Peter Warner

Peter Raymond Warner (22 February 1931 – 13 April 2021) was an Australian seafarer and ship's captain who discovered six Tongan youths marooned on a Pacific island in 1966, more than a year after they had been presumed dead. He also won the line honours three times in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.

Early life Peter Warner was the youngest son of businessman and politician Sir Arthur Warner (1899–1966), who was head of Electronic Industries, and Ethel Wakefield.

Sailing career Warner ran away from home at the age of 17, wanting to sail boats, and not wanting to be a part of his wealthy father's large business. Upon his return a year later, his father made him finish school, and enroll in law at the University of Melbourne. The boat was named after the Warner family's household appliance company, Astor Radio Corporation. Although they had lit signal fires each time a ship passed, four had failed to sight the boys. Once aboard Warner's boat, they told him that they were students at a boarding school in Nukualofa, the Tongan capital. They had decided to steal a fishing boat one day, only to get caught in a storm. Their trip to the island lasted eight days, and they needed to constantly bail water from the 24 ft boat. Once established on the island, they climbed to the top of a volcanic crater where they found wild taro, bananas and chickens descended from those cultivated when the island had been inhabited a century earlier.

Upon their return, the boys were greeted by their friends and relatives, who had presumed them dead and held their funerals. Warner helped the boys get out of jail by paying Uhila for the boat. He also secured the documentary rights to the story, with the boys acting as themselves in the film. He later had a new ship built and hired the boys as crew. The crewman who sighted the distress flashes from a mirror was Sione Filipe Totau, the lead boy from Ata Island – now a deckhand on Warner's ship. Autobiographies In 2019, Warner published a book about his life as a fishing boat captain and ocean racing sailor. He published three volumes of his autobiography:

Astor: Adventures Ashore & Afloat (2020), on his upbringing and taking to sea and his yachting successes up to 1965. Ocean of Light: 30 years in Tonga and the Pacific (2020), on his time from finding the Tongan boys in 1966, establishing a fishing fleet and then a small shipping line based in Tonga, until his intended retirement to Australia in the mid-1990s. He was 90 years old at the time of his death.