Not Such a Bad Species, part 1

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William Golding lied to you. He did. He lied to us. It may seem strange to say that a work of fiction is a lie, but Golding’s 1954 novel, The Lord of the Flies, purveyed a lie.

In the book: A plane goes down near a deserted island in the Pacific.

“The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. It’s as if they’ve just crash-landed in one of their adventure books. Nothing but beach, shells, and water for miles. And better yet: no grown-ups.
On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy – Ralph – is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic, and handsome, he’s the golden boy of the bunch. Ralph’s game plan is simple. 1). Have fun. 2). Survive. 3). Make smoke signals for passing ships.
Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. Most of the boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Jack, the redhead, develops a passion for hunting pigs and as time progresses, he and his friends grow increasingly reckless. When a ship does finally pass in the distance, they’ve abandoned their post at the fire.
‘You’re breaking the rules!’ Ralph accuses angrily.
Jack shrugs. ‘Who cares?’
‘The rules are the only thing we’ve got!’
When night falls, the boys are gripped by terror, fearful of the beast they believe is lurking on the island. In reality, the only beast is inside them. Before long, they’ve begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
Of all the boys, only one manages to keep a cool head. Piggy, as the others call him because he’s pudgier than the rest, has asthma, wears glasses, and can’t swim. Piggy is the voice of reason, to which nobody listens. ‘What are we?’ he wonders mournfully....‘Savages?’
Weeks pass. Then, one day, a British naval officer comes ashore. The island is now a smoldering wasteland. Three of the children, including Piggy, are dead. ‘I should have thought,’ the officer reproaches them, ‘that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.’ Ralph, the leader of the once proper and well-behaved band of boys, bursts into tears.” (Rutger Bregman, Humankind, p. 22-23)

Golding writes: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”

The Lord of the Flies has sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into more than thirty languages and hailed as one of the classics of the twentieth century. Every year more high schoolers are assigned to read the book. The story is meant to illustrate, as Golding wrote in his letter to his publisher, that “even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it....Man produces evil as a bee produces honey” (qtd in Bregman, p. 23).

That’s the lie. We aren’t such a bad species.

The book was written for a readership reeling from the atrocities of World War II and asking themselves how Auschwitz could have happened. The idea that’s there’s a Nazi hiding in each of us just waiting for the chance to come out was grim, but at least it seemed to make sense of the events that had happened.

William Golding was an unhappy man: an alcoholic, prone to depression – a man unable to take the trouble to spell acquaintances’ names correctly. Biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal said, “there is no shred of evidence that this is what children left to their own devices will do.” And Frans de Waal had not then heard about the real case of shipwrecked boys on a deserted island.

It turns out there is such a story. And while millions have read William Golding’s fable, almost no one knew about the true story until more than 50 years after it happened when Rutger Bregman, researching his book that came out in Dutch in 2019, dug it up and tracked down the now-elderly survivors.

In June 1965, Luke, Sione, Fatai, Kolo, Tevita, and Mano -- six boys, ages 13 to 16, all pupils at St. Andrew’s, a strict Anglican boarding school on the South Pacific island of Tonga -- were bored. They longed for adventure instead of school assignments. They came up with a plan to escape to Fiji, some 800 kilometers away. Or maybe all the way to New Zealand. The boys stole a 7.3-meter boat from a fisherman they all disliked. They brought two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner – and that was pretty much it. No map. No compass.

The first night a bit of weather came up. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Then the rudder broke. For eight days they drifted – without water other than what rainwater they could collect in the coconut shells – which they shared equally, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

On the eighth day: a miracle. They spotted a small island – a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than 300 meters out of the ocean. The boys had stumbled upon Ata, an uninhabited island 450 acres in size.

“It had once been home to about 350 people, but in 1863 a British slave trader kidnapped about 150 of them, and the Tongan king relocated the rest to another island, where they would be protected.” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)

For over 100 years, the island had been deserted, and is today considered uninhabitable.

“At first the boys lived off raw fish, coconuts, and birds’ eggs. After about three months, they found the ruins of a village, and their fortunes improved — amid the rubble they discovered a machete, domesticated taro plants and a flock of chickens descended from the ones left behind by the previous inhabitants.” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)

For 15 months the boys were on that island – a year and a quarter – before they caught the attention of a passing fishing trawler. The captain that rescued them wrote that,

“By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” (qtd in Bregman, p. 32)

Fatai,

“after countless failed attempts, managed to produce a spark using two sticks. While the boys in the make-believe Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in the real-life Lord of the Flies tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarreled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, and ‘after four hours or so,’ Mano later remembered, ‘we’d bring them back together. Then we’d say, “OK, now apologize." That’s how we stayed friends.'
Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat, and played it to help lift their spirits.” (Bregman, p. 33)

Fatai slipped and fell off a cliff one day

“and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves." (Bregman, p. 33)

The leg healed perfectly.

Says Rutger Bregman: “The real Lord of the Flies is a story about friendship, and cooperation, and human resilience.”

In the delayed discovery of this story, the New York Times wrote: “The six boys flourished in their spontaneous community, suggesting that cooperation, not conflict, is an integral feature of human nature” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)

William Golding lied to us. So why has his novel seemed to so many to be realistic? I’ll look into that in part 2.

To part 2