Real-life Lord of the Flies — what Happened When Six Boys Were Marooned for 15 months
The true story of a group of teens who were stranded on a remote island for over a year
Ten years after William Golding released Lord of the Flies, six teenage boys found themselves stranded on a real desert island. Like in the book, there were no adults and it was up to them to survive.
In the novel, things famously went badly with the boys reverting to savagery and even murder. Golding was trying to make a point that humans, stripped of civilization, were still beasts at heart and would regress to a more primitive state.
So what happened when the scenario occurred in real life? Reassuringly for humanity, things turned out very differently.
Six boys set out on an adventure
On the 18th June 1965, six Tongan boys between the ages of 15 and 18 decided to have an adventure. They wanted to escape their strict Catholic school boarding school, St Andrew’s College, located in the Tongan capital of Nuku’alofa and sail off in search of a better life.
The friends were: Sione, Kolo, David, Stephen, Luke and Mano. In an interview years later Mano explained that the group was “bored” and thought they might sail to New Zealand. Things went wrong pretty quickly.
