Neale, tells his story

Suwarrow’s hermit, Tom Neale, tells his story

Anybody who has been reading PIM regularly these past few years should have a pretty fair idea of who Tom Neale is.

His story has been running as a sporadic serial in our pages ever since September, 1952, when we recorded that Tom, with only a tom-cat for company, was leaving Rarotonga aboard the Cook Islands trading vessel Mahurangi to live a solitary life on isolated, uninhabited Suwarrow Atoll.

IT seems,” our September, 1952, report said, “that Tom Neale, well-known in Tahiti and the Cook Islands, has, for some considerable time, cherished an ambition to live alone on the Cooks’ loneliest atoll.

“Lately, the Administration granted him permission to go there at his own risk, accepting no responsibility for hurricanes, ghosts, peritonitis, and home-sickness that may beset the lone philosopher. There will be no means of communicating with the outside world, except by smoke signal; and Suwarrow’s nearest neighbour, Manihiki, lies over 200 miles away. , . .”

PI M’s first report of Tom Neale’s solitary life on Suwarrow came almost immediately on the heels of the one saying he was going there, for Tom had only been installed in his new home 24 hours when a Dutch yacht, Onrust, happened to put in there. The yacht duly cleared the atoll of its “accumulation of mail”— one letter.

Visit by helicopters

From that time onwards, PIM pub lished a report about Tom every time any other yacht happened to drop in on him, which, though not often, served to remind people that he was there.

In June, 1954, we reported that Tom had left the atoll in the Rannah at his own request and had returned to Rarotonga.

Two years later, there was a report that he had returned to Suwarrow as an Administration overseer with a team of mother of pearl shell divers, and that he had stayed on the atoll for a couple of months.

Later again, we recorded that he had gone back to Suwarrow again in a similar capacity in June, 1960; that the party of shell divers had re mained on the atoll until the follow ing November; and that Tom had stayed on alone after their departure.

It was not long after Tom’s second

solitary sojourn began that he made the world’s headlines.

A couple of helicopter pilots from USS Glacier landed on the atoll in the course of an exercise, and found to their astonishment that the place was inhabited by “a stark naked white man”.

This story published in the Press, with all sorts of other startling and garbled details added, resulted in an English journalist, Noel Barber, visiting Suwarrow to write a series of articles for the London Daily Mail.

Subsequently Tom had even more visitors, in the shape of yachtsmen, than he had had before.

Finally. Tom decided to abandon his atoll for good; and in March, 1964, we reported that “Suwarrow’s Crusoe” had returned to the civilisa tion of Rarotonga.

Since then, we hear, he has moved

i to Panama; and the latest news is at he has published a book about s Suwarrow experiences entitled An land to Oneself.

The book appears to owe a lot to e practised hand of some pro ssional writer (possibly Noel arber), but it is so well executed at to read it is to recapture the dldhood thrill of reading Robinson rusoe.

On AAoorea

In it, Tom explains how he first ent to the Islands in his teens as a ting in the New Zealand Navy, and aw he bought his way out after four ;ars “because of a nagging desire see more of the world than the ief glimpses we obtained beyond e confining, narrow streets of the >rts where we docked”.

For the next few years, he andered from island to island, doing Id jobs, planting, and working on ter-island tramps.

Eventually, he settled on Moorea. was there that he first met the merican writer Robert Dean Frisbie id the well-known Islands schooner :ipper Andy Thompson, who were • strongly influence him to aspire to s solitary life on Suwarrow.

Andy persuaded Tom to move om Moorea to Rarotonga, where j again met Frisbie; Frisbie infected om with his own enthusiasm for iwarrow, which was the subject of is book Island of Desire.

In 1945, Tom had his first glimpse : Suwarrow when Andy Thompson died there in the Tiare Taporo in hich Tom had been signed on as igineer.

Shopping list

Seven more years passed before om found a means of going there >r good—in the Cook Islands trader fahurangi.

The passage cost him £3O, which ft him £49 to fit himself out for is solitary life Tom’s description of the pains he >ok to fit himself out—of the lought he put into his shopping list -sets the tone of his book.

Every item was of immense impor mce. He could not go without Dpper nails. He had to find a way

of preventing his tea from going fusty. It was essential to have a crowbar, etc., etc.

Subsequently, when he arrived at the island of his heart’s desire, every little aspect of life became invested with the same sort of importance.

The catching of fish; penning of fowls; the cooking of food; the wash ing up; the improvisation of this and that—all demanded and received great attention.

Wild pigs

Tom found, indeed, that there were so many things to do that he even got behind-hand with his reading and never seemed to have time to repair odds and ends around the house, or even to do a little mending.

Then there were wild pigs to be killed so that he could make a garden; and finally, after 10 months (for Tom makes no mention of the Dutch yacht Onrust ) his first visitors.

On paper, by the time these first visitors turn up, Tom has filled 132 pages of his book; and by the time he leaves Suwarrow, because of a back injury, at the end of his first spell, he has filled 56 more.

Up to this point (except for the non-mention of the Onrust), Tom’s

book seems to record accurately and fully the main features of his life.

But from then on—probably be cause the details tend to spoil the An Island to Oneself theme —the book cannot be regarded as factual history to quite the same extent.

Tom makes no mention, for example, of his visit to Suwarrow in 1956 as overseer with the pearl shell divers. In fact, he claims that “six frustrating years” passed before he was able to go there again.

Later on in the book, he makes no mention of the visit to his island of Danny Weil’s yacht Yasme 111, which was so well fitted with radio that the Cook Islands News was able to interview Tom over the airwaves (. PIM, Dec., 1962, p. 119).

Tom also neglects to mention the visit of the yacht West Wind, which called at Suwarrow early in 1963 {PIM, April, 1963, p. 114).

These omissions in no way detract from the interest of Tom’s book. But if you know about them, they make you feel that, in the second half, at least, the book is more like the fiction of Robinson Crusoe than the real life of Defoe’s model, Alexander

Selkirk.

RL.

(An Island To Oneself. Collins.

$3.85.)