Self marooned for 16 years - Tom Neale and his amazing life

foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] good to be here this is quite a story when I first read it I didn't realize there were such people maybe there aren't maybe I'm being too hopeful that this is actually plural because he seems unique to me in wanting to live alone on a desert island Robinson Crusoe style yeah and uh a kiwi champ and um an inspiration actually probably possibly more known outside of New Zealand than to new zealanders themselves but he wrote an amazing book called an island to oneself and his book was an inspiration that helped to kind of nurture the concept for my book certainly but on my travels around the Pacific and I've been to a few Islands now I've met at least one dozen individuals I can sort of name them all have been so inspired by Neil's book they went and lived a dream that they could only imagine before and I'm not surprised that his book became a bestseller Tom Neal spent a total of 16 years by himself on a remote coral island over three different spells between 1952 and 1977. now this island was only 800 meters long by 300 meters wide and it was 300 kilometers from the nearest inhabited aisle now surroth is about 800 kilometers Northwest of Rarotonga so it's a fair way up in the Pacific there and not many people get to go there and it was at the time especially out of the way from any shipping lanes or regular trade supply routes or anything like that yeah totally in fact there were a few yachties American ones in particular that were you know when you go from the cooks to Pago Pago an American Samoa you you generally go past suvaro but he he certainly picked a way out Place how this person came to find it and make the decision he took this on late in life and had a lot of life before even embarking on this 16 years in total on an 800 meter long atom yeah and he didn't get there until his 50s so you know it's been a fair bit of the time and he wasn't a sort of any sort of crank or a Mystic or hermit or even slightly barmy you know some people are inclined to call people who would sort of Cast Away on an island but I think Tom just simply wanted to get out of the Rat Race and to have the satisfaction of tending for himself and to prove that he could do it using his full strength of his body and mind and that was very important to him and he nearly didn't make it on several occasions he sort of beleaguered by mishaps including sort of near-disc brushes with poisonous corals and fish and and the most devastating Cyclones and physical mishaps and sickness but overall his experience was one of great contentment and isolation but interestingly there was no real history of Wonderland Justin Neil's family other than the motivation that may have bought his father who was born and buckinghamshire out to New Zealand after serving in the 17th Lancers that was about it really his father had a rather a rather sort of lackluster job as a company secretary in Wellington where he was born now 1902 Tom was born now when Thomas still a baby the family moved to Greymouth where his father was appointed paymaster for the state coal mines and when Thomas seven they moved again this time to Timaru Tom loved this place and he so excelled at school that he was able to skip standard two so you know he was a happy champ without a doubt he had a good good sort of persona to him right from a very young age but for a reason he could never explain he was a great writer Tom so you know we sort of know quite a bit about him although he's very careful to leave out a certainly with certain personal things it seemed utterly natural to him from an early age to sort of Imagine his working life based at Sea his parents went along with us and they took him up to devonport when he turned 18 to enlist in the Navy but they were absolutely dismayed to find he was still too old to be apprenticed as a seaman so he started as a stoker in the boiler room and that sort of satisfied him for a year or two because he felt like he was going to see the world or sort of so he thought but after our four years of sort of catching brief glimpses beyond the narrow streets of little ports they docked at you know what it would be like Tom brought himself out of the Navy and he'd seen quite a few places around the Pacific but he just loved the place and for the next sort of 10 years he wandered the islands just offering his Services as a stoker on the hundreds of little slow inter-island [ __ ] ships that crisscrossed all around the ports and when he felt like it he just settled down and got a job sort of clearing scrub or planting bananas always sticking to the local diet which suited as taste you know he was just another itinerant worker in the Pacific really he loved the Pacific Islands he really fell in love with them a little bit from I think it's from his book I really came to know and loved these islands strung like pearls across the Pacific beautiful writing he said Mana hickey at dawn is the Schooner threads its way through the reef pepiidi at Sunset was a Pacific lapping against the Main Street the haze of the coconut