II don't suppose I shall ever forget that day. I was awake, lying on my back, when I distinctly thought I heard voices, a sort of low hum like two men talking. Not being a religious man, I hadn't thought much about miracles and at first I imagined it must be a dream. And, of course, it had to be a dream, however real the voices sounded, because the only other alternative must that I was going mad. I opened my eyes. Every object in my bedroom became clearly visible. Then I heard the voices again, followed by footsteps - and suddenly, wildly excited, I knew that this was no dream and that those voices must belong to fishermen who had landed on the island from Manihiki. I tried to shout, but though I could feel the muscles moving in my throat, no sound came out.
The voices suddenly changed from a low incomprehensible jumble of sound into a distinct clear cough - the sort of apologetic cough a man makes when he enters a room unbidden - followed by two simple words, startlingly clear:
"Anybody home?"
"Who is it?" I managed to croak.
"Two fellows off a boat," cried the unknown voice.
"Come in, come in," I gasped.
In retrospect the delicacy displayed by my unknown visitors over entering my bedroom seems almost ludicrous. Two men now entered the room. My field of vision was limited, because I was unable to lift my head, but I was relieved to see quite clearly two brown, bearded faces - brown, yet the sunburned brown of white men. They stared at my face for a moment, and I noticed their eyes travel down to my chest, my pareu covering my loins. Then, in a surprised voice, one of them said, "Christ! He's a white man!"
"My name's Tom Neale," I gasped again. "Dislocated my back. You'll have to help me up. What day is it?"
"Wednesday." They were still staring at me.
"What's the date?" I asked
"The twenty-sixth."
I still couldn't believe it. "I must have been lying here four days," I said. "Trying to summon the nerve to sit up."
"Good God!" The stranger nearest to me looked really concerned. "You must be starved. What can I cook you?"
"I sure would like a cup of tea, thanks." (Later they told me I even managed to grin.)
"Where shall I brew it?" he asked, glancing round my simple room.
I told him he could make a fire out in the cook-house, and this amazing man (whose name I was very soon to discover was Peb) briskly told his friend, "Go and make some tea, Bob, and I'll see if I can manoeuvre him into a sitting position."
From his accent I had already guessed he was an American, and as he bent over me now, his black beard brushing my face, I recognised the type - enormously strong, an inborn longing for adventure, undoubtedly a good sailor, all these obvious qualities concealing an inner capacity for gentleness and kindness.
"Don't worry, Tom," he told me as he did one strong arm under my shoulders, "it'll hurt once - but only once."
It hurt like hell, but now it hardly seemed to matter. I gritted my teeth and in one movement he had me sitting up. As he had said, once it was over, it was over.
"It's made you sweat," he said gently. "Here, let me help you." He vanished into the kai room, came back with a teacloth and began to wipe the sweat off my back and shoulders.
"I'll be all right in a minute," I said. I could hear his companion calling from the cook-house that the fire was going.
"What you need," replied Peb, "is a good meal. Every single rib you've got is showing. Hang on for a little while. I'll row back to my boat for some supplies."
Then, almost as an afterthought, "Do you use cigarettes?"
There was nothing I craved more in the world, but somehow that American accent with its curious expression, "Do you use cigarettes?" coming on top of the shock of relief and the certainty I was not dreaming, produced a ridiculous reaction. I started laughing. I don't really know why, but I think I must suddenly have remembered a Western I had read one evening in the shack. Sitting alone, I'd laughed then over a line when someone posed a question to the sheriff, and he had replied, "You're darned well right I do." I had an uncontrollable impulse to answer Peb with the same phrase until I saw the concern on his face. "You all right, Tom?" he asked anxiously.
"A smoke would be really something now," I compromised.
That night I ate my finest meal for many a month - a bowl of good thick vegetable soup, a tin of meat and some tinned fruit. There were other miraculous things which Peb had brought over from his yacht. A stiff tot of rum - my first drink since I had finished the bottle Tom Worth had given me - a carton of cigarettes and, almost more important, a bottle of liniment with which my two new friends took it in turn to massage my back.
That massage did me a world of good, so much so that by that evening I was even able to sit up on one of my box chairs - so long as I remained bolt upright - whilst Peb and Bob told me the story of how it was they had come to arrive on Suvarov at such an amazing and providential moment.
"Peb" was the nickname for James Rockefeller. He lived in Maine, and had come to the Pacific some months ago in his boat, the Mandalay, accompanied by his friend Bob Grant. They had spent the time sailing from island to island, "Which," as Peb explained, "is the perfect way to learn about the South Pacific."
