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F or centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. Simply in the terminal 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still and so young that researchers in dissimilar fields often don't even know about each other.
When I started writing a book about this more than hopeful view, I knew at that place was one story I would have to address. It takes identify on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who tin't believe their good fortune. Naught but beach, shells and h2o for miles. And meliorate notwithstanding: no grownups.
On the very first day, the boys constitute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the grouping's leader. Able-bodied, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is unproblematic: 1) Take fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make fume signals for passing ships. Number ane is a success. The others? Non so much. The boys are more than interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Soon, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
By the fourth dimension a British naval officer comes aground, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. "I should have idea," the officeholder says, "that a pack of British boys would take been able to put upwardly a ameliorate prove than that." At this, Ralph bursts into tears. "Ralph wept for the end of innocence," we read, and for "the darkness of man'southward centre".
This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more 30 languages and hailed as ane of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the hugger-mugger to the book'southward success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second earth war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?
I first read Lord of the Flies every bit a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to incertitude Golding's view of human nature. That didn't happen until years afterwards when I began delving into the writer's life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." And it was "partly out of that sad self-knowledge" that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they establish themselves solitary on a deserted island? I wrote an commodity on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summertime camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an absorbing story: "I mean solar day, in 1977, six boys set up out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they practice, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel."
The article did not provide any sources. Simply sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 Oct 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: "Sun showing for Tongan castaways". The story concerned six boys who had been found 3 weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an isle group in the Pacific Body of water. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea helm after being marooned on the island of 'Ata for more than a twelvemonth. Co-ordinate to the article, the captain had even got a television set station to film a re-enactment of the boys' run a risk.
I was bursting with questions. Were the boys however live? And could I find the television footage? Well-nigh chiefly, though, I had a lead: the captain's proper noun was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent result of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: "Mates share 50-yr bail". Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, grinning, ane with his arm slung effectually the other. The article began: "Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature." Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted isle.
My wife Maartje and I rented a auto in Brisbane and some 3 hours afterward arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front end of a low-slung house off the dirt route: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.
Peter was the youngest son of Arthur Warner, once one of the richest and almost powerful men in Australia. Back in the 1930s, Arthur ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which dominated the country's radio market at the time. Peter was clean-cut to follow in his father'due south footsteps. Instead, at the age of 17, he ran abroad to sea in search of adventure and spent the next few years sailing from Hong Kong to Stockholm, Shanghai to St Petersburg. When he finally returned v years later, the prodigal son proudly presented his father with a Swedish captain's document. Unimpressed, Warner Sr demanded his son acquire a useful profession. "What's easiest?" Peter asked. "Accountancy," Arthur lied.
Peter went to work for his father's company, all the same the bounding main still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the mode dwelling house he took a little detour and that'southward when he saw it: a minuscule isle in the azure sea, 'Ata. The isle had been inhabited once, until one night day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, 'Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.
But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. "In the tropics it'southward unusual for fires to start spontaneously," he told usa, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. All of a sudden more than boys followed, screaming at the acme of their lungs. It didn't take long for the first boy to reach the gunkhole. "My name is Stephen," he cried in perfect English. "In that location are half-dozen of us and nosotros reckon nosotros've been here 15 months."
The boys, in one case aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku'alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a line-fishing boat out one mean solar day, merely to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter idea. Using his two-style radio, he called in to Nuku'alofa. "I've got six kids here," he told the operator. "Stand past," came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this office of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: "Y'all plant them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a phenomenon!"
In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on 'Ata. Peter's retentivity turned out to be excellent. Even at the historic period of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, xv years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived simply a few hours' drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were half dozen boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku'alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one primary affair in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or fifty-fifty all the way to New Zealand.
There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to "borrow" one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn't occur to whatsoever of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.
No one noticed the pocket-sized craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild cakewalk ruffled the calm sea. Simply that night the boys made a grave fault. They fell comatose. A few hours after they awoke to water crashing downwardly over their heads. Information technology was dark. They hoisted the sheet, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to pause was the rudder. "We drifted for viii days," Mano told me. "Without food. Without water." The boys tried communicable fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out kokosnoot shells and shared it every bit between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.
Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A pocket-size island, to be precise. Non a tropical paradise with waving palm copse and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of stone, jutting up more than a grand anxiety out of the ocean. These days, 'Ata is considered uninhabitable. But "past the fourth dimension we arrived," Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, "the boys had set up a small-scale commune with nutrient garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to shop rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old pocketknife bract and much determination." While the boys in Lord of the Flies come up to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so information technology never went out, for more than a year.
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, cartoon upwards a strict roster for garden, kitchen and baby-sit duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and concluded with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a kokosnoot beat out and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked gunkhole – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to aid lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried amalgam a raft in order to leave the island, simply information technology fell apart in the crashing surf.
Worst of all, Stephen slipped one 24-hour interval, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way downwardly later on him and then helped him back up to the top. They gear up his leg using sticks and leaves. "Don't worry," Sione joked. "We'll do your work, while you lie there similar King Taufa'ahau Tupou himself!"
They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well every bit eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the isle, they constitute an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. At that place the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the terminal Tongans had left).
They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local doctor later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen's perfectly healed leg. But this wasn't the end of the boys' little take a chance, because, when they arrived back in Nuku'alofa police boarded Peter's boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing gunkhole the boys had "borrowed" 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he'd decided to press charges.
Fortunately for the boys, Peter came up with a programme. It occurred to him that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood cloth. And existence his male parent'due south corporate accountant, Peter managed the company'south film rights and knew people in Television set. So from Tonga, he called up the managing director of Channel seven in Sydney. "You can have the Australian rights," he told them. "Give me the world rights." Next, Peter paid Mr Uhila £150 for his quondam gunkhole, and got the boys released on condition that they would cooperate with the moving picture. A few days later, a team from Channel 7 arrived.
The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of Haʻafeva – population 900 – had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa'ahau Tupou Iv himself, inviting the captain for an audition. "Give thanks you for rescuing six of my subjects," His Regal Highness said. "Now, is there annihilation I can practice for y'all?" The helm didn't have to retrieve long. "Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and offset a business here." The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father's company and deputed a new ship. Then he had the vi boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the globe across Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing gunkhole.
While the boys of 'Ata take been consigned to obscurity, Golding's book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of i of the nigh popular entertainment genres on television today: reality Boob tube. "I read and reread Lord of the Flies ," divulged the creator of striking serial Survivor in an interview.It'south fourth dimension nosotros told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; ane that illustrates how much stronger nosotros are if we tin can lean on each other. Later on my wife took Peter's moving picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, and then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked downwards at the outset page. "Life has taught me a great deal," it began, "including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people."
This is an adapted excerpt from Rutger Bregman's Humankind, translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. A live streamed Q&A with Bregman and Owen Jones takes place at 7pm on 19 May 2020.
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