palms at pukapuka he was quite a writer actually and he saw great Beauty in his surroundings you know but after 10 years sort of wandering around he came back age 28 and he phoned his father who said which Tom you know he hadn't really communicated with them very much he wrote down how he looked at his mother one evening in her armchair the way that he always remembered her before he left and he thought to himself is it really possible that for all these years while I've been seeing the world she's just sat there every evening apparently content you know she was there when he left and was in the same spot when he hear the same chair and so you know he took off again and he settled in Tahiti at moraya actually and he learned perfect Tahitian uh and he just um enjoyed the swimming and the moonlit lagoons every night so he's developed a sort of trait of talking to himself and he would ask himself questions like Neil he used to address himself as Neil he said this is the nearest thing to Paradise on Earth you know and so he sort of um asked himself a question and reply back and he said this was a good attribute to have living in the Pacific it was a long time before he could live his dream and it's not a one-dimensional dream either it takes some peculiar twists and turns the beauty of the islands as he saw it it really suited him it was his thing he fell in love with them but it wasn't enough for him was it he had this hankering yeah he met a schooner Captain called um Andy Thompson he had 100 tan Schooner and the two got on well and he got offered a job as a sort of uh store Keepers in the Pacific you know which is a sort of all comprehensive job you do everything off a medical advice just about kerosene you know one of those sort of jobs and you go from Island Ireland and he did this for um quite a few years actually but he he wasn't very satisfied doing it without a doubt and he took a ton of twist of fate really he got uh when he was the sail back to um to Rarotonga was Thompson at one stage and he said within two days of arriving he he was introduced to an American writer called Robert Dean Frisbee now he was quite well known he used to write books about the Pacific as sort of Pacific name was rupate and Neil had already read the author's books about the Pacific and the two immediately hit it off and over a bottle of rum one sort of lazy Pacific afternoon frisbee first mentioned um silver off tune to Tom nearly said Tommy said sue Roth is the most beautiful place on Earth no man has really lived and until he's lived there now Tom had heard of this big Lagoon which is about 800 kilometers north northwest of Rarotonga and in the British called it suara of course but it was way off the usual trade routes anyway they ended the conversation with Neil got up to leave he said sounds like the place for me and frisbee um speedily retorted back to him he said well if you feel like that why don't you just go and live there well this idea is sort of simmered now he became more and more um fixed on this idea of going there now to put this in historical context the rest of the world is in the midst of World War II yeah exactly in 90 about 1943 here there's no way that he could possibly go there there were New Zealand coastwatchers there on Anchorage which was the main little island of which Tom eventually settled but there was no way that he could possibly go there but he knew one day that he would get there he had to wait till the end of the war before he got a look and it was 1945 live when the Schooner Captain Andy Thompson he said the Knicks run that he was doing up to the northern Cooks maybe they'd could take a look at silveroff well he was on like a shot there was no way they were going to keep him off their boat and took them about 11 days to sail up there suvaro Lagoon was calm as they quietly made their way over the corals so beautiful no painter could have ever captured them Tom said but inside the Lagoon he said it was like floating on vast pieces of colored satin on the blinding white Beach of Anchorage the two New Zealand Coast watches that had been waving frantically as the Schooner approaches the first people I'd seen in months there were people on the island waving to save us save us we're Cast Away yeah and they were the coast Watchers of course had they been forgotten about no they were still there but they didn't get picked up for some time after the war it just didn't end immediately of course but on the beach the mean appeared cheerful and boisterous but Neil immediately detected in this two countrymen a sort of underlying anger if you like that the war has dealt on such a dirty card and they were still marooned as Castaways on a god forsaken desert island they couldn't wait to get off but quietly over the next couple of days Neil took an every bit of detail of their lives a little Shack that built their water tanks full and in good repair their little fine Garden of vegetables which had been hacked out of the tropical Wilderness he noticed that there were heaps of poor poor breadfruit bananas and he imagined inheriting their nightmare which was actually his dream