The Tongan Castaways

A Wikipedia discovery:

The Tongan castaways were a group of six boys between 13 and 16 (Luke Veikoso, Fatai Latu, Sione Fataua, Tevita Siola’a, Kolo Fekitoa, and Mano Totau), who, in 1965, ran away from a school on the island of Tonga, stole a boat, and became shipwrecked on the deserted remote island of ʻAta.

The boys formed a strong bond and, despite deprivations and injuries, kept themselves fit and healthy for 15 months. They survived primarily through consumption of local birds, fish, wild taro, and chickens and bananas that had been raised and cultivated on the island 100 years prior. They captured rainwater using hollowed out logs, though it was sparse during the initial months of their survival. They drank blood from seabirds when they did not have enough water.[1]

They were discovered in 1966 by Australian fisherman Peter Warner and returned with him to Tonga, where they were immediately imprisoned for the theft of the boat. The boys were released from prison after Warner compensated the owner of the stolen boat, and arranged for them to participate in a film for Australian media.

Peter Warner died this month at the age of 90. The story of the Tongan Castaways has often been described as a “real-life Lord of the Flies,” although in this case reality is a lot more hopeful than fiction. As Steve Sailer comments: “My guess is that teachers assign Golding’s book because a) it holds boys’ attention, and b) it gets across the message: without my guidance, you little stinkers would be doomed.”

Faroese

Flag of the Faroe Islands. Wikipedia.

From BBC Travel (hat tip: Pam Wilson):

The Faroe Islands’ 500-year-old fight to save its language

Situated between Iceland and Scotland, the isolated Faroe Islands are in a unique position. For years, their remoteness kept locals out of reach of their Danish rulers.

“The people of the Faroe Islands have been raised in the belief that we can manage our own destiny,” said Magni Arge, Faroe Islands MP in the Danish Parliament.

A long struggle for independence

The Faroes are an archipelago of 18 verdant, volcanic islands jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean between Scotland, Iceland and Norway. With a Celtic and Viking heritage – and a population of about 50,000 – they’re semi-autonomous but still a Danish dependency, having been ruled by both Denmark and Norway for centuries.

The Faroese have had a long struggle for self-rule, which had a turning point during World War II. Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, and it was Britain that provided protection from German invasion due to the islands’ proximity to the Shetland Islands and UK mainland. With no contact with Denmark for five years during the war, the islanders began to forge their own path.

Over the last few decades, many Faroese have been building towards a new wave of independence, including the struggle to not only hold on to their native tongue, but also to help it flourish.

The fight to keep a language alive

The Faroese people have been fighting to keep their language alive ever since it was suppressed by the Danish, when the islands became part of the Dano-Norwegian Kingdom in 1380. With the Reformation, that stronghold was reinforced and Faroese was completely banned in schools. People had no choice but to succumb to the vernacular of the law courts and the Danish parliament.

While Danish dominated official realms for centuries, the wider community continued to speak and sing in Faroese. The written language they use now only formally came into being in 1846, and over the next few decades an upturn in the Faroese economy, caused by sloop fishing and the end of the Danish trade monopoly, further increased national confidence.

With greater links to the outside world in the late 1800s, people began to assert the integrity of their own tongue, and oral Faroese became a school subject in 1912, followed by the written language in 1920. After the establishment of Home Rule in 1948, Faroese was recognised as the official language of government; however, Danish is still taught as a compulsory subject, and all the Faroes’ parliamentary laws still need to be translated into Danish.

Read the whole thing – which is a slideshow; make sure you watch the fourth slide, which is a short video proposing why Faroese, which is related to Icelandic, survived Danish proscription:

“Our own language was very much tied into the way we lived. So each and every bit of a boat has its distinct name, and each tool has its name, and each walk path. Everything had its name tied into the old Faroese language. And if they lost that they probably would lose the ability to live here as well.”

The Faroese passed on their stories through kvæði, ballades that accompany the chain dance.

“Our language has lived through these stories, that have been told from generation to generation. Now we have around 17000 verses. And I think that’s a lot because we should remember it was only 5000 people on these islands at the time. It’s been verses that they have remembered in their heads.”

