By Selwyn Duke

If you’ve attended school during the last half century, you likely know the story: Supposedly civilized schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island, organize and make plans to survive, but soon descend into barbarity, warfare, and murder as the “beast” within asserts its primal influence.

That’s the fictional tale presented in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), anyway, considered by many one of the 20th century’s great novels. But the real story of what happened when a group of boys was stranded on a deserted island, just 11 years after the book’s publication, is quite different. It’s an amazing, touching story of not just survival, but also faith, kindness, resolve, and discipline.

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