
