Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and

Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book,

all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. A group of young boys, a shipwreck, a deserted island. In William Golding's

1950-for-novell, The Lord of the Flies, these are the ingredients for disaster.

A harrowing cautionary tale about what happens to our humanity when we are removed from society's rules. But as six Tongan schoolboys

discovered, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. On September 11th of

1966, Australian fishermen Peter Warner was sailing in the South Pacific when he spotted a tiny island in the distance.

Now, this wasn't unusual. This island called Attah was marked on his map.

What was unusual was that the uninhabited island had large scorched marks in the green vegetation covering it.

As he drew closer, he began to hear shouts coming from the island, and then one of his crew called out.

Someone was swimming toward them.

The young boy who arrived at their ship was covered in dirt, with long hair stiff with salt.

He looked like he'd been living alone in the wilderness for years.

So it was surprising when he spoke in polite boarding school English.

His name, he said, was Stephen, and he and his five friends had been stranded on Atah for 15 months.

A year earlier, in June of 1965, Stephen and his friends had been students at a boarding school in Nukualofa,

the capital on the island nation of Tonga.

The six teenage boys named Stephen, Luke, Sioni, David, Kolo, and Mano were all sick of their

tiny island and yearned for adventure.

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