The Indepedent

Lord of the Flies is still a

blueprint for savagery
Six decades ago, William Golding set out a terrifying view of the base instincts of a marooned band of children. But
how close to the truth was Lord of the Flies? Eleanor Learmonth and Jenny Tabakoff leaf through a dark and bloody
history of disaster
Eleanor Learmonth, Jenny Tabakoff
Sunday 16 March 2014

James Aubrey and Hugh Edwards in the

1963 film version of Lord of the
Flies Rex Features
"I'm afraid. Of us."
Those words first appeared in print
exactly 60 years ago when William
Golding published his most famous
novel, Lord of the Flies.

It's easy to see how Golding got the

inspiration for his tale of humanity
red in tooth and claw: he had served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and
wrote Lord of the Flies while teaching boys at Bishop Wordsworth's School. For our book No
Mercy, we spent five years researching how accurately Golding's novel reflects the behaviour
of real-life groups of disaster survivors stranded in isolated corners of the globe, asking: did
Golding get it right? It turns out he did. Accounts of survivor groups through history from the
siege of Numantia in 134BC to the Chilean miners trapped under the Atacama desert in 2010
mirror what happened on Golding's imaginary tropical island. When Ralph tells Piggy he's
afraid "of us", reality shows he was right to be afraid. The destructive processes Golding
described are astonishingly accurate. When groups of people are clinging to life, the greatest
threat may be not the harsh environment, starvation or dehydration, but the other survivors
standing next to them on the deserted beach or the remote, snow-covered mountain. Group
fragmentation, leadership struggles, personal hatred, theft, abuse, frenzied violence, the
discarding of empathy and compassion these are all things that afflicted both Golding's
schoolboys and many real survivor groups.

The real-life 'Lord of the Flies'

The Robbers Cave Experiment
A group of boys find themselves stranded in a beautiful but isolated environment. For a brief
period things go well, but then human nature starts to assert itself, and their mini-society
descends swiftly into antagonism, hostility and violence. That was the fascinating premise of
not one, but two books published in 1954. But while Lord of the Flies was a novel, Muzafer
Sherif's The Robbers Cave Experiment was factual: a scholarly text that also became highly
influential, although much less famous.

The spark that lit Golding's creative fuse was his scorn for the books he had been reading to
his children, particularly RM Ballantyne's The Coral Island. As a teacher, Golding found
Ballantyne's depiction of boys living in an island utopia of fun and friendship deeply
unconvincing.

While Golding worked his way through rejections and rewrites, an experiment was taking
place in Oklahoma that would start with a very similar premise. Twenty-two boys were let
loose in a deserted scout camp in the Robbers Cave State Park by a team of psychologists
headed by Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif. The boys were given food, shelter and almost-
complete autonomy, with the researchers there only to observe them. The aim of the
experiment was to generate friction between two groups of strangers, then bring them
together to resolve their differences by forcing them to co-operate. The participants, who
thought they were attending a normal summer camp, were 11-year-old boys.
Sherif and his team carefully selected intelligent, well-adjusted boys from middle-class, white
families. The researchers pretended to be camp staff and janitors, and melted into the
background. The boys were divided into two groups before arriving: later called the "Rattlers"
and the "Eagles".

In phase one of the experiment, each group was left alone for a week of camping, hiking and
swimming. Both established their own hierarchies, unaware of the other group's existence.
Then Sherif allowed them to hear the other group in the distance, which sparked immediate
signs of rivalry and territorialism in both groups. The announcement by the staff of a
tournament between the two tribes caused even greater hostility: as soon as they set eyes on
each other, the insults started to fly. After losing an early contest, the Eagles dispensed with
their complacent leader; a more aggressive boy seized power and immediately threatened to
beat up anyone on his own team who didn't take the competition seriously. The first day
ended with the Eagles seizing and burning the Rattlers' flag; the next day, the Rattlers
destroyed the Eagles' flag. Brawls erupted and the researchers had to break them up.

Later, the Rattlers executed a night raid on the Eagles camp, wearing full war paint to terrify
the enemy. They raced into the cabin unopposed, smashing and stealing. The Eagles leader
rounded on his routed troops, accusing them of being "yellow", and they subsequently carried
out a counterattack on the Rattlers camp armed with sticks and baseball bats. Mission
accomplished, they retreated and rearmed, this time filling socks with stones. The
psychologists watched the arms race escalate over the following days. Finally, one violent
mob brawl became so sustained that the researchers were forced to step in, drag the boys
apart and remove them to separate locations.
How long did it take for mere friction to escalate into a juvenile war, in an idyllic setting where
everyone had plenty of food? Phase two lasted just six days from the first insult ("Fatty!") to
the final all-out brawl. Golding would have loved it.

One of the 33 miners

trapped 700m underground
in northern Chile in 2010
the men suffered
hallucinations of small
apparitions and evil
emanating from the rock
(EPA)

The fear of the supernatural

The 'Belgica' and the trapped Chilean miners
Golding was also right about the corrosive effects of darkness, fear and the spectre of the
supernatural. The Lord of the Flies boys, stranded by a plane crash on an uninhabited island
paradise, are paralysed by their fear of an unseen creature they call "the beast". Most of the
boys are convinced the beast will emerge under the cover of darkness to kill them. Their fear
is so intense that they resort to ritual sacrifices of flesh to appease the beast. Golding saw
belief in the beast as a tipping point in the boys' journey from civilisation to base, human
instinct: "The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away."