Peb was making notes and taking photographs for a book - which he was later to publish - and I have the impression that they had enough money to last them for some months. Over the years I had met several young, adventurous Americans who had saved hard, then thrown up their jobs to make a trip of this sort before settling down, and they fitted into the mould.
Having left Tahiti nearly eight hundred miles astern, they had set course for Samoa when Peb, who had been looking through the Pilot Directions had come across what he described to me as "one magic phrase." It was: "Suvarov is uninhabited."
They decided to spend a couple of weeks on a desert island.
"As soon as I read the word 'Suvarov' I remembered all about the place," Peb told me that evening. "I'd read how treasure had been found on the island, and of course I'd read my Frisbie before I left the States. When I glanced through Pilot directions I just felt an impelling urge to see what it was like."
Not for a moment had it ever entered their heads there might be someone living on the island. Peb told me they had both stared unsuspectingly at the deserted beach through their binoculars until something suddenly riveted their attention. It was my boat pulled up on the sand and, next to it under the palms, my special chair.
They anchored and rowed ashore. "One of the things that struck us was that the name 'Raptured Duckling' had been painted on your boat with a very shaky hand," said Peb. Once on the beach they discovered the path I had made and walked up it towards the shack. It must have been an eerie sensation - the Ruptured Ducking, the chair - and yet no sign of life. "It reminded me a bit of the Marie Celeste," Bob told me.
On reaching the porch, they had both shouted loudly. But although their voices must have been forceful enough to have been heard all over Anchorage, there had been nothing but a strange, uncanny silence.
There seemed nothing to do but go inside the shack. "The first room I looked into seemed to be a sort of study or office," Peb told me. "I could see books on the shelves and the desk piled high with papers and magazines. Then I looked into the second room - your bedroom. It was a bit dark and at first I couldn't see anything except the lower end of your wooden bed with its white sheet; then by God, I saw two feet on that sheet. We were so astounded that Bob whispered to me that we ought to have knocked, and he coughed, hoping you might hear us. I had a horrible fear that a dead man lay in that room. It was then that I called out, 'Anybody home?' boy! Was I glad when I heard your voice!"
My visitors stayed two weeks with me on Suvarov, nursing me back to life with wonderful care and gentleness and building me up with good solid tinned food from the Mandalay. It was the sort of food I had not eaten for months, and it was borne in on me once again that the human body needs meat of some sort to sustain it, especially when there is heavy manual labour to be done. Swapping our food worked very well, for they were delighted to eat fresh fish, eggs, fowls, vegetables and fruit, while I wallowed in tinned pork and beef, and cooked wonderful fresh bread with their flour.
In those two very happy weeks, my back seemed to improve with an almost incredible speed, though, as I noted in my journal, I was unable to use both hands to wash my face until June 8 - nearly two weeks after the seizure. Twice a day Peb or Bob rubbed me down with liniment and soon I was able to walk fairly easily and even take an occasional dip in Pylades Bay. Every now and then, however, a twinge doubled me up as it stabbed its way right across my back, and reminded me vividly that things were far from right just yet. Although each spasm passed comparatively quickly, it was clear there was some lasting damage.
"Don't think you've licked it," Peb told me towards the end of their stay. "You'll never lick it till you see a doc."
Not unnaturally, I had been giving a great deal of thought to the future, for I was really frightened about the state of my back. The memory of that morning on One Tree motu still disturbed me as vividly as the occasional twinge of pain, and I knew Peb was right. I would never recover until I had some sort of medical attention. I might be able to carry on for a few months if I were careful, but what sort of a life would it be for a man hundreds of miles from any sort of help, perpetually forced to walk gingerly, think twice before daring to lift a spade or chop down a nut? I was in no doubt now that it was exertion that brought on the crippling pain; a sudden jerk, the quick instinctive tensing of muscles even before the message had passed from brain to limb. A disability like this was obviously an impossibility on an island where physical effort was vital in order to keep alive. I had to face it. This serious weakness would not only make life impossible, but little short of suicidal into the bargain.
Had I had a companion, a Man Friday, I might have been tempted to remain, for Peb's constant help had proved that a companion could quickly get me into a sitting position, and unlock the muscles I would have been powerless to free alone. But there was no companion, and soon even Peb would be on his way.
"I suppose I'll have to leave," I remember saying as we walked slowly along the beach just as dusk was falling, the time of the day I like best of all. "I hate the idea, but I'm scared of my back - and I want to live a little longer."
