Lost Kingdom

8. Minerva‘s islands, rocks, reefs, foreshores and waters claimed

On 7 July 1962 a 16-metre long Tongan cutter called Tuaikaepau (Slow But Sure) was wrecked on a reef 500 kilometres south of Nuku’alofa.

It was bound for New Zealand with seven crew and 10 passengers. Six of the passengers were boxers hoping to get fights in New Zealand. The cutter had hit the high seas South Minerva Reef which was only visible at low tide. The men were to spend nearly one hundred days on the reef. While shipwrecks and lost ships are regrettably common around Tongan waters, this one touched Tonga in a different way. Queen Sālote wrote a song and dance on it, still performed decades later, a kind of informal national anthem. Significantly the incident would, a decade later, outline the very nature of the kingdom itself, while pitting Tonga and King Taufa’āhau against Fiji in a still unresolved dispute. It also put the king on a world stage, portraying him often less than flattering. 

Four Tuaikaepau castaways beside the wreck of the Japanese fishing trawler ship Noshemi Maru on Minerva Reef. Air Force Museum of New Zealand

 The Minerva Reefs, (Ongo Teleki in Tongan), are North Minerva Reef (Teleki Tokelau) and South Minerva Reef (Teleki Tonga). The reefs were known in pre-Europeans times and were fished from Ono-i-Lau in Fiji, and Tongatapu. In those times no one needed to claim islands and it was questionable whether there was even a political entity that could be called Fiji. Much of it was under the suzerainty of various Tongan chiefs, making places like Ono-i-Lau part of Tonga anyway.