Civilisation has a habit of slipping away from stranded and stressed survivors as irrational
fears start to surface. Trapped in the Antarctic ice on the Belgica in 1898, ship's doctor
Frederick Cook observed the effects on the crew of the "soul-despairing darkness" of the polar
winter. Although they had adequate supplies, the men's physical and mental state
deteriorated rapidly as they were incapacitated by depression and fear.
When one man, Emile Danco, died three weeks into the polar night, Cook was convinced the
darkness had hastened the death. Unable to bury Danco, the men hacked a hole through the
thick sea-ice next to the Belgica, and dropped the weighted body in.

Soon the men were being plagued by mysterious groaning sounds that reverberated through
the hull of the ship. Many were convinced it was Danco, and had visions of his corpse
suspended directly beneath their ship. Even the ship's cat, Nansen, went mad and died.
Another crewman developed symptoms identical to Danco and became gravely ill and
deranged. Luckily, they were saved by the return of spring and the release of the Belgica from
the pack-ice.
As recently as 2010, the Chilean miners trapped in the collapsed San Jos mine reported
many sightings of small apparitions flitting through the black corners of the mine. They were
so common the men gave them a name "mineros chicos". Several men also felt evil
manifesting out of the rock itself. "The Devil was there we weren't alone," said Samuel
Avalos. "I felt that evil presence myself."

In a 1959 BBC radio interview, Golding reflected on the appearance of the beast and its
meaning: "It's the things that have crawled out of their own bones and their own veins, they
don't know whether it's a beast from the sky, air, or where it's coming, but there is something
terrible about it as the conditions of
existence."

Thodore Gricault's 'Raft of the Medusa' (1818) revealed some of the horrors that took place on board of
147 who took to the raft, only 30 survived the first 48 hours

The darkness
The raft of the 'Medusa'
During the day, survivor groups have to contend with hunger, thirst, in-fighting and other
pragmatic issues. But as night comes, a new issue emerges: the darkness itself. For the 147
survivors of the wrecked Medusa abandoned by their longboat-sailing shipmates on a huge,
unseaworthy raft in 1816, the darkness stirred up a potent mix of terror, despair and mindless
aggression. On their second night adrift off the West African coast, a collective insanity
descended and a pitched battle began on the raft. "The soldiers and sailors," wrote one of the
few survivors later, "terrified by the presence of inevitable danger, gave themselves up for
lost."

An orgy of destruction ensued, directed both at the raft, which they tried to chop up, and
other passengers. People were hacked or beaten to death and thrown into the sea. Unarmed,
deranged men used their teeth and fists: one man had his ankle badly mauled, another nearly
had his eyes gouged out. By morning, more than 60 were dead, but "as soon as daylight
beamed upon us, we were all much more calm". The survivors passed the day in a state of
shock. There were now sharks circling, attracted by the blood and mutilated corpses caught in
the structure of the raft.
Those who had survived managed to get through the next 24 hours unscathed, but on the
fourth night, "darkness brought with it a renewal of our disorder in our weakened state. We
observed in ourselves that natural terror greatly increased in the silence of the night." Some
of the men became filled with a "horrid rage" and the slaughter recommenced. By the next
morning, when the insanity had retreated, only 30 of the 147 who had boarded the raft were
still alive.

Survivor maths
The 'Mignonette'
Often in dysfunctional survivor groups, a division quickly appears between the healthy and
strong, and the weak and sick. Survivor maths reasoning works like this: if there is a set
number of people consuming limited provisions, and it is likely that some will die in a few days
anyway, why should the group waste precious food or water on the dying? Sometimes this
means abandoning them, but at other times the calculation is much more ruthless. Such was
the situation aboard the dinghy of the Mignonette, in the infamous case of its cabin boy,
Richard Parker. The Mignonette was sailing from England to Sydney in 1884, when the flimsy
yacht suddenly sank after being hit by a large wave. Richard Parker found himself on a dinghy
with three other men, floating more than 1,000km from the nearest land. After two weeks
adrift, the captain, Tom Dudley, raised the issue of drawing lots and eating the loser. At first,
the others refused, saying they should all die together. But the captain tried desperately to
persuade them: "So let it be, but it is hard for four to die, when perhaps one might save the
rest."

After several more days, Parker became (according to the others) sick and possibly comatose,
at which point he became the loser of survivor maths. He is said to have muttered, "What,
me?" as Dudley drove a penknife into his jugular. In his legal depositions, Dudley would
initially claim Parker was unconscious, but somewhat later in his eight different versions of the
truth, he admitted that Parker had spoken. Singling out the sick and weak is useful to a
survivor group in two ways. First, it can provide a seemingly legitimate rationale for
abandonment or murder. Second, sick and weak people are much easier to dump or dispatch.
The Lord of the Flies principle is ruthless: if the strong are battling to survive, why should they
waste care and resources on the weak? After all, one man dead would mean more food and
water for the rest. In William Golding's novel, the first to die was a "littlun".

Response
Write your responses to the following in a blog post:

1. According to the article, when a group of humans is faced with hardship and
extreme situations due to isolation and the difficulty of the environment they are
in, comradery and communal dependence on one another breaks down. Instead
group fragmentation, leadership struggles, personal hatred, theft, abuse, frenzied
violence, the discarding of empathy and compassion takes over. Do you agree with
this? Explain why or why not.

2. We have learnt that the beast represents the fear within ourselves. Do you
agree that it also could symbolize humans propensity to believe in the supernatural
such as the devil?

3. The darkness stirred up a potent mix of terror, despair and mindless

aggression. Why do you think that in these examples, the darkness plays an
important role?

4. Who was Richard Parker? How is this historical example comparable with Lord of
the Flies? What about Life of Pi and Pis experience with Richard Park on the life
raft in that novel? (Extension- research the character named Richard Parker in
Edgar Allan Poes novel- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, when
the fiction comes before the history).