although this is a good day isn't it there have been bad days tell us what happened in the hurricane of 1942. well that was the biggest hurricane to probably go through the cooks for many decades and and at Silver off 16 of its 22 little eyelets were washed away in a matter of hours Robert Frisby had actually written a book called The Island of Desire about Sven on suvroth but it was definitely his lowest moment he said he had his four children with him and he had to tie them to trees to stop them getting blown away oh my God Outdoors tie your children to trees yeah at about one meter above sea level the only four or five Big Trees on the oil and be prepared to tie yourself to them Don knew what he was getting in for he had to go back to the cooks of course he had a job and various things and it took him another seven years to get there and his opportunity finally came in 1952 and he just turned 50. right and what has he been doing in these intervening best part of a decade while it's been stewing in the back of his mind I've got to get to superov well he'd been working as this itinerant Island shopkeeper if you like he was quietly saving but when I say saving 79 pounds was his entire life savings by 1952 now the captain of a schooner said he was going up there and he could take him there and he wanted 30 pounds to drop him off so he had exactly 49 pounds to buy everything that he could take with them to go and live there for what he thought would be the rest of his life took clothes tools cooking eating utensils threads needles six pairs of tennis shoes from Reef walking fish hooks even a few copper Nails in case the coast watches had left behind their skiff this is a total commitment he's given all of his life savings into the survival cargo that he needs to live alone on this thing for the rest of his life that's right the thing that worried him most though was not sickness but toothache every Outsider it's the thing that eventually brings them to town got thoroughly examined by a dentist in Rarotonga and he found that there's only one tooth that had to come out so he he felt in good shape and he decided against a gun or a radio because he didn't like killing things and he wouldn't be able to use any of them anyway after the bullets or the batteries were used up well that's a remarkable decision not to take a firearm you'd never know no you know and it was actually something he regretted initially too and also things like bamboo poles and banana saplings and of course two stray cats why take cats yeah company company and also um rats and when the day came to sail he was so disappointed because the captain got a order from his boss to say they weren't going past Palmerston atoll now which meant that suvro was off the itinerary he basically cried but the captain assured him that they'd be going past again in another month or so so he had to unload all this cargo again plead with his landlord could he just stay a few more weeks in the shack that he was staying and finally this Ship Sails his near lifelong dream since he heard about this island he gets there and I understand that it wasn't a great pull free or anything so or goodbye to to see him off they just dumped him there and that's exactly what they did they just dumped him on the beach with all his crates and packages the boat just sailed away and he said that his heart was in his mouth as he walked up the overgrown path to where he remembered the coast watches Shaq has been and would anything be left he said his heart sunk when he found it completely covered in rampant tropical growth how long is it since he saw that island and now he's back for only the second time that he's ever seen it right yeah for seven years right and at one end of The Veranda there was another little disappointment when he spotted the skiff with two huge cracks and he went back down to the beach and he let out the two cats that began meowing for Freedom you know and within five minutes the mother kept killed his first rat good work cat yeah the first thing he did he discarded his shorts to wear a Peru piece of cloth around your loins you know native style he he basically reverted if you like okay the shack he was expecting the shack to be there this is the old Coast watches from World War II that were waving saying save us what's left in there for him he had a reasonable bed the water tank was full of sort of clean rain water and and a toilet and bath house still existed out the back there a chicken came to visit him another of the sort of Coast watches left over so he at least he knew he had eggs and Anna's very first journal entry before he went to bed that first night on suvaro he wrote haven't had time for a proper look around but I can see miles of work sticking out there will be no time for Sydney under a tree and watching The Reef not for a long time anyway it was the next morning though that he found he had other company yeah because he woke up to a most serious squealing just outside he said it just froze him with fear but soon of course it was followed by lots of grunting which he quickly recognized so so the rumors that silvero had