How A Book I Hadn’t Read Changed My Life

Published: Thursday, August 15, 2019
By: Bob Bitchin

When I was first getting into the sailing life, I heard about a book called “An Island to One’s Self” written by a man named Tom Neal. He was a New Zealander who had a dream. That dream became an obsession: to find the perfect island and be the only man to live on that island.

Over the years, my obsession with cruising pretty well matched what I imagined his fervor to be. I say “imagine” because I didn’t read the book. No, I got a copy of it... but I didn’t read it. I had this idea that the best place to read the book would be on the island that the book was written about.

Oh, I remember articles written by the greats of sailing about the man. Stories of how he lived as a hermit on the island of Suvarov (AKA: Suvaroff or Suwarrow), a small speck that I located on a map of the world – and it was about the size of a flyspeck – dead in the center of the South Pacific. I read how cruisers would stop by his island to visit. He would have them sign his guest book and he would visit with them, sometimes one or two a year, and one year as many as six. I read in various cruising magazines how he’d become ill, how a passing cruiser – I believe it was Bernard Moitessier – found him ill and sailed him to the hospital in Pango-Pango, where he passed away from cancer.

And then the stories became even more of an obsession for me, but I still refused to open the book. I had a dream, and I wanted... no, I needed to make it come true.

You see, the stories were told of other cruisers who would stop to visit Tom on his private hideaway. When they found him gone, they would still sign his guest book. If it looked like the hut he lived in was in disrepair, they would repair it. As time went by, the guest book filled, but soon a passing cruiser dropped off another guest book, and it started to fill as well.

The legend of Tom Neal kept growing in my mind. Years later, I read that cruisers had stopped to visit and found half the hut had blown down in a storm. They stayed for almost three months, and they rebuilt the hut. There were a couple of cans of beans that were starting to rust through, so they replaced the cans with new ones. And as people would come, they found it as he had left it years ago.

Eventually, the government of the Cook Islands decided the history was worthy of recognition, so they created a National Reserve for cruisers. I read of the ceremony and wished I could have been there… and then I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start living my dream.

In 1991, I told Jody we were sailing to the South Pacific. Yes, we were going to stop in Tahiti. Yes, we were going to visit the Marquesas and Samoa and Tonga, but in my mind there was just one real destination – Suverov.
Two days out from Suverov, we were being beaten back by a storm. There was more rain than we’d seen before, even in the tropics. Then, we saw the darkness on the horizon in front of us start to lighten. Soon, we could actually see blue sky in front of us, even though rain and lightning were hitting all around us. As we sailed out from beneath the clouds, we sailed into the warmth of a brilliant South Pacific day. The seas calmed, and just after dawn the next morning, we entered the lagoon at Suvarov Island. My first sight of the island was not disappointing.

It took us a day to dry out everything that had gotten soaked during the storm, but as the blankets and towels dried on the life-lines, I took out my book, grabbed a beanbag, and planted it firmly on the bow. As I read the book, I lived Tom’s adventure. I looked up and saw the beach he built his hut on. I saw where he’d fallen and hurt his back, struggling to get back into his boat.

One day while there, I got Jody and our two companions together and we went ashore and helped rebuild the stone dock that had been torn apart in the last storm. Even for days after I finished the book, I would sit and look out at the island, recalling passages. I traveled by dinghy across the lagoon and I visited a small atoll where I found a large driftwood log described so perfectly by my friend Tom (as I often thought of him), sitting right where it was all those years ago.

I didn’t share my feelings much with the rest of the crew. I couldn’t. How do you share a dream? And it was then that I realized just how much cruising meant to me as a way of life. Most people dream their whole lives about doing something like that, and I had made my dream come true.