Six Shipwrecked Schoolboys Survived by Cooperating
Bored with boarding school, they set sail in 1965 and wrecked on a deserted island, then split chores and shared apologies.
Channel 4 News · Rutger Bregman on elites, survival of the friendliest, rethinking human historyIn the fall of 1965, six schoolboys in Tonga decided they had had enough of boarding school.
They were pupils at an Anglican boarding school, bored with the homework and the meals, and hungry for adventure. So they slipped into a small boat and set out to sea. On the first night, they fell asleep. Then a storm hit, and they drifted for eight days before wrecking on a small, uninhabited island where no one had lived for more than a hundred years.
That is where the famous story says things should have turned dark. Generations of students have read William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, in which shipwrecked schoolboys turn on one another. According to historian Rutger Bregman, this is the only known case in which schoolchildren were actually shipwrecked on an island, and it ended in cooperation, not violence.
The six boys survived together for more than a year by dividing the work. They split into pairs to tend a garden, to cook, and to keep watch for passing ships. It was not easy, and it was not always peaceful. Food and fresh water were sometimes scarce, and the boys sometimes fought.
When they did, they had a rule. The two would walk apart to cool off at separate spots. Then they would come back and apologize.
After more than a year, an Australian captain who happened to be fishing nearby spotted them by chance and took them aboard. The captain later employed some of them, and the rescue turned into a friendship.
Fifty years later, Bregman tracked down two of the survivors. He found that both had gone on to live happy and fulfilling lives.
Questions people ask
Where exactly were they stranded?
On 'Ata, a rugged, uninhabited island at the southern tip of Tonga. It had once been inhabited, but no one had lived there for more than a century after slave traders raided it in the 1860s.
What did they eat and drink for more than a year?
They ate fish, seabirds and eggs, along with coconuts, bananas, and taro and beans they planted. They collected rainwater in hollowed tree trunks for drinking, and they kept a fire burning the entire time after managing to get one started.
Who rescued them?
Australian sea captain Peter Warner spotted them in September 1966 while fishing nearby. He took them home to Tonga, where they were initially jailed for taking the boat, and he helped secure their release and later employed some of them.