Shipwrecked.in Tonga
The Kingdom of Tonga lies just to the South of Samoa and
South East of Fiji.Most people will be familiar with the ancient kingdom which was ruled
for many years by Queen Salote. It is likely that Tonga has been inhabited since the 5th
century BC and the present monarchy can trace its origins back more than a thousand
years.Europeans first visited these islands in 1610 when they were discovered by two Dutch
navigators, other notable explorers who visited Tonga and the surrounding Islands were
Tasman, Wallis, Cook and , perhaps the most notorious of all, Bligh. The Mutiny on the
Bounty occurred in Tongan waters near a small Island called Tofua.
The Kingdom of Tonga consists of 169 islands ( although the
number tends to vary slightly depending on which book you happen to be reading!). The
capital is Nukualofa which is on the island of Tongatapu. Tongatapu is an extremely
flat island covered mainly with palm trees.
I first visited Nukualofa, travelling from Western
Somoa in a small, rather ancient plane in 1977. My husband and I soon found somewhere to
stay, a hospitable Tongan guest house. Meals were a delightful mixture of European and
Tongan dishes. At our first meal the soup, lobster, raw clams, squid, and some alarmingly
coloured ice-creams all arrived together.
We stayed on for a few days and cycled around most of the
island, we decided it was time to move to another island in the group. We chose the
Hapai group of islands which are more than a 100 kilometres north of Tongatapu- an
estimated sailing time of 8 hours.We purchased tickets on a locally- owned vessel called
the Olovaha which was due out of port on the following Monday morning (and eventually
departed on Tuesday afternoon). The 550 tonne Olovaha had been donated by the British
Government to the Tongan people some ten years earlier and was now showing signs of
neglect.
We squeezed ourselves up the gangway along with some 300
rather well-endowed Tongans and half a dozen tourists. We managed to find ourselves an
area on the upper deck and settled in with the other passengers. We all assured ourselves
that the rather alarming list of the ship was due to some kind of special cargo stowage
which, with the right tides and favourable winds, would assist us to reach our
destination.
In Tonga, probably the most religious kingdom in world, it is
a tradition to return the dead to the island on which they were born and so one of our
travelling companions was a corpse.
We steamed steadily out into the ocean. I slept for some
hours and when I woke the engines had stopped. I asked one of the crew members how long it
would be before we reached Haapai, and he told me that the engines had broken down
but were being worked on.
It was not until first light that it was obvious that
something more than a minor breakdown had occurred in the engine room. Some of the younger
crew members were frantically passing buckets, filled with oily looking water, out of the
hatchway and across the deck. Shortly afterwards one of the two engines was re-started and
we chugged slowly onward again; the captain at this stage had changed the destination to
Vavau, the northernmost group of islands in Tonga. We passed the island of Tofua,
the exact spot where the Mutiny of the Bounty took place in 1789. At this point the only
working engine ground to an ominous halt and we drifted back on the current to the place
we had started from a few hours earlier.
We started to worry as anxiety amongst the crew increased.Not
only did the radio not work but we discovered that we only had two life boats for about
three hundred passengers.
The crew continued to bail but the boat began to list at a
more alarming angle than before and the deck became even more slippery as the oil spread
across its surface.
One of the lifeboats then splashed into the sea along with
half a dozen or so of the ships crew.The lifeboat and crew headed towards one of the
islands on the horizon to radio for help.
Night fell. The ship was now listing so badly that it was
almost impossible to walk on the deck.The generator which lit only the Captains
cabin and the engine room started to splutter, and to add to our problems the wind began
to blow.
Shortly afterwards my husband Peter found himself sloshing
about in the bottom of the ship holding one of the 6 buckets that by some luck, rather
than foresight, had found their way on to the ship. There was no bilge pump working as
this had been blocked some time earlier by flotsam and jetsam in the bilge.Six of the
remaining crew and passengers (the rest of the passengers had resigned themselves to
drowning)) baled for much of that night.
One of the crew had a pocket transistor radio on which he
picked up a message from the Tongan Government that we had been reported missing and a
boat from the Tongan Navy based at Pangai was being sent to help.
The wind blew and the waves, now several metres high rolled
over our listing and now fast sinking ship. It was impossible to believe that we could
survive this situation in a fierce storm in shark waters in a sinking ship in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean. I held onto my necklace, a beautifully crafted silver Persian camel
on a silver chain. I grew up in Iran and was given the charm by a very old man who sold
wonderful things in our local market. He told me to look after the wonderful object he had
given me as one day I would need its luck. I always carried his charm with me.
Early on Thursday morning a large Tongan freighter arrived
and was skilfully manoeuvred alongside so that a line could be shot across to the Olovaha
which was now rapidly sinking. The freighter towered above us and then on a crest of an
enormous wave we found ourselves looking down on the deck of the freighter in a giant game
of sea-saw The captain of the freighter negotiated the enormously high waves with
incredible skill and after many attempts we secured a line to the Olovaha. Soon we were
being towed toward the island of Pangai. We spent the rest of the night on the deck with
our fingers crossed too exhausted to bail anymore.
Once inside the reef and in calmer water we haphazardly
disembarked and swam ashore. The corpse which had been blamed for this unfortunate mishap
and which contributed greatly to the air of doom, which had prevailed for most of the
voyage was removed. The Olovaha was brought into shallow water where shortly afterwards
she slowly and gently settled to the bottom.
The next morning we walked along the beach at Pangai and I
went to check my camel necklace and it was gone, my treasured object had done its work!