wild pigs was true this would be a terrible trauma for him over the next few months because he could never get a garden established or anything else they wreaked havoc on the island right it was him or the pigs he had to decide because he wasn't going to be able to establish anything resembling self-sustainability with that competition no that's right it was we basically he he declared war but for someone who didn't want to kill very much it was became quite a onerous thing for him he had to sort out a plan because he didn't have a gun of course no he didn't have a gun and this is going to make an unpleasant job from his point to view even more unpleasant that's right he knew there were about five wild pigs on the island because they all came to eat the coconut that he he lay out to entice the wild fowl and and the issue of those big animals sort of occupied him more and more because he knew if he didn't do something about killing and catching them they'd not be able to start a garden even you know and he had all these little seedlings going Neil gave quite a lot of thought to how he was going to get these pigs you know and he was now hell-bent on on getting them you can obsess over that sort of thing and I suppose fair enough he was living on fish Plenty of Fish there in the lagoon and things like that though yeah so easy to get and they particularly like the lobsters that he could just wait out not even up to his knees and just pull them out by their feelers so she could just get with a spear I mean it was a little Paradise really and he gets started to gather the eggs from the wild fowl that he had tamed and and he got all these vegetable seedlings raised in boxes and soils meticulously reared them but the thing was that he couldn't put them out until the pigs were gone so he realized that he had to kill these pigs one by one he thought of pits with spikes and sneers but in the end he knew the only practical solution was to actually tackle them with a spear so for several nights he's sharpened a broken machete blade until he could have shaved with it and then he tied it to a stout Pole from his experience he knew pigs didn't look up so he spent three days building a sort of platform four meters up a coconut palm he spent four nights up the tree with cut open coconuts scattered all around and he waited in vain but on the fifth night the dark shadow appeared and the vines and creepers and the Big Boar was weary but it kept coming closer and closer and when it was directly below Neil who was perfectly still until then he plunged the spear deep into the pig's back and there was a terrific squeal and and the pig ran off with the spear lurching wildly from the body and jumping down Neil chased it and finally caught and slashed it to death with his machete and of course he just threw up he felt so bad about it he couldn't bring himself to eat that pig say resolved to bury it the very next day it does seem a remarkable waste of protein he's not a vegetarian yeah and it took him a whole year to kill all the five pigs but but you know it's hard work of bound perseverance paid off in the weeks following this sort of pretty really basic eradication project an amazing transition began on the island poor poor trees sprouted everywhere and bananas began to flourish and now Neil could sort of plant out his garden it fixed the skiff too by cooking it with strands of leftover rope that he teased out and covered it all with a sort of thick layer of paint and thin bits of wood and he renamed it the ruptured duckling and things were starting to pull together for him now that little boat opened up a whole new welcome because one by one he visited the other Islands nearby but then he had another problem there were plenty of flowers on this plant but there were no fruit or vegetables performing and of course living so far in the ocean there were no Bees so he began meticulously hand pollinating all the flowers of his vegetable plants he's got all day to do this though hasn't he yeah does his work I mean what else did he do really within three months of realizing this he was picking tomatoes and by four months pumpkins and the most wonderfully delicious melons and his foul run was successful too and every day collected eggs and even had Surplus roosters for the pot and not shared with another Soul other than the cat no he didn't get his first visitor until 1953 huh what sort of of shock was that to him to see a sale on the horizon as they used to say his first reaction he said was one of disbelief in a shadow of aversion went through him as he walked back to his Shack and and put on his shorts for the first time since he'd arrived but as soon as they dropped anchor offshore Anil did the right thing and rode out and and the big Sloop had two American couples who'd been Keen to take a tour around the island and the British Consul in papiiti an old friend of Tom's actually had asked him to call him and see how he was and they all got on immensely well the woman were highly impressed at Tom had everything so Ship Shape they said they're right down to his drawing tea towels and his polished drinking