Minerva Reef by Olaf Ruhen
$39.95
Minerva Reef by Olaf Ruhen
In stock
Description
“Minerva Reef: fourteen desperate weeks with the castaway Tongans”
by Olaf Ruhen
Line drawings by Clem Seale
Hard cover with dust jacket, wear/tears on dj, good condition, small wear and tear, chips in jacket
Published 1963 by Minerva Bookshop, Auckland.
200 pages.award stickers on end page
End paper maps showing the course of the cutter “Tuaikaepau”.
Measures 22 cm x 15 cm.
Quote:
“…is a great true story of men against the sea…
“On the night of 7 July 1962 the twenty-ton cutter ‘Tuaikaepau”, sailing from Tonga to Auckland, ran hard upon the outer edge of Minerva Reef, 380 miles south of Suva in Fiji. Heavy seas and the sharp teeth of the coral quickly broke the cutter to pieces, and her complement of 17 Tongans found themselves without even a small boat on a reef that was totally submerged except during the few hours of low tide each day.
“They had neither food nor water; their only shelter was the hulk of a Japanese trawler that had been earlier wrecked on the reef; and some of them had litle or no experience of the sea.
“Yet all but a few of these men survived. They kept themselves alive for 102 days on the reef, and finally they encompansed their own rescue”.
