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Desert island
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the island off the coast of Maine, see Mount Desert Island.
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".[1] However, according to another, "A desert island is a small tropical island, where nobody lives."[2]
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The first examples of stories set on a desert island were Philosophus Autodidactus written by Abubacer (1105-1185), followed by Theologus Autodidactus written by Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288). The protagonist in both stories (Hayy in Philosophus Autodidactus and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus) are spontaneously generated individuals living in seclusion on a deserted island. The story of Theologus Autodidactus, however, extends beyond the desert island setting when Kamil comes in contact with the outside world after the arrival of visitors who get stranded on the island, and when they take him back to the civilized world with them.[3] A Latin translation of Philosophus autodidactus appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger, followed by an English translation by Simon Ockley in 1708.
The quintessential desert island novel is 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. Other significant novels set on desert islands include The Swiss Family Robinson, The Coral Island, Lord of the Flies, The Cay and The Beach.
Tom Neale was a New Zealander who spent 16 years in three sessions 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.
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."[4]
- 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.
- See also: Castaway
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 years of solitude.
- ^ Merriam-Webster Online, "desert" definition 2
- ^ Collins Cobuild Dictionary (1995)
- ^ Dr. Abu Shadi Al-Roubi (1982), "Ibn Al-Nafis as a philosopher", Symposium on Ibn al-Nafis, Second International Conference on Islamic Medicine: Islamic Medical Organization, Kuwait (cf. Ibnul-Nafees As a Philosopher, Encyclopedia of Islamic World).
- ^ Clarke, Thurston, Searching for Crusoe (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 6.