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1 Rutger Bregman& #39;s written a fascinating account of a group of castaways on the Tongan island of & #39;Ata for the Guardian. But the story has a much darker historical background than Bregman& #39;s article lets on. (thread) https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1259050383638437888">https://twitter.com/guardian/...
2 Bregman tells the story of the group of Tongan teens who stole a boat from Nuku& #39;alofa harbour, got caught in a storm, were wrecked on the remote southern island of & #39;Ata, & survived for many months before a fisherman rescued them. But how were the boys able to survive?
3 The story of the & #39;Atan castaways was first told by Keith Willey in his book Naked Island nearly half a century ago. Willey& #39;s book includes a crucial detail that Bregman leaves out of his article.
4 & #39;Ata is surrounded by cliffs, & it took the castaways weeks to find a route to the island& #39;s interior. Once they reached the island& #39;s high plateau, though, they found plentiful food. As Willey noted, the boys were repopulating an ancient Tongan village called Kolomaile.
5 The Guardian has unhelpfully illustrated Bregman& #39;s article with a photo of the wrong island. There are two & #39;Atas in Tonga: one is a cosy atoll near Nuku& #39;alofa, the other is the remote & precipitous place where the castaways ended up.
7 Bregman states merely that the old inhabitants of & #39;Ata & #39;left& #39;. In fact, half of them were stolen by Australasian slavers bound for Peru in 1863. The remainder of the population was evacuated shortly afterward by Tonga& #39;s King Tupou I.
8 The survival of the & #39;60s castaways was greatly helped by the residue of the civilisation the & #39;Atans established on their island, before the disaster of 1863. The castaways found not only fruit & vegetables from old gardens, but chickens.
9 But the central point of Bregman& #39;s article is that the castaways on & #39;Ata show us a different model of human behaviour than dystopian adventure stories like Lord of the Flies. & there& #39;s another Tongan castaway story that could be used to bolster Bregman& #39;s case.
10 Just a few years before the castaways crashed on & #39;Ata, a group of adults were wrecked on Minerva Reef, another obscure fragment of land between Tonga & NZ. They not only survived for months on the reef& #39;s moonscape, but built a new vaka & sailed home.
11 Bregman& #39;s argument about the human potential for cooperation is eloquent & important. But I think there may be a danger of too quickly abstracting the stories of the castaways on & #39;Ata & Minerva from their cultural context.
12 On both & #39;Ata & Minerva, a very Tongan religiosity & respect for hierarchy helped cohere groups of castaways. Prayer sessions & deference to a leader were crucial. Bregman is mistaken if he feels that the castaways established a democracy.
