Eroni Kumana, one of the two Solomon Islanders who saved JFK, died this past Saturday. I never knew the details of this story, but always found it interesting.
Another cool bit of info is that Kennedy would later use his coconut as a paperweight in the Oval Office.
Quote:
On 5 August, Kennedy and his colleague George Ross left the other men on this new island and set out again in search of food and water. As they made their way along the beach on another nearby island, they spotted two men in a canoe - it was Kumana and his friend Biuku Gasa.
At first, the two Solomon Islanders were frightened of Kennedy and Ross, says Kumana's grandson, Malakana.
"They saw these people and they thought they were Japanese - so they paddled away in their canoe. Fortunately they came across the rest of Kennedy's crew mates at the other island, who told them they were from America."
In an interview in 2002 with the National Geographic, Kumana himself recalled the moment he met the survivors: "Some of them cried and some of them came and shook our hands. When Kennedy saw us… he ran and embraced us."
Kumana and Gasa worked with the Coastwatchers, a network of agents based across the Pacific islands during WWII, tasked with keeping an eye on the enemy and reporting back to Allied forces.
Kennedy knew he somehow needed to get a message back to base if a rescue was to be organised, so he wrote a message on a coconut:
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