We all had our choldhood heroes. Mine were Dr Albert Schweitzer who built a leper hospital at Lambaréné, Heinrich Harrer who lived for seven years in Tibet, Heinz Helfgen who "radelt um die Welt", and Thor Heyerdahl and his five companions on the "Kon-Tiki".
When I lived in what is today Namibia in the late 1960s, I added Henno Martin who, along with Hermann Korn, lived for two-and-a-half years in the inhospitable Namib Desert to avoid internment during the Second World War, and while I worked on Thursday Island in 1977, I added Oskar Speck who paddled a tiny 'faltboot' from Germany to the Torres Strait.
And then, sometime in my sixties, I found in an obscure little op-shop on the shores of Burril Lake a small book that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, from the pen of some obscure storyteller, who had spent sixteen years totally alone on a tropical atoll in the South Pacific.
For a preview of the audiobook, click here
That man was Tom Neale and the book is "An Island to Oneself". Trying to describe the book to those who haven't read it can be difficult. It is not just a book about living on a desert island. Its essence is larger than that. It's a book about a passion for simplicity; it's about being alone and doing alone. It tells us that life is incomplete without dreams and risk. It teaches the important and hard to appreciate truths that the ocean is beautiful and violent, that soil is precious and that there is a use for a bicycle pump on a desert island. It's a book about how to dream and how we might live. It is a book that became a place — Suwarrow Atoll.
I've read this little book a dozen times already, and I pick it up again every time I find another piece of the puzzle that was Tom Neale. A few years ago, I read of a recording made of Tom's voice by the German single-handed circumnavigator Rollo Gebhard - click here - and wrote to his widow Angelika for a copy which she graciously made available to me, but which I am not allowed to make public for copyright reasons.
Today I found this amazing footage of Tom Neale uploaded on YouTube about a year ago. It is in Russian and was filmed by the crew of a Soviet oceanographic vessel in 1977, which seems rather fitting since Suwarrow was first discovered by the Russian-American Company ship Suvorov, which reportedly followed clouds of birds to the atoll on 17 September 1814. The ship was named after Russian general Alexander Suvorov and the atoll that now bears his name has variously been spelled Souvorow, Souwaroff, and Souworoff. "Suwarrow" is today's official spelling.
