Discovering a Living Library in the South Pacific

The August issue’s Max Ebb about yacht club libraries rekindled a memory of an experience with a yachting library a long time ago.

In 1986, my wife Alison and I cruised through the South Pacific aboard our Ranger 33, Eleu. One of our stops was Suwarrow Atoll in the Cook Islands. I had read Tom Neale’s book, An Island to Oneself, about his 16 years of solitude there, in preparation for our visit. Tom had passed away nearly a decade earlier, and I looked forward to exploring his iconic island.

Our arrival at the atoll became a bit hectic when we hooked a large crevalle jack right in the middle of the entrance channel, but we got the fish safely aboard while dousing sails and avoiding coral heads. There were no other boats present and no sign of life on the motus that dotted the atoll’s fringing reef. We dropped the hook in the lee of Anchorage Island, the largest motu, got sails and running rigging put away, and I went to work cleaning that night’s dinner. After removing the filets, I tossed the carcass overboard. Five seconds after it hit the water, there was a tremendous commotion next to Eleu. We looked overboard to see a half-dozen 4-foot-long black-tip sharks fighting over the remains. These predators had apparently taken up residence under the boat as we anchored.

“I don’t think we’ll be doing a lot of snorkeling here,” I said to Alison.

We launched the dinghy and rowed ashore to the postcard-perfect white-sand beach shaded by overhanging coconut palms. Behind the middle of the beach, we found a stone-lined path leading toward the center of the half-mile-long, quarter-mile-wide, densely jungled motu. “That’s strange,” we noticed. “The path is clear of debris while everywhere else is covered with fallen coconut fronds.” Somebody else was either there or had been recently.

We walked cautiously up the path, and at a turn 50 yards in, came face to face with a life-sized concrete bust of a man with an inscription beneath it: “Tom Neale lived his dream on this island.” This was getting eerie.

Another few yards up the path, we entered a large clearing and glimpsed a cat darting into the underbrush to the left, and a chicken squawking in alarm as it escaped the clearing to the right. In the middle of the clearing stood the house I recognized from Tom Neale’s book. It was well maintained.

“Somebody MUST be here!” I said.

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