glasses we spent the first evening aboard their yacht consumed a bottle of fine rum and as the first alcohol nearly drunk since he arrived on suvro and it would be the first news of the outside world he hadn't taken a radio oh how interested he was about the outside world you know you do wonder he doesn't mention it very much has broke hardly at all his trip was himself really Elvis who Edmond Hillary what mountain yeah exactly he enjoyed their company but he wasn't sad at all that they left he said it was so natural that they should go and leave him alone it was while trying to build a pier out of coral you got a cut and oh dear oh dear this was his nightmare wasn't it what happens if I get sick he labored on this project for months he's been ages lifting these big Coral blocks into position he didn't have gloves or anything so of course he would have cut himself didn't he'd gone down with sickness before but never as bad as as when he got it when he was doing this pier in four days it just engulfed him in waves temperature soared his beard was just soaked to a sweat and in between the hot flushes he just shivered at the end of it he wrote in his journal felt weak but managed to collect some eggs and had 10 for tea hurricanes do hit he'd spent months and months building stuff around this island what happened yeah he spent six months entirely on this pier doing virtually nothing else even in an opening ceremony where he thanked himself as a local contractor complimented himself for completing a near impossible task in record time and he declared a public holiday day for the cats and he went to bed that night just as the barometer started to fall sharply and the Eerie calm you know before the storm and it filled almost tread he said that night a place just got hit just slammed by a hurricane he buried his tools in the ground he made all the preparations right preparations and and he found himself outside his Hut you know holding on for dear life to one of the five Big Trees the tamanu trees just like frisbee had done and the wind screamed he thought the Hut would get blown away you know and the next day as the wind died down he made his way back down the track and just a huge tangle of windfalls and his peer was completely gone six months of hard labor just wrecked and six many hours really of this hurricane and in his diary he wrote I felt so downhearted that I didn't even use any bad language just walked back slowly to the house well the next remarkable thing which would have worried him greatly something struck him what What's Happening Here it also on his little skiff one day to one tree island it was the smallest of the suvaro at holes he was walking up the beach and suddenly he was struck by the sharp stabbing pain across his back it just caused him to collapse he couldn't even move there's no way he was just a lying there in the beating Sun for several hours he just tried to move but he just couldn't even move a muscle he was just completely crippled by this pain finally summing up enough's courage he made his way on all fours back to the skiff luckily the wind was blowing back to his Island he sort of managed to get in and let the boat drift out he tried to row couldn't do it he thought he was just going to die and in this book The Blow by blow ordeal occupies 10 pages of getting back to his Island every minute detail he did get back to his Island spending the afternoon crawling back up the beach and track and he just collapsed into bed and for the next few days he was just in and out of Consciousness and then he suddenly thought he heard voices and he heard someone call out anyone home and he said is that and there's two fellows off a boat and he said come on and come on in and there were two suntan Sailors there sort of gingerly entering his bedroom he said Christ he said it's a white man he said to the other one they said to him that he should go back in the boat with them that that something was seriously wrong with them they're on their way to Samoa and they didn't want to deviate back but they said that they would send a boat back to get him it was only a matter of weeks then that Tom got picked up by a schooner that came to get him he thought it was best actually that he'd get back and and once back in Rarotonga a doctor examined him pronounced that it actually just had an acute arthritis now this was great news for Tom because he said that it was nothing serious he had a few things to overcome first before he goes to silveroff the resident Commissioner's Office was his main hurdle he went to see him to say he was going back to silveroff the verdict was no they were worried about his health Neil protested by writing to the ministry of Ireland territories in Wellington but they only referred it back to the commissioner in Rarotonga and so it went round and circled the man's powers were obsolete because all the commissioner had to do was contact all the Schooner captains and say that if they dropped Neil off at suvaro they would be legally obliged to call in every so often and check up on his health and so that would stop anyone taking him you see he spent a year