In his youth Tom Neale was an ordinary seaman and for years a shopkeeper among the Cook Islands, but he was in his fifties when he turned his back on society to live alone on the South Pacific atoll of Suvarov (now known as Suwarrow). With him he took nothing but a couple of cats, some bric-a-brac to tie and bolt his meagre dwelling, and the strength of body and mind to survive. In the six years over, which Neale wrote this autobiography there were heroic moments when he battled the elements: the furious hurricane that engulfed the coral islet; five desperate hours in a stormy lagoon with a cripplingly strained back; even a reluctant bit of blood-letting on wild pigs and a mammoth sea turtle.