Such interpretations seem to fit the work better than that of a German critic, who sees in the book a sort of Utopia, a model community, or an exhibition in the development of law and order. Free love led to license, maids were ravished, and the complete promiscuity of intercourse disgusted Pine, who sought to suppress it by force and, in killing the leader of a revolt, a man with negro blood in his veins, to impose punishments for acts which he had himself done. The ground for believing that Neville had any such purpose when he wrote the book is too slight to be accepted. In 1668 the author had no call to convey a lesson in government to his countrymen by any means so frankly vulgar and pointless as the "Isle of Pines." If Neville had intended such a political object, a phrase would have sufficed to indicate it. No such key can be found in the text, and there is nothing to show that, politician as he was, he realized that such an intimation could be drawn from his paragraphs.
To assume, therefore, that so carefully hidden a suggestion of a model republic could have aided the circulation of the pamphlet at the time, or at any later period, is to introduce an element unnecessary to explain the vogue of the relation. It passed simply as a story of adventure, and as such it fell upon a time when a wide public was receptive to the point of being easily duped. Wood asserts that the "Isle of Pines," when first published, "was look'd upon as a mere sham or piece of drollery; "{1} and there are few contemporary references to the relation of either Pine or Van Sloetten, and those few are of little moment If the seamen, who were in a position to point out discrepancies of fad in the story, made any comment or criticism, I have failed to discover them.
1 Athenæ Oxomiensis (Bliss), iv. 410.
Neville himself freely played with the subject, and it is strange that he did not excite some suspicion of his veracity among his readers. He had told in his first part of a Dutch ship which was driven by foul weather to the island and of the giving to the Dutch the story of Pine. His second part is the story of the Dutch captain, sailing from Amsterdam, re-discovering the Isle of Pines, and returning home—that is, to Holland. Yet Neville for the combined issue, and presumably only a few days after giving out the first part, composed two letters from a merchant of Amsterdam—Abraham Keek—dated June 29 and July 6, saying that the last post from Rochelle brought intelligence of a French vessel which had just arrived and reported the discovery of this very island, but placing it some two or three hundred leagues "Northwest from Cape Finis Terre," though, he added with reasonable caution, "it may be that there may be some mistake in the number of the Leagues, as also of the exact point of the compass from Cape Finis Terre."
Keek offered an additional piece of geographical information, that "some English here suppose it maybe the Island of Brasile which have been so oft sought for, Southwest from Ireland."{1} The first letter of Keek is dated five days after the licensing of the first part of the "Isle of Pines," and the second sixteen days before the date of Sloetten's narrative. It is hardly possible that Neville could have been forgetful of his having made a Dutch vessel responsible for the discovery and history of Pine, and it is more than probable that he took this means of giving greater verisimilitude to the Isle of Pines, by bringing forward an independent discovery by a French vessel. However intended, the ruse did not contribute to such a purpose, as the combined parts did not enjoy as wide a circulation as the first part.
1 See page 53, infra.
On the continent a German, who knew the tract only as translated into German through a Dutch version of the English text, and therefore imperfectly, gave it serious consideration, and had little difficulty in finding inconsistencies and contradictions. Some of his questions went to the root of the matter. It was a Dutch ship which first found the Isle of Pines and its colony; why was not the discovery first announced by the Dutch? Piece by piece the critic takes down the somewhat clumsily fashioned structure of Neville's fiction, and in the end little remains untouched by suspicion. No such examination, dull and labored in form, and offering no trace of imagination which wisely permits itself to be deceived in details in order to be free to accept a whole, could pass beyond the narrow circle of a university.
As an antidote to the attractions of Neville's tract it was powerless, and to-day it remains as much of a curiosity as it was in 1668, when it was written. Indeed, a question might be raised as to which tract was less intentionally a joke—Neville's "Isle of Pines," or our German's ponderous essay upon it? At least the scientific ignorance of the Englishman, perfectly evident from the start, is more entertaining than the pseudo-science of the German critic, who boldly asserts as impossible what has come to be a commonplace.{1}
1 Das verdachtige Pineser-Eylandd, No. 29 in the
Bibliography. It it dedicated to Anthonio Goldbeck,
Burgomaster of Altona, and the letter of dedication b dated
at Hamburg, October 26, 1668.
Hippe calls attention to the geography of the relation as not the least interesting of its features, for the neighborhood of the Island of Madagascar was used in other sea stories as a place of storm and catastrophe. "The ship on which Simplicissimus wished to return to Portugal, suffered shipwreck likewise near Madagascar, and the paradisiac island on which Grimmelshausen permits his hero finally to land in company with a carpenter, is also to be sought in this region. In precisely the same way the shipwreck of Sadeur,{1} the hero of a French Robinson Crusoe story, happens on the coast of Madagascar, and from this was he driven in a southerly direction to the coast of the southern land."