going back and forth from the commissioner's office but the official was unrelenting so he had little Choice really but to take up his old job as a store keeper as heart sunk of course he spent another six years in Rarotonga well six years yeah waiting to get the opportunity to go back and see I was veggie garden isn't it yeah one thing that did come to him though was an inheritance of 250 pounds after his mother died so Neil now had a considerable amount of money because there's all his expenses in Rarotonga only came to one pound a week so he quit his job and in secret started building a 12-foot boat finally he got back to suvaro and this time he met an American Seaman called Lauren Smith who'd sailed to Rarotonga and he was Keen to take him back in his catch to suvaro for 50 pounds and so Neil went back he realized he had the trump card now he went back to the commissioner and said I'm leaving for Subaru tomorrow and commissioner said well good luck he knew that he couldn't stop him because it was an American registered yacht they towed his dinghy back in March 1960 took them 11 days again to reach suvaro and it was full of cages of new chooks they couldn't get all Neil's mountain of supplies into Yachts so they did a second run actually later on so he's quite well equipped he found all his buildings exactly like the first time all covered in Vines and vegetation and everything needed redoing again you know he found the note scrawled on a cardboard and tacked to the door where they left and it said to whom it may concern do not kill any of my aristas or fouls and do not take my stools or use my boat I shall return within three weeks T Neil well it took him six years of course yeah well there's his note yeah all right it just shows how off the the beaten shipping Lane shall we say um this place is okay he makes the start of a second stay on the island with all that work to do again compelled to be there isn't he yeah and he's lasted three and a half years on a second stint how old is he now he's 60 something yeah I'm about 63 and he he didn't work so hard this time but he took it a lot easier and listened to his body and with a seed more seaworthy boat he literally explored the other at holes he actually set up a little summer residence on Motu II one of the other little Islands he definitely improved his lifestyle on that second trip he was the king of his domain yeah that's right and I think the shortest visit of anyone he got suddenly his sort of Silence was shattered with a sudden rivaled two helicopters carrying 15 military personnel from the U.S Navy and they were explained to Neil that the aircraft carrier was on their way to New Zealand and they could take him back there if he wanted to be rescued and he said but I don't want to be rescued he said I want to be here and and the captain said well I'll be down Robinson Crusoe comes true they had a half hour visit the quickest of anyone to souvero while um Neil resided there they were very impressed with his residence and they promised to contact his sister in New Zealand to tell her that he was still alive and their visit had huge consequences for Neil because the U.S Navy issued a brief news item about visiting the hermit of suvaro and it came to the attention of American journalists well-known one called Noel Barber and he turned up there about five months later with a photographer called Chuck smooze on a chartered boat from Pago Pagan that's been a lot of effort to get to him and these stories published on back home it made Sensational reading in the United States and most new zealanders were still completely unaware of Neil's existence but it started a run of Yachts to go and see him he became almost a kind of a crusade if you like we shall go and see this amazing hermit of suvaro right yeah an idea that destroys Itself by perception if people go visit him all the time that's right he was went very well the second sojourned and on the island but things can change in an instant and it was on a sunny day on the 30th of August 1963 when he suddenly looked up from his Veranda to find an American yachty staring at him and he he turned up with a Samoan wife and daughter in their boat and they all got on very well but as they were Shifting The Yacht one night this American yachty he he managed to hit it as a coral head and it sunk within minutes so suddenly he had these Trio turned up this husband and wife with a daughter and they were Castaways with him now oh all right that could uh destroy the Tranquility of the place yeah that's right so from that night the four of them should sort of shared the bedroom of the tiny Shack and they had no positions other than the clothes they were wearing and for two weeks they salvaged everything they could from the toothpaste to the binoculars they dive down into this boat 40 times a day into the cabin it was obsessed with finding his false teeth and his wife was desperately after her carton of cigarettes and they finally found them and some were even dry enough to smoke much to the woman's absolute delight and Neil recorded in this journal that he'd never met a more addicted smoker