Mr Alex Bond from Penryn, Cornwall was delivering the 10-metre yacht Mary Powell from Hawaii and docked at Kanton Island – an atoll between Hawaii and Fiji. He was met by extraordinary scenes when he found the island's 14 adults and 10 children had been given no supplies for several months.
Apparently the supply ship which should have brought them provisions was stuck at nearby Christmas Island, and the inhabitants of the island had been living off just coconuts and any fish that they could catch for more than two months.
Mr Bond immediately contacted Falmouth Coastguard for help and they in turn called their American counterparts and the Honolulu authorities to arrange a drop-off. The United States Coastguard, is now planning to airlift supplies such as cooking oil, flour and sugar from its base on Samoa.
In the meantime Bond gave the islanders any provisions he could spare. "They said to me `Captain, we have no rice, please can you help us?
“They have no starch, no calcium, no bananas; all they have is fish and coconuts. These islanders are very resilient and stoical - a bit like we are in Cornwall. But this is the second time in four years that they really have been down to nothing. Nobody is dying, but the children have got very bowed legs, very serious calcium deficiencies and really bad teeth," he said.
"These people are the caretakers of our world heritage. To think they are suffering and supplies are just a one-a-half-hour flight away is completely shameful to us as a world population," Mr Bond said. The sailor, who has worked with the Cornish humanitarian charity ShelterBox, said he and his two crew members planned to stay on and help the locals, having shared what supplies they could with them.
The island has plentiful stocks of harvested rainwater and its fishing waters are bountiful, having never been commercially exploited. But the population depends on imports for a balanced diet and needs supplies to keep its only radio transmitter in working order.
A Falmouth coastguard spokesman said today: "When the British sailor arrived, he was was met by the desperate and starving islanders who had not been delivered any supplies for months. There was no way of knowing who would have found the starving population, had not Mr Bond stopped off there.
Richard Williams, Falmouth's Watch Assistant said: "The British sailor has given the islanders all the supplies that he can spare from his 33 foot yacht. We are now working with the Americans to drop supplies or land on the island. "We don’t normally get requests like these from British sailors, but hopefully we will be able to help the islanders to get the supplies that they need. So far, we have been given a shopping list of provisions such as cooking fat, rice, sugar and flour which we have passed on to the Americans."
Since it was first claimed by a British whaling ship nearly 200 years ago, Europeans and Americans have been drawn to the remoteness of Kanton Island, a speck of land nestling in the Pacific between Hawaii and Fiji.
Britain and the US vied for control of the island before the Second World War, when it was a vital stopping off point for the Pacific Clipper flying boat service. During the ensuing conflict some 1,200 troops were stationed there and it was used as a base to attack the Japanese. The island is little more than a thin ribbon of coral enclosing a large lagoon, measuring just 14.5km from end to end, but it still has its airstrip.
The development of long-range jet engines put an end to Western interest in the atoll. The airlines pulled out in the 1960s and, after a short period when it was used by the US Air Force to track missiles, the Western powers packed up and went home. The British closed the post office in 1976 and Anglo-US condominium was ceded three years later when Kiribati became independent and assumed sovereignty.
Kanton Island’s tiny population was consigned to a life of splendid if precarious isolation, reliant on regular supplies delivered by ship from the outside world.
The atoll was repopulated from other islands and in 2008 Kanton became part of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), the world's largest marine protected area.