An Island to Oneself
by Tom Neale
Notes
4I discovered this book through Audrey Sutherland’s Paddling My Own Canoe and decided that if she was a fan, it had to be good. And it was.
It turned out to be a highly entertaining book, which is a little surprising since it really is just a man alone on an atoll 200 miles from the nearest civilization. (The atoll is Suvarov, which is now apparently one of the most popular sailing destinations in the Cook Islands area. Neale’s room is still furnished just as it was when he lived there, though there is now a caretaker and his family that lives nearby). The very day struggles of existence can make an entertaining story when told by the right person. And contrary to what you might expect Neale seems have been a perfectly social, well adjusted person. He just really liked being on his own, with an island to himself.
This book made me realize how woefully unprepared I would be trying to survive with nothing but my wits and what was available through nature.
Curiously the copy I got from my local library was entitled An Island to Myself while almost every other copy I’ve seen is An Island to Oneself which is a subtly, but I think importantly, different thing. I think the latter is better and more appropriate so that’s what I went with. If you’re interested the text is available for free in HTML.
Highlights:
Seen from the deck of the Tahiti, nothing seemed to have changed (though I was under no illusions about the mess I would find when we landed). The morning sunlight seemed to catch the tops of the old, eighty-foot palms in such a way that they stood out almost in silhouette — jet-black with a dazzling light shinning though them. It seemed to me (perhaps understandably!) that the islands had never looked more beautiful…
– Page: 168
I thought back to the happy evenings I had spent on the beach with the cats purring as the sun went down,m to the undisturbed rhythm of a life that nine of these people around me could ever remotely imagine: the day I calked the boat, the evening I made the candles, the morning I discovered the brick.
And now it was all gone, receding into a sort of dream as rapidly as the island recided before my eyes. I remember standing there, and suddenly shivering as the captain yelled again for me to join him in a drink. I was not the cold that caused the shiver, but the sudden recollection of an old Tahitian proverb I had heard years ago: “The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs.”
(from the end of the first time he spent on the island, does go back again)
– Page: 149
Staggering back, spattered with blood, I thought for a moment I was going to be sick, but once the gurgling and thrashing stopped, once the heavy body slumped into dark shadowed immobility, and I could see it lying there, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of melancholy. I suppose it was the reaction. All at once I was no longer a hunter, I was just an old man of fifty-one, along on an atoll. I walked home slowly, deciding that I would bury the animal the following day. Nothing on earth could have induced me to eat any part of it.
(This comes from a section in which he’s trying to get rid of some wild pigs that have been destroying his garden)
– Page: 77
I was fifty when I went to live alone on Suvarov, after thirty years of roaming the Pacific, and in this story I will try to describe my feelings, try to put into words what was, for me, the most remarkable and worthwhile experience of my whole life.I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking
– Page: 1