I was also interested in their attempts at updating their language while avoiding Anglicisms and other loan words:

“We Faroese are a bit puristic, so we like to have our own words, like Icelanders. We think, ‘Why should we all take the English words? We should all make something ourselves! I speculated, ‘What should we call a computer?’ ‘Tel’ is a number. So ‘telda.’ Everybody called it ‘telda’ – computer!”

“When we were kids, we were always thinking this sounded a bit weird. But nowadays, you think it’s weird if anybody says ‘helicopter’ or if anybody says ‘computer’ instead of ‘telda’ and such.”

I applaud such efforts, which you can also see in Quebec and Israel. I actually don’t like how internationally influential English is. The great thing about making up words self-consciously is that you can control for euphony and brevity as well as meaning. “Telda” is just a nicer word than “computer”!

Slide sixteen addresses Faroese political nationalism. I guess that the Faroe Islands are a few steps behind Iceland on this front, which won home rule in 1874, “extended” home rule in 1904, sovereignty in 1918, and compete republican independence in 1944.

The Faroese have a long history of discussion, democracy and government, and Tinganes (pictured) in the capital Tórshavn is claimed by the Faroese to be one of the oldest parliamentary meeting places in the world. The current building inhabits the site of the first Viking parliament that met here sometime after 900AD.

The current drive to write their own constitution is the next stage in the movement towards what many Faroese hope will be self-governance, though it’s a controversial issue for some, given how much financial support is received from Denmark.

Nevertheless, the Faroese are keeping a close eye on how Catalonia’s bid for independence progresses, as well as Britain after Brexit. Separatists feel that independence is long overdue, though for many, the spike in taxes if they were to lose Danish support is more than enough reason to keep some of the ties that bind them. Whatever does happen in the future though, the fight to keep Faroese as a living, breathing language will endure.

Looks like I’ve got another place to add to my bucket list!

Heligoland

779px-DE_Helgoland_COA.svg

Heligoland coat of arms. Wikipedia.

From the National Post:

‘Blow the bloody place up’: Why, 70 years ago, Britain blew up an entire German island

In 1947, Britain had a problem. It had thousands of tonnes of explosives left over from the Second World War. And it also had a German island in the North Sea that it hated.

So, 70 years ago this week, the Royal Navy enacted an elegant solution: Use the explosives to blow the island to hell.

“Blow the bloody place up,” was reportedly the instructions given to F.T. Woosnam, the British naval engineer tasked with making the island of Heligoland disappear.

The preparation wasn’t overly technical.

For nearly a year, crews had simply stacked up more than 7,000 tonnes of old munitions and wired them together: Depth charges, old torpedoes, boxes of grenades and stacks of aerial bombs.

Photos from the era show crews nonchalantly kicking dismantled torpedoes into large heaps.

The resulting April 19 explosion, triggered with the push of a button by a sharply dressed naval commander, not only shattered every vestige of human habitation on the island — but permanently altered the topography of the place.

The United Kingdom had plenty of reasons to hate Heligoland. For starters, the island had once been part of the British Empire after it was captured during the Napoleonic Wars.

But finding no use for a windy outcrop filled with vacationers, in 1890 London handed it over to the newly formed German Empire in exchange for the African island of Zanzibar.

To the Brits’ chagrin, the Germans then proceeded to spend two world wars using Heligoland as a fortress from which to attack the U.K.

The island was the site of the first naval battle of the First World War, and the first major aerial battle of the Second World War. In both conflicts, it was a key forward base for submarines looking to starve the U.K. into submission.

After the first war in 1918, the victorious Allies had simply ordered the island to be demilitarized.

But when that clearly hadn’t worked, the victors of another war settled on a backup plan: Detonate the place so severely that it could never again be used for military purposes.

“A very reasonable way of celebrating Hitler’s birthday,” proclaimed the narrator of British newsreel documenting the destruction.

Then, just for good measure, the Royal Air Force spent the rest of the 1940s using Heligoland as a target site for their bombers.

Only in 1952 were Heligolanders allowed to move back.

Why the Brits didn’t just keep it I do not know. I seem to remember that the place played a role in the John Malkovich movie Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Click on the link to read more and to see newsreel footage of the explosion.