Peb was sympathy itself. Tactfully he offered me passage to Pago Pago although he did not have much room on the Mandalay. I refused, however, for two reasons. Were he to land me in Samoa, I would be left with no prospect but to borrow or work for the money necessary for a passage back to Raro on the infrequent boats that plied between the port and Pago Pago. If I had to return to Raro, then I wanted to go there directly. And secondly, something else held me back, something that inhibited me from travelling away from my island with Peb and Bob, wonderful fellows though they were. They could never grasp just what leaving the island was going to mean to me. There was no reason why these two young, intelligent men "doing" the Pacific should understand. I admired their courage and eagerness to discover what life was like amongst the islands in the real tough way (rather than on a conducted tour), but I knew too that for them the experience would never have nostalgic memory related around the fireside to their children, brought alive with albums of photos so that they could relive the great adventure of their youth.
To me, in sharp contrast, the island was not an adventure, it was something infinitely bigger . . . a whole way of life; and so, if I had to leave Suvarov, I knew it was vital I would spend my last few weeks alone on the island. I have seldom ever felt anything more strongly and I think Peb understood this, for he did not attempt to persuade me to change my mind, but merely nodded at my attempt to explain my feeling, and agreed to my suggestion that when he reached Pago Pago he should send a cable to the Commissioner in Raro, telling him I was ill, and asking him to instruct the next schooner for Manihiki to pick me up on her way back. The commissioner would probably be angry since this sort of thing cost Government money, but in my present mood I was not unduly over-sensitive over the risk of incurring a little official wrath.
And so on our last night together we had a farewell party, and I cannot do better than quote from my journal on Sunday, June 6: "Killed another rooster for the last meal my friends will share with me here, since they are due to leave tomorrow provided the weather is suitable. We had a wonderful meal with a bottle of champagne chilled in a wet bag hung in the shade in the breeze and finishing off with chocolate cake (iced and cooked on the boat) and some good coffee. The best meal I've yet had here."
After our meal, a tot or two of rum kept us yarning halfway through the night which was clear and filled with stars. I was very moved because I liked these two boys immensely, and could not escape a gently melancholy (eased by the rum) knowing that, life being what it is, this was probably the last time I would ever see and talk to the two men whom chance had sent to save my life.
Just as I anticipated that night, I never have seen Peb or Bob again, though we have corresponded, and I hear Peb had married and settled down. The morning of their departure, Peb asked me over to the Mandalay there, ready for me, were some stores, a good supply of cigarettes, and a couple of bottles of rum.
"They'll tide you over until the island schooner comes to pick you up-" Peb gave me a final handshake - "and for God's sake be careful."
"See you one of these days!" cried Bob, and then in no time, it seemed, Bob was winding up the anchor and almost before I realised what was happening, the Mandalay was slowly moving as the first wind caught her sail. I stood by the broken-down pier for a long time watching her slowly getting smaller.
When the yacht was almost out of sight, I turned and walked up the coral-edged path to the shack and brewed myself a cup of tea. It was an important moment. During the last two weeks the three of us had proved conclusively that three can be good company. Never for one moment had we exchanged a cross word, never experienced a moment of discord. They had proved staunch friends, the sort of friends one does not often meet in a lifetime. Yet when the kettle started to hiss, and I warmed the pot, and put a larger spoonful in for good luck, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace.
Two weeks were to elapse before the ship called to pick me up.
Looking back, although I had to be very careful about moving around and was always conscious of my back, these were the happiest weeks of my life.
(Read the full book, "An Island To Oneself", here.)
Tom Neale's book ends with his second stay on Suvarov on December 27, 1963 but he did return for a third stay on the island from Juny 1, 1967 until March 3, 1977 when he was evacuated from Suvarov. He died from stomach cancer in Rarotonga on November 30, 1977.
If you're as much of a Tom Neale fan as I am, you will remember the story of Tom's miraculous rescue from the island by James S. Rockefeller who also wrote about it in his own book "Man on His Island". This book is not so much about sailing as it is about people who live on islands. I have been trying to find a copy of this book for years but it's been out of print and the occasional copy on sale sells for several hundred dollars.
I was lucky enough to find Chapter 15 which describes his visit at Suvarov - click here.
It was also published in England, Germany and Norway, where it is considered one of ten books that should be carried in a cruising man's yacht library. The German edition, "Eine Insel für jeden", is equally rare and, if it does come up for sale, also costs several hundred dollars.
James Rockefeller published his memoirs, "Wayfarer", in 2018. He died at his home on January 8, 2025, the day after his 99th birthday.
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