Covered by the Sea: Surviving a Hurricane – Part 32
Away from Suwarrow, still, Neale made it clear that Avarua, Rarotonga’s little town, was not a bad place to live. He found a cheap place to rent that was also close to where he worked. The work, running the warehouse, was not challenging and took his mind off Suwarrow. On his days off he bicycled the twenty-mile long road that encircled the island. Still, in place of the pristine quiet of his adopted home, Avarua was noisy, and stinking from automobiles. Instead of getting up at daylight and going to sleep at dusk, now he lived by the clock. And instead of being outside fishing or tending his garden, he spent his time in a dusty, dirty warehouse.
He had few friends in Avarua, but they were good friends. Sometimes he visited Andy Thomson, the schooner captain, or Ron Powell, who now had his own little boat yard where he built and repaired small vessels, mostly little sail boats, fishing vessels and dinghies. Due to Rarotonga’s isolation and its lack of sheltered harbors, not many small yachts docked there[1], so it was not a huge business.
Tom Neale and Ron Powell had much in common. Both were free spirits who loved the peace and beauty of the outer islands. Both were handy with tools and could fend for themselves in nearly any environment. But while Neale was a dreamer who had difficulty living in civilization, Powell had the ability to adapt to his environment. It seemed like he could be happy wherever he was. And while Powell could do equally well alone or in the company of people, Neale never felt really comfortable in the presence of others. He had the ideal personality to be a hermit.
After work Neale would often go over to Powell’s boat yard and watch him as he worked on his boats. After expressing his hope to return to Suwarrow, Powell suddenly said, “Well, why don’t we build you a boat to use when you get there!” So, with Powell’s help, Neale began work on a 12-foot sailing dinghy.
One day Neale received a check in the mail from the New Zealand solicitor who was handling his mother’s estate. She had died and left him £240. Immediately he quit work at the warehouse and worked on the construction of his dinghy full-time. With Powell’s concern for craftsmanship and Neale’s desire for a dream dinghy to use in his dream island’s lagoon, the boat was probably a work of art. In fact, it took him a year to build it.
Two major occurrences took place while Neale was on Rarotonga. With the guidance of the British author, Noel Barber, Neale began to write a book on his experiences living on Suwarrow. The second occurrence was that Neale became close to a woman who seemed to take his eccentricities in stride. Her name was Sarah Haua and she was pretty, with curly dark hair and a ready smile. She was living on Rarotonga at the time, though she had many family members on Palmerston. On June 15th, 1956, Neale and Sara Haua married. Eventually they had two children, Arthur and Stella, although it seems likely that Sarah did most of the family raising). Much to Sarah’s dismay, Neale was still totally committed to moving back to Suwarrow. He was turning sixty soon and he felt that if he did not return to the island in the near future, he might never return at all.
Meanwhile, an American, Loren (Smitty) Smith, sailed his yacht into Rarotonga. While Neale helped Smitty work on his boat, he told Smitty his forlorn hope to return to Suwarrow. Then one day, Smitty turned to him and said, “I’ll take you there.”
Neale was stunned by the generosity of Smitty’s offer. It was over 500 miles to Suwarrow, and all Neale’s supplies would require two trips. Once Neale became convinced of the seriousness of the offer, the two men talked long into the night about the practicalities involved. Although Smitty never asked for payment, Neale gave him all the money he could spare, £50, which would at least pay for gasoline if they were forced to use the motor. Then Neale began making lists of the items he would need and rushed around to acquire them.
By that time, nearly six years had passed from the time Neale left Suwarrow to the time he took up residence, and after some years of living on Suwarrow once again, Neale realized that he might succumb to another accident or illness due to his aging. He considered the possibility that he could die a very lonely death. Because of these thoughts, he left Suwarrow on December 27th, 1963 and returned to Rarotonga.
There, Neale continued working on his book with Noel Barber’s help. Barber also helped him to find a good publisher. An Island to Oneself was published by Collins in 1966. It was a wonderful book and sold well. All of a sudden Neale had more money than he had seen in his entire life. Besides meeting his financial obligations to his wife and children, his newly found wealth enabled him to expand his horizons. With his family taken care of, he still had the resources to return to Suwarrow once more.
Neale had never been happy since returning to Rarotonga. Even though it might seem like a quiet backwater place to others, for him it was too crowded and was filled with automobiles and now airplanes (since the local airstrip had been expanded to an actual airport). He longed for the absolute peace and isolation that only Suwarrow afforded him. So, in July 1967, Neale one again moved back to his island.
This time Neale knew precisely what equipment and supplies to bring. This time, he could also afford to hire an interisland trading vessel to go out of its way to deliver him and his supplies “back home.”
Though Neale knew that this time he might die on Suwarrow, he knew this is where he wanted to be.
There is not much record of Neale’s third stay on Suwarrow. His daughter Stella visited him twice. During the rest of his life he and his daughter had a close relationship even though they were hundreds of miles apart. His son Arthur joined Ron Powell’s son operating a black pearl farm on Manihiki. Stella became a teacher and eventually join Sarah on Palmerston, teaching in the little two-room school house there. In 1972 after finally coming to the conclusion that it made little sense being married to a man that she almost never saw, Sarah got a divorce from Neale. Later she married her distant cousin and took up permanent residency on Palmerston.
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In 1989 I visited Palmerston, having been dropped off there by an interisland trading vessel. Sarah and Stella (then called Dawn, her middle name) were both living there. Stella was still teaching the island children in the dilapidated two-room schoolhouse. Stella and Sarah were both warm and hospitable and I very much enjoyed the time I spent with them. While I was aware that Tom Neale had been Sarah’s husband and Stella’s father, at that time I had no intention of writing about him and so we did not discuss him at length.
Palmerston at the time of my visit was probably not much different from what it had been when Ron and Elizabeth Powell lived there in the 1940s. The lovely old church built from timbers scavenged from Palmerston’s formidable reefs was still standing. Most of the sixty people on the island still lived in little cottages made from coral crushed to form concrete. There were no wheeled vehicles except for homemade wheelbarrows. Besides the people’s houses, most of the few other buildings had been built in the late 1800s or early 1900s. There were no roads, only paths, and when the island’s generator wasn’t running, I felt like I was in a pre-machine-age society. Life on the little island was serene and peaceful, and from morning to night I lived with the lovely metronome of the waves crashing on the reef. I began to understand the attraction that Suwarrow must have had for Tom Neale.
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Neale lived on Suwarrow for nearly ten years although he returned to Rarotonga from time to time to stock up on supplies. Royalties from his book allowed him to pay for an interisland freighter to pick him up and then to return him to his island. In the fall of 1976 he began experiencing stomach pain. No matter what he ate or drank or how he medicated himself, the pain continued to worsen. He had trouble swallowing and felt an almost constant nausea. Every day he vomited, no matter what he ate or even if he had eaten nothing at all. He lost his appetite and had no energy. Often he spent the whole day lying in bed, only to rise to feed his chickens and to gather a few eggs. When he began vomiting blood, he thought he was dying. He was right, he was dying.
In early March, a yacht called the Feisty Lady stopped at Suwarrow. Neale was almost totally bedridden at this time. The yacht’s owner radioed Rarotonga and on March 11th, 1977 the interisland trading vessel Manuvai took him to Rarotonga, where he died on November 30, 1977 from stomach cancer.
Today the Suwarrow atoll is declared a National Marine Park. A family of caretakers lives in Neale’s cabin, thus insuring that his island will remain a peaceful sanctuary far into the future.
[1] This is still true today.