Boy From The Sky

In 1806, at the height of the Napoleonic wars, a British privateer limped into one of Captain Cook’s old anchorages in the Tongan archipelago. This is the story of the fifteen year-old ship’s clerk who, in four years, rose from being a naked and derided castaway to become a member of the Tongan aristocracy and one of the largest estate holders in the islands.

Surviving a massacre aboard the ship, William Mariner was adopted by its perpetrator, King Finau, and groomed to be his lieutenant. With the ship’s canons and muskets in the hands of the sixteen other crewmembers he had spared for the task, Finau plunged the islands into a civil war. Mariner’s graphic account of the impact of western arms upon a stone-age population is matched by his descriptions of the chaotic scenes that followed as Finau’s army resorted to cannibalism and headhunting. Urging on his mentor, leading war parties, delivering up a suspect chief for execution, Mariner is remarkably frank about his own role in these events and his portrait on the mercurial and despotic Finau is equally candid. As the king’s amanuensis he recorded the man’s ambitions and fears, his outbursts, assumptions and beliefs and here, for the first time, was an insight into what ‘they’ thought of ‘us’ during the great Age of Pacific Exploration.

But in Mariner’s account of his adventures, published eight years after he was rescued, there is a curious omission for, despite the central role that they played in Finau’s conquests, his shipmates are barely mentioned. Using contemporary newspaper reports and accounts of activity in that region of the Pacific, some that only came to light decades later, this book fleshes out Mariner’s tale and uncovers the reasons for this lacuna.

The Port au Prince was an English privateer. Before she limped into Finau’s kingdom she had been raiding the coast of Spanish America. Mariner provided an inventory of the prizes. It was a modest haul, all of which went down with the ship when the Tongans set fire to it, or so he claimed. In fact the Port au Prince’s treasure, 36,000 uninventoried silver dollars, were hidden on a deserted island before the ship reached Finau’s kingdom. For the surviving seamen who had spent over a year manning a vessel on the basis of ‘no prize, no pay’, one thought was uppermost in their minds; ‘How do we get to the island and escape with the prize ?’ The first three who tried were drowned attempting to reach the island. A year later, two succeeded only for one of them to perish in Fiji where the baulk of the hoard ended up in the hands of the mysterious Charles Savage, ‘survivor’ from the Port au Prince and soon to become the Napoleon of Fiji.

Years later Mariner’s eldest son disappeared following his discovery of this hidden story – unlike much of the ‘Port au Prince’s’ hoard which still lies buried a few minutes walk inland from the southeastern shoreline of the Fijian island of Viti Levu.

Book Author

Nigel Randell Evans spent twenty-five years making documentaries in many parts of the world for the BBC and Channel Four. His films won three Royal Television Society Awards and two US Emmy’s. He lives in Vava’u in the Kingdom of Tonga.
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