all right the permanent change would be when somebody else decided to set up camp Subaru that's right the Shipwrecked family were removed by the New Zealand naval ship the pukaki and that was great but I think the turning point for Don Neal became when a whole lot of pearl divers turned up it's an unexpected arrival of 10 of these divers who came to camp on suvaro not far from the beach from a shack and they were all happy-go-lucky sort of manahiki Islanders and it was not that he disliked them but they bought a kind of untidiness in the festival atmosphere which he hated a decision had been made in Rarotonga to send more divers who would soon be coming on a sort of regular basis he didn't regret his decision to return to Rarotonga to live in because two years later he finished writing that his most successful book okay so he did decide he thought okay I'm going back to Rarotonga in this PostScript of his book Neil said he proved to himself that he could make a go of it on a desert island and be happy enough living alone he said I've had a hurt wealth of memories no man can ever take from me before taking off on his third sojourned on suvaro he married a cook Island woman very quietly and had a child with who two years later now it says something about the privacy of this man that he barely talked about this marriage and when his book was republished in 1999 there was no updated mention was made of a third stay on the island yeah so we decided to go there again with wife and child to live and it's a 10-year stay and we don't know anything no hardly anything he left his wife and child back in Rarotonga oh sorry yeah so he's Lisa's wife and child back in Rarotonga he goes for another 10 years yeah a day on Subaru yeah yeah and when he got back there were notes pinned to his Hut from yachty's who had read his book presuming he would return which he did in June 1967 but prior to that there's so many people had been inspired by Neil's book that they visited the island you know there was one woman June Donald pay in 1964 she was a former accountant from Honolulu and she lived alone in this house in suvro for a week and and while her crewmates were on the Schooner they stayed on board their vessel and another guy called Michael Swift he lived alone on suvaro waiting for him to turn up against but many other sort of short-term visitors traveled there especially to leave messages for him presuming he would return when he came back he he had all these messages pinned to his door would you believe it you know but he led a very sedentary and laid back life on the third visit Andy he received an ever a number increasing number of yachties mainly Americans who were very inspired by his story it's a bit of a tragic end for Tom when he finally became ill on his Island he wasn't sure he had stomach severe stomach pains and he was taken bypassing yacht back to Rarotonga and he was diagnosed with stomach cancer but he died eight months after his return from suvaro and he died on the 27th of November 1977 he was aged 75 so the last 10 years was his 60s and 70s that are pretty much alone on that island that's incredible yeah it is basically from 64 to 74 he lived on that island and here you can go and see his gravy Spirit In The Returned Services Association Cemetery in Rarotonga just opposite the International Airport there and his legacy lives on through his remarkable Story one of the sort of a perfect Escape in the south sea Islands there's no desert island of Silver Oak and it was an ambition shed by many but it took a very special person to accomplish it I reckon and today Subaru enjoys a sort of similar protection at a national park and Yachts regularly calling me on the way to to Rarotonga to pagapado and it's commonplace now to see a dozen sailboats at any one time anchored in the lagoon and it would be criminal for them not to understand that story that unfolded there and that last 10 years is just no real reports on it though and this is longest day it's the most confounding thing yeah it is and very little information about it and Neil Shack is still used by the island visiting government caretakers I've spoken to quite a few people why did he originally go there and why did frisbee why was he so interested in the island well there is a treasure connection actually supposedly a Spanish Galleon got wrecked there in 1742. there is a strong suspicion amongst several people that I've spoken to that the interest in Subaru was because a Spanish Galleon was wrecked there in 1742. In 1855 apparently there was 15 000 US dollars of banished gold coins that were reportedly dug up on suvaro another smaller cash later on also this is certainly some of the interests of yachties that go there although Tom never mentioned this in his book I actually think he had pure emotives than that actually well it's an amazing life and one that stretches well into many many people's living memory 1977 and a kiwi kiwi through and through yeah yeah unbelievable yeah foreign [Music]

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Length: 37min 7sec (2227 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023