This is a pretty cool story. I wondered about the difference between Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the six boys stranded on Ata. How much of the tragedy in Lord of the Flies is more art imitating life, as William Golding appears to be a douchebag when relating to youth? How much of the success on Ata was related to having enough of the essentials? In the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Golding’s early life mentions, “ When he(Golding) was a teenager he attempted to rape a 15 year old girl.[10] ”. The Guardian article notes that Golding also beat his kids. The boys on Ata, I would like to think, would have kept civil in any other related stranding situation, but maybe they did well due to having ample resources to get by. Not always did they have a surplus of water or food, but they also never did need to resort to cannibalism or trade lives for resources. They had just enough and maybe that’s why it never went completely sideways on them.