- For the island off the coast of Maine, see Mount Desert Island.
A deserted island (also known as a 'desert island') is simply any uninhabited island: the word "desert" in this context is an adjective meaning "desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied," and does not imply arid desert weather.[1] Such islands are commonly invoked in metaphor, literature, and the popular imagination.
Deserted islands in literature and popular culture
The quintessential deserted 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 deserted islands include The Swiss Family Robinson, The Coral Island, Lord of the Flies, The Cay and The Beach.
The theme of being stranded on a deserted 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 freshwater lens can be reached with a well.
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 deserted island.
- A message in a bottle is a form of communication often associated with people stranded on a deserted island attempting to be rescued.
- Deserted 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."[2]
- A man on a deserted 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 deserted islands is: " If you were stranded on a deserted island, what 10 items would you bring with you?" The amount of items usually varies.
Historical castaways
- 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.
