Desert island

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For the island off the coast of Maine, see Mount Desert Island.

An example of a desert island

A desert island is simply any uninhabited island: the word "desert" is a reference to the island's deserted status, and does not necessarily imply arid desert weather. Such islands are commonly invoked in metaphor, literature, and the popular imagination.

Contents

1 Desert islands in literature and popular culture
2 Historical castaways
3 Islomania
4 See also
5 Notes
6 External links

Desert islands in literature and popular culture

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 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).

Lost makes this explicit with characters named John Locke and Danielle Rousseau, named for John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom were social contract philosophers who dealt with the relationship between nature and civilization. Locke believed that, in the state of nature, all men had equal right to punish transgressors; to ensure fair judgment for all, governments were formed to better administrate the laws. Rousseau, on the other hand, argued that man is born weak and ignorant, but virtuous nonetheless; only after man develops society does he become wicked.

The BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs asks well-known people what items they would take with them to a desert 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."^{[#endnote_clarke]}
A man on a desert island is also a hugely popular image for one-panel cartoons.
Many children have written stories about desert islands, including one (not very well known) story Desert Island (the novel), which was written by two middle school girls.

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 years of solitude. For more details of historical castaways see under castaway

Islomania

Possessing desert or tropical islands is the dream of many, and is often realized by the very rich. The term islomania is used to describe a craze for islands.

Notes

↑ Clarke, Thurston, Searching for Crusoe (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 6.

External links

[The Straight Dope: Are there actual cases of castaways who have been rescued?]