"You should always look for what is good and positive in people"

‘Life has taught me a great deal, including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people’ read the opening statement of the memoirs of Mr. Peter Warner, written for his children and grandchildren.

In the book Humankind – a hopeful history, the author Rutger Bregman picturises the stark contrast between the reality and what various authors paint their pictures of humankind in their books.

The author starts with a fabulous comparison between the behaviours of children left stranded in a remote island as portrayed in the book ‘Lord of the Flies’ by psychologist Bryan Gibson and the real such incident that happened in the Ata, a remote uninhabitable island in Pacific Ocean farther away from Tonga.

In the fictious (the story never happened as it was made up by an English schoolmaster in 1951) story of Lord of Flies, being a psychologist Golding portrayed the darkest depths of mankind. Golding, in his letter to his publisher of the book, wrote, ‘Even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it. Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.’ Eventually, Golding even won a Nobel Prize for his oeuvre where the Swedish Nobel Committee wrote that Golding’s work ‘illuminate[s] the human condition in the world of today with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth.’

In Golding’s fiction, all the boys developed overpowering urges to pinch, to kick, to bite and out of all the boys, only one of them kept a cool head and he kept mourning whether they are all humans or animals or savages due to their actions. They all feasted and frolicked than to tending to the fire they lit. Rules were broken. When a British naval officer came ashore the island by then was a smouldering wasteland and three of the boys were already dead. The leader of the boy ‘wept for the end of innocence and the darkness of man’s heart’ as the story read.

The author of the book Humankind – a hopeful history, Mr. Rutger Bregman, says when he first read the Lord of the Flies as a teenager, he remembers feeling disillusioned afterwards, as he turned it over and over in his mind and he began to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. Mr. Rutger Bregman didn’t stop it there and picked up the book again years later and start delving into the author Goldman’s life and learnt that Goldman was an unhappy individual in personal life, an alcoholic and prone to depression. He also found out that Golding confessed that he always understood the Nazis and he is of that sort of nature and it was partly out of that sad self-knowledge he wrote the Lord of the Flies.

The above findings triggered huge interest in Mr. Rutger Bregman to study what real children would have done if they found themselves alone on a deserted island. After a long struggle he managed to found one such real incident in 1966 that involved six boys who had been found on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean, after more than a year.

In striking contrast to Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in this real incident the six boys, all pupils at St. Andrew’s, a strict catholic boarding school in Nuku’alofa, with their ages between 13 to 16, due to their boredom came up with a plan to escape to Fiji, some five hundred miles away. They did not owe a boat and they borrowed a fishing boat from one of the local fishermen whom they disliked. Their preparation for the journey was limited to two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner. Neither they had a map nor they had a compass and none of them were experienced sailors. The youngest of them was included in the team merely because he is the one who knew how to steer a boat.

On their first night of their journey, they slept and when they woke up, they saw foaming waves cresting around them. The wind tore the shreds and the rudder was also broken subsequently. They drifted for eight days without food and water they survived by equally splitting between them the rain water they caught in the hollowed-out coconut shells. On the eighth day they landed on this island of Ata which was nothing but a hulking mass of rock. The island is far too rough even a rugged Spanish adventure who wanted to commercialise by conducting expedition trips there in the past gave up after nine days into the expedition.

The teenagers had a different experience by setting up small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to tore rainwater, a gym with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire all from handwork, an old knife blad and much determination.

Even the real story of igniting and maintaining a fire was striking contrast from Lord of Flies. In the fiction the children come to blows over the fire whereby in the real incident the teenagers tended to their flame such that it never went out for more than a year. The teenagers agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes, they quarrelled, but whenever that happened, they solved it by imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, and after four hours or so they would bring them back together and make them apologise to ensure they stayed as friends. They even fixed the broken leg of one of them by setting his leg using sticks and leaves. After being rescued (after more than a year) and subsequently examined, the local physician who examined them expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and as well as the healed leg of one of them.

The teenagers were found by Mr. Peter Warner and developed a great bond with them subsequently. Peter paid back the money for the old boat to the fisherman and managed to release the teenagers from the prison who were imprisoned due to the fisherman pressed charges against them for the boat. Peter, whose earlier request for trapping lobster in Tonga was refused by the His Royal Highness King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, was subsequently invited for audience with him in which His Royal Highness asked what Peter wanted in return for rescuing his six subjects. Peter made the same earlier request of trapping lobster in their waters and start a business in Tonga. The King consented. Peter resigned from his father’s company and commissioned a new ship. He had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all i.e. an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga.

Peter Warner and one of the boys Mano Totau shared 50-years of bond to cherish with which made Peter to write those memoirs mentioned in the beginning of this article for his children and grandchildren.

The above is only by reading less than 10% of the book Humankind – a hopeful history and I can’t hold up anymore my curiosity and interest to complete this book.