Peter Warner, sailor who rescued Tongan schoolboys stranded on a Pacific island – obituary
Unlike Lord of the Flies, the story of savagery to which the case was compared, the Tongan boys showed friendship and resourcefulness
Warner, 1967
Credit: Stuart William MacGladrie/Fairfax Media via Getty
Peter Warner, who has died in a boating accident aged 90, was an Australian sailor who made headlines around the world after rescuing six Tongan schoolboys who had been marooned on a remote Pacific island for more than a year.
The story, widely compared to that of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s dystopian 1954 novel about a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island, began in 1965 when the boys, aged between 13 and 16, bored of life at a boarding school in the Tongan capital Nuku‘alofa and longing for adventure, stole a fishing boat and set off for Fiji, an island about 500 miles from Tonga.