The Isle of Pines

Henry Neville
1668

The Isle of Pines has confused readers and scholars from the 17th century until the present day. Defying genres, it has been consequently categorized as fake news, a travel account, a dystopian novel, a political treatise, an erotic tale and a proto-Robinsonade. It purports to be the true story of the how George Pine and four women were cast upon an uninhabited island in 1569 and consequently populate the island with four tribes, each led by the descendants of one of the women. When a Dutch captain discovers the island in 1667, he finds the 12,000 primitively living Englishmen in the middle of a civil war. The JCB holds nine editions of this text, which immediately became a bestseller and was accepted as fact by many contemporaries.

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