An uninhabited island, desert island, or deserted island, is an island, islet or atoll which lacks permanent human population. Uninhabited islands are often depicted in films or stories about shipwrecked people, and are also used as stereotypes for the idea of "paradise". Some uninhabited islands are protected as nature reserves, and some are privately owned. Devon Island in Canada's far north is the largest uninhabited island in the world. [1] [2]
Small coral atolls or islands usually have no source of fresh water, but occasionally a freshwater lens can be reached with a well.
Uninhabited islands are sometimes also called "deserted islands" or "desert islands". In the latter, the adjective desert connotes not desert climate conditions, but rather "desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied". The word desert has been "formerly applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land", and it is this archaic meaning that appears in the phrase "desert island". [3]
The term "desert island" is also commonly used figuratively to refer to objects or behavior in conditions of social isolation and limited material means. Behavior on a desert island is a common thought experiment, for example, "desert island morality". [3]
Desert islands are partly sheltered from humans, making them havens for a number of fragile wildlife species such as sea turtles and ground-nesting seabirds. Many species of seabirds use them as stopovers on their way or especially for nesting, taking advantage of the (supposed) absence of terrestrial predators such as cats or rats.
However, tons of waste from far away countries accumulate on their beaches from the sea, and the absence of surveillance also makes them desirable spots for poachers of protected species. [4]
Rank | Area Rank | Island | Area (km2) | Area (sq mi) | Country/Countries | Coordinates |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 27 | Devon Island (Tallurutit) | 55,247 | 21,331 | Canada (Nunavut) | 75°08′N 87°51′W |
2 | 28 | Alexander Island (Isla Alejandro I) | 49,070 | 18,950 | None (Antarctic territorial claims by Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom) | 71°00′S 70°00′W |
3 | 30 | Severny Island (Severnyy Ostrov) | 48,904 | 18,882 | Russia (Arkhangelsk Oblast) | 75°30′N 60°00′E |
4 | 31 | Berkner Island (Isla Berkner) | 44,000 | 17,000 | None (Antarctic territorial claims by Argentina and the United Kingdom) | 79°30′S 47°30′W |
5 | 32 | Axel Heiberg Island (Umingmat Nunaat) | 43,178 | 16,671 | Canada (Nunavut) | 79°26′N 90°46′W |
6 | 33 | Melville Island (Ilulliq) | 42,149 | 16,274 | Canada (Northwest Territories and Nunavut) | 75°30′N 111°30′W |
7 | 40 | Prince of Wales Island (Kinngailak) | 33,339 | 12,872 | Canada (Nunavut) | 72°40′N 99°00′W |
8 | 46 | Somerset Island (Kuuganajuk) | 24,786 | 9,570 | Canada (Nunavut) | 73°15′N 93°30′W |
9 | 47 | Kotelny Island (Olgujdaah Aryy) | 24,000 | 9,300 | Russia (Sakha Republic) | 75°20′N 141°00′E |
10 | 54 | Bathurst Island | 16,042 | 6,194 | Canada (Nunavut) | 75°46′N 99°47′W |
11 | 55 | Prince Patrick Island | 15,848 | 6,119 | Canada (Northwest Territories) | 76°45′N 119°30′W |
12 | 56 | Thurston Island | 15,700 | 6,100 | None | 72°6′S 99°0′W |
13 | 57 | Nordaustlandet | 14,467 | 5,586 | Norway (Svalbard) | 79°48′N 22°24′E |
14 | 59 | October Revolution Island | 14,170 | 5,470 | Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) | 79°30′N 97°00′E |
15 | 68 | Ellef Ringnes Island | 11,295 | 4,361 | Canada (Nunavut) | 78°30′N 102°15′W |
16 | 69 | Bolshevik Island | 11,270 | 4,350 | Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) | 78°63'N 102.48°E |
17 | 71 | Bylot Island | 11,067 | 4,273 | Canada (Nunavut) | 73°16′N 78°30′W |
18 | 77 | Prince Charles Island | 9,521 | 3,676 | Canada (Nunavut) | 67°47′N 76°12′W |
19 | 82 | Komsomolets Island | 9,006 | 3,477 | Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) | 80°29′N 94°59′E |
20 | 85 | Carney Island | 8,500 | 3,300 | None | 73°57′S 121°00′W |
21 | 107 | Coats Island | 5,498 | 2,123 | Canada (Nunavut) | 62°35′N 82°45′W' |
22 | 111 | Amund Ringnes Island | 5,255 | 2,029 | Canada (Nunavut) | 78°20′N 96°25′W |
Most of the largest uninhabited islands are many kilometers/miles inside the Arctic or Antarctic circles, indicating that the reason for their desertedness is the freezing climate.
