Shipwrecked 5 Weeks On Atoll

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31092, 22 June 1966, Page 21

Shipwrecked 5 Weeks On Atoll

(N.Z. Trett Association) AUCKLAND, June 21. After being wrecked on a South Pacific coral atoll, living off coconuts and spending nearly five weeks with natives an English family arrived in New Zealand yesterday.

They are the Cardiner family, of Southampton, who set sail for New Zealand in their 36-foot motor yacht Valfreya last July 7. Mr John Cordiner, aged 46, his wife Jane, and son Jonathan, aged 18, decided to make their own way to New Zealand aboard their yacht. They sold their house and furniture to buy the £4OOO Valfreya and equipment worth £lOOO.

Their adventures began in earnest on the night of May 4 when Mr Cordiner dozed at the wheel of his yacht and it went aground on a coral reef 280 miles north-east of Tahiti and broke up. During the scramble to get ashore Mr Cordiner was wearing only shorts and his wife and son pyjamas. All were barefoot “It was like walking bn razor blades across the coral,” he said. “We knew we had lost everything we had. The boat was full of water in two minutes and the deck was beginning to lift. We felt we were lucky to escape with our lives.” They spent three days on the uninhabited Handshake Island, a small island in the Ahe Atoll, living on coconuts. Their only comfort was a coconut fire, lit by a flare retrieved from the wreck, and kept glowing day and night. “It was my turn to look after it at night,” said Mrs Cordiner. “I didn’t mind as I couldn’t sleep with the myriads of mosquitoes that were biting me.”

Nobody answered the flares. “We knew there was an inhabited island within 20-odd miles of us and the range of our parachute flares was said to be 36 miles,” Mr Cordiner said.

They were discovered by the chief of Ahe. “Very soon about 30 natives appeared and escorted us like Roman emperors to the atoll’s main village. They thought the wreck a huge joke,” said Mr Corinder.

“For the 32 days we were with the natives we were looked after by a different family each day. Each morning the chief would lead us through the village to a different family. They would throw their arms around us and kiss us. “The food took the form of a huge mound of rice with brightly coloured fish, cooked whole, placed on top. “Flies and mosquitoes were a curse,” he said. The only way Mr Cordiner could communicate with the natives was by the little French he and the chief knew. Although telegrams were sent by way of another island to Papeete it was 32 days before the copra boat Nui Maru picked them up. The Cordiners spent seven days on the copra boat before it reached Papeete. A further seven days was spent there before money was forwarded from London for the tickets to fly to New Zealand.