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Desert island

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A desert island is an uninhabited or sparsely inhabited island. Such islands are commonly invoked in metaphor, literature, and the popular imagination, as a place where individuals or small groups of people find themselves marooned or castaway, cut off from civilization.

Note that an arid desert climate is not necessarily implied; one dictionary uses the phrase 'desert island' to illustrate the use of 'desert' as an adjective meaning "desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied". However, according to another, "A desert island is a small tropical island, where nobody lives.

Desert islands in literature and popular culture

The first known novels to be set on a desert island were Philosophus Autodidactus written by Ibn Tufail (1105-1185), followed by Theologus Autodidactus written by Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288). The protagonists in both (Hayy in Philosophus Autodidactus and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus) are feral children living in seclusion on a deserted island, until they eventually come in contact with castaways from the outside world who are stranded on the island. The story of Theologus Autodidactus, however, extends beyond the desert island setting when the castaways take Kamil back to civilization with them.

William Shakespeare's 1610-11 play, The Tempest, uses the idea of being stranded on a desert island as a pretext for the action of the play. Prospero and his daughter Miranda are set adrift by Prospero's treacherous brother Antonio, seeking to become Duke of Milan, and Prospero in turn shipwrecks his brother and other men of sin onto the island.

A Latin translation of Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger, followed by an English translation by Simon Ockley in 1708, as well as German and Dutch translations. In the late 17th century, Philosophus Autodidactus inspired Robert Boyle, an acquaintance of Pococke, to write his own philosophical novel set on a desert island, The Aspiring Naturalist. Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus was also eventually translated into English in the early 20th century.

The quintessential desert island novel, however, was Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. It is likely that Defoe took inspiration for Crusoe from a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who was rescued in 1709 after four years on the uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands; Defoe usually made use of current events for his plots. It is also likely that he was inspired by the Latin or English translations of Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus.

Tom Neale was a New Zealander who voluntarily spent 16 years in three sessions in the 1950s and 1960s living alone on the island of Suwarrow in the northern Cook Islands group. His time there is documented in his autobiography, An Island To Myself. Other significant novels set on desert islands include The Swiss Family Robinson, The Coral Island, The Mysterious Island, Lord of the Flies, The Cay and The Beach.

The theme of being stranded on a desert island has inspired films, such as Cast Away, and TV series, like Lost and the comedy Gilligan's Island. It is also the driving force behind reality shows like Survivor.

In the popular conception, such islands are often located in the Pacific, tropical, uninhabited and usually uncharted. They are remote locales that offer escape and force people marooned or stranded as castaways to become self-sufficient and essentially create a new society. This society can either be utopian, based on an ingenious re-creation of society's comforts (as in Swiss Family Robinson and, in a humorous form, Gilligan's Island) or a regression into savagery (the major theme of both Lord of the Flies and The Beach). In reality, small coral atolls or islands usually have no source of fresh water (thus precluding any long-term human survival), but at times a fresh water lens can be reached with a well.

  • The BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs asks well-known people what items they would take with them to a deserted island.
  • A message in a bottle is a form of communication often associated with people stranded on a desert island attempting to be rescued.
  • Desert islands also figure largely in sexual fantasies, with the top "dream vacation" for men surveyed by Psychology Today being "marooned on a tropical island with several members of the opposite sex.
  • A man on a desert island is also a hugely popular image for one-panel cartoons, the island being conventionally depicted as just a few yards across with a single palm tree.
  • A popular question concerning desert islands is, "If you were stranded on a desert island, what 10 items would you bring with you?" The number of items often varies.

Historical castaways

Real-life castaways were reduced to an extremely primitive condition, or lost the powers of speech, in a space of a few years. One report describes a Frenchman who, after two years of solitude on Mauritius, tore his clothing to pieces in a fit of madness brought on by a diet of nothing but raw turtles. Another story has to do with a Dutch seaman who was left alone on the island of Saint Helena as punishment. He fell into such despair that he disinterred the body of a buried comrade and set out to sea in the coffin. Another castaway, the Spaniard Pedro Serrano, was rescued after seven and a half years of solitude.

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Last updated on Thursday July 24, 2008 at 10:08:16 PDT (GMT -0700)
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