In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called The Isle of Pines), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and Swift and not unimportant in itself.  Its author was Henry Neville, of the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times.  The grandson had had a life of some stir earlier.  Born in 1620, and educated at Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable practices, but escaped serious punishment.  He lived quietly for more than thirty years longer and died in 1694.  Besides The Isle of Pines he wrote satirical tracts (the Parliament of Ladies being the best known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts, though, like his friend Harrington, something of a “crank.”  He seems also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.

The Isle is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages:  but there is a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written.  A certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, “supported by letters from Amsterdam,” how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the Southern Ocean, comes to a “fourth island, near Terra Australis Incognita,” which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but mostly naked.  The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather, George, has left a written account of the origin of the community.  This relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing “with man and mouse,” except himself, his master’s daughter, two white maidservants, and a negro girl.  The island proves pleasant and habitable:  and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect harmony.  Thirty-seven children result:  and these at first necessarily intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that brothers and sisters may not unite—­the descendants of the four original wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their own.  A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the sanction of capital and other punishments:  and things go so well that the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty, and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously praying God “to multiply them and send them the true report of the gospel.”  The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well.