This is the best summary I could come up with:

When they regained enough strength, Mano and Sione told us, they climbed up to the island’s forested plateau where they found a clay pot, a machete and chickens, all left behind by a small Tongan community that lived on 'Ata before being ripped from their home by slave traders a century earlier.

The teenage runaways showed remarkable resourcefulness—building a hut out of palm fronds, establishing a garden with bananas and beans, and setting up a roster to keep a lookout for passing ships.

For more than 50 years the real-life story of Sione, Mano and their friends was little known outside of Tonga… until Dutch historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman stumbled across it on the internet.

Like millions of others, Bregman had read the fictional tale of marooned schoolboys, Lord of the Flies, which for generations has been taught in high schools around the world.

Peter Warner told us he paid off the owner of the stolen boat—and finally sailed the runaway schoolboys back to their home island, accompanied by the Australian television crew that had flown in to film their story.

The story has never been forgotten in these islands but when a British newspaper published a chapter of Rutger Bregman’s book last May, the tale of the Tongan teenagers went viral—7 million people read it within days.

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