One thing struck fisherman Peter Warner as odd.
In September 1966 he was sailing from northern New Zealand towards Tonga on his ship, always on the hunt for crayfish.
On a sunny morning, off the island of 'Ata, whose rugged rocky coast offered no anchorage, Warner searched the rugged slopes with his binoculars - and discovered wide, burnt areas amidst the tropical greenery.
A forest fire in the humid tropics?
Unusual, especially since the island was considered uninhabited.
Then his sentry sounded the alarm.
"I can hear people screaming!" he called down from the crow's nest.
"Nonsense," retorted the captain, "it's just a few seabirds." He was about to give the order to proceed when he saw through his binoculars someone running along the cliffs and jumping into the surf.
The tanned figure on the bank was wild-looking, naked, hair long and matted.
She let out bloodcurdling screams and swam furiously towards the trawler.
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Rescued the six boys then hired them: Captain Warner (1967)
Photo: Fairfax Media/Getty Images
Warner ordered the crew to get their rifles and cock them in readiness for a possible attack.
Because other people were already making their way into the water.
Warner wondered if 'Ata was some kind of prison island.
He had heard that criminals in Tonga were often banished and abandoned in a leaking boat.
As the swimmer drew closer, Warner's fears faded.
He lowered the ladder, a boy smiling in perfect English: 'My name is Stephen.
There are six of us.
And we estimate we spent a year or two here.” That's how Warner recalled his first encounter with the six teens of 'Ata in his 2018 autobiography, Ocean of Light.
A father had been looking for the boys for months - in vain
The others also climbed aboard and reported that they had escaped from a boarding school in Tonga's capital, Nuku'alofa.
One evening they "borrowed" a boat to catch fish, but they drifted away and were stranded on the deserted island.
Warner wanted to be sure: he had the names spelled out and asked for confirmation by radio from the capital of Tonga, the island kingdom in the South Pacific.
After a long wait, the radio operator in Nuku'alofa cracked: St Andrew's Anglican College had testified that five of the six had been students there.
"They were all pronounced dead long ago when the missing boat never returned," he reported.
A father looked for the boys on uninhabited islands for months, but then gave up exhausted.
The story initially sounds very much like "Lord of the Flies", the famous novel by British author William Golding from 1954 about a group of children on an uninhabited island: the boys, left to their own devices, gradually forget all the rules of civilization until only the law of the strongest applies – the rule of thumb wins, the weak become followers, the children become violent savages and sometimes murderers.
But the reality of 'Ata was very different from Golding's dark Robinsonade, winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
When the youths left Tonga in 1965, the youngest was 13 and the oldest 16, as Peter Warner later reported;
they were strong and looked older in photographs.
The mid-year reports were due, some were afraid of getting stuck, everyone wanted to experience an adventure.
They grabbed one of the traditional longboats and disappeared into the moonless night.
Sleep overcame her, the weather changed on the open sea and strong gusts shredded both sails.
As they passed Hunga, Tonga's last island, the oar broke.
"We were adrift at sea for eight days without food or water, certain we were going to die," said survivor Sione Fataua in an interview with Radio New Zealand some 55 years later.
Now and then they could kill fish with a spear, drank the blood, ate the raw meat and tried to catch rainwater with two coconut shells.
When they saw an island with high cliffs, they paddled towards land with the last of their strength and by late afternoon they were close to a headland.
Mano Totau, then 15, wanted to swim to the beach and find a suitable landing spot.
The strong current swept him away.
"When I finally reached the bank and wanted to start running, everything revolved around me, I could only crawl ashore," he recalled in an interview with the British newspaper "Guardian".
Nobody saw the castaways
The others quickly followed him, but the surf tore the ship to the rocks and it broke.
With bruises and abrasions, everyone made it ashore.
To regain strength, they killed fish with handmade spears, ate them raw, and drank the blood and eggs of unwary seabirds.
The last Tongans had been evacuated from the island a good century earlier.
At the edge of an old volcanic crater there were still traces of an earlier settlement.
It became the basis of their survival, because bantams had bred wildly there, bananas and carbohydrate-rich taro plants grew.
Soon the boys were planting new beds, collecting rainwater in hollow tree trunks and even building a kind of gym with home-made weights and a badminton court.
One of the youths managed to make a fire.
From then on it was guarded day and night;
they constantly took turns looking for passing ships.
Some passed, but no one saw the castaways and the great fires they lit in hopes of rescue.
Celebrated for six days
There were always arguments, but the elders always tried to mediate or they sent the quarrelers to different sides of the island until they had calmed down.
The cohesion was great, especially after setbacks.
Stephen broke his leg falling off a cliff.
The others nursed him until the injury healed three months later, leaving a huge scar.
When fishing captain Peter Warner brought the rescued back to Nuku'alofa, there was no cheering reception committee waiting at the pier, but the police.
The six ended up in cells, reported by the boat owner.
When Warner paid him £150 in compensation, the youths were released.
Then it was finally time to celebrate – for six days.
Almost all 900 residents came together on Ha'afeva, the home island of the rescued.
Kava, the drink made from the intoxicating pepper, was served with crawfish.
There was a lot of dancing and praying, those who had been believed dead hugged each other with their families.
'There had been a mourning ceremony for each of us.
Just not for me«, Sione Fataua recalled in a radio interview.
"My father never believed I was dead."
The captain hired the six boys
Warner was asked as the savior of King Tupou IV for an audience at his summer residence and was impressed: »He was one of the mightiest men I had ever seen.
My hand disappeared into his, it resembled the giant fin of a seal,” he said in his autobiography.
“You saved six of my young subjects.
Thank you for that!” the king told him, asking what his country could do as a reward.
Warner didn't have to think long and secured the rights to fish crawfish with his fleet in Tonga's waters.
Shortly thereafter, he also had a documentary made about the rescue mission.
The six recreated their experiences on the island, and the film aired on Australia's Channel 7 TV in October 1966.
With a new boat, Warner soon went fishing again and hired the six boys.
He chose the boat name after the island he rescued her from: Ata.
The story of the runaways was forgotten until the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman rediscovered it in 2020 when he was looking for a real, positive counterexample to William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" for his book "Basically Good" - and on the events pushed by 'Ata.
He had read the novel as a teenager, and now he tracked down Warner and some of the castaways.
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Historian Bregman: Believes in the good in people
Photo: Horst Galuschka / IMAGO
"You often hear how people panic and the worst comes to light in emergency situations," says Bregman in an interview with SPIEGEL.
“I think the opposite is usually the case.
This story teaches us that crises often bring out the best in us.
The friendliest among us manage to survive.«
For many decades, the rescuer and the rescued were bound by a deep friendship.
In April 2021, Peter Warner, now 90 years old, was sailing off the south east coast of Australia when a huge wave swept him overboard.
Although he could still be rescued from the water, he died shortly afterwards.
Before that, he had managed to sell the film rights to a large studio with the four boys from 'Ata and Bregman who were still alive.
"They all always wanted their story to be known worldwide," says historian Bregman.
A major Hollywood film based on the events of 'Ata is now in the pipeline.