Understanding One Another
The Real Lord of the Flies
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
William Golding imagined stranded boys descending into savagery. Years after Lord of the Flies appeared, six Tongan boys supplied a real-life counterexample: marooned on the Pacific island of ‘Ata for fifteen months, they survived through cooperation and were rescued in good health. Doug presents their story through Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, which recovered it from a 1966 report in the Australian newspaper The Age.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
This title is from the prologue of a new book by Rutger Bregman. The subtitle is A Hopeful History. Most people are aware of the story Lord of the Flies by William Golding. In this story young boys find themselves on a deserted island. Initially, they are successful at forming and implementing a workable strategy for living on the island. Unfortunately, this initial organization breaks down into an unorganized bunch of savages. Many people have taken from this that civilization could break down and degenerate into chaos.
Lord of the Flies is fiction, but there is a true story of six boys who found themselves in the same situation. They found themselves on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. This story was reported in the 6 October 1966 issue of The Aegean, an Australian Newspaper. The boys were rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys adventure. They had been there for about fifteen months, they had survived, were well, and had not degenerated into savages.