The first known novels to be set on a desert island were Hayy ibn Yaqdhan written by Ibn Tufail (1105–1185), followed by Theologus Autodidactus written by Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288). The protagonists in both (Hayy in Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus) are feral children living in seclusion on a deserted island, until they eventually come in contact with castaways from the outside world who are stranded on the island. The story of Theologus Autodidactus, however, extends beyond the deserted island setting when the castaways take Kamil back to civilization with them. [8]
William Shakespeare's 1610–11 play, The Tempest , uses the idea of being stranded on a desert island as a pretext for the action of the play. Prospero and his daughter Miranda are set adrift by Prospero's treacherous brother Antonio, seeking to become Duke of Milan, and Prospero in turn shipwrecks his brother and other men of sin onto the island.
A Latin translation of Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger, [9] [10] followed by an English translation by Simon Ockley in 1708, [11] as well as German and Dutch translations. [12] In the late 17th century, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan inspired Robert Boyle, an acquaintance of Pococke, to write his own philosophical novel set on a deserted island, The Aspiring Naturalist. [13] Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus was also eventually translated into English in the early 20th century.
Published in 1719, Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe , about a castaway on a desert island, has spawned so many imitations in film, television and radio that its name was used to define a genre, Robinsonade. [14] [15] The novel features Man Friday, Crusoe's personal assistant. 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 otherwise uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands; Defoe usually made use of current events for his plots. It is also likely that he was inspired by the Latin or English translations of Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan. [9] [12] [16] [17]
Noel Paul Stookey sang a song about living on a desert island called "On a Desert Island (With You in My Dreams)" on Peter, Paul & Mary's 1965 album: "See What Tomorrow Brings".
Tom Neale was a New Zealander who voluntarily spent 16 years in three sessions in the 1950s and 1960s living alone on the island of Suwarrow in the Northern Cook Islands group. His time there is documented in his autobiography, An Island To Oneself . [18]
In the popular conception, such islands are often located in the Pacific, tropical, uninhabited and usually uncharted. [19] 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 ).
Desert island jokes are also a hugely popular image for gag cartoons, the island being conventionally depicted as just a few yards across with a single palm tree (probably due to the visual constraints of the medium). 17 such cartoons appeared in The New Yorker in 1957 alone. [20]
A special variation of the desert island theme appears in H.G.Wells's The War in the Air . As part of the cataclysmic global war depicted, the bridges linking Goat Island in the middle of the Niagara Falls to the mainland are cut, and with civilization fast breaking down a few survivors stranded on the island cannot expect rescue and must rely on their own resources - embarking on a grim life-and-death struggle.
The top "dream vacation" for heterosexual men surveyed by Psychology Today was "marooned on a tropical island with several members of the opposite sex". [21]
In 1820, the crew of the British whaler Essex spent time on uninhabited British Henderson Island. There they gorged on birds, fish, and vegetation and found a small freshwater spring. After one week, they had depleted the island's resources and most of the crew left on three whaleboats, while three of the men decided to remain on the island and survived there for four months until their rescue. [22]
Survivors of the British Strathmore survived for 7 months at a small island of the French Crozet Islands from 1875 to 1876. They survived from eating eggs and flesh of geese, albatrosses and other seabirds. The also ate root vegetables and fish. [23] The survival was the input for among others the book Survival on the Crozet Islands: The Wreck of the Strathmore in 1875. [24]
Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
Islamic philosophy is philosophy that emerges from the Islamic tradition. Two terms traditionally used in the Islamic world are sometimes translated as philosophy—falsafa, which refers to philosophy as well as logic, mathematics, and physics; and Kalam, which refers to a rationalist form of Scholastic Islamic theology which includes the schools of Maturidiyah, Ashaira and Mu'tazila.
Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar and lasting until the 6th century AH. The period is known as the Islamic Golden Age, and the achievements of this period had a crucial influence in the development of modern philosophy and science. For Renaissance Europe, "Muslim maritime, agricultural, and technological innovations, as well as much East Asian technology via the Muslim world, made their way to western Europe in one of the largest technology transfers in world history." This period starts with al-Kindi in the 9th century and ends with Averroes at the end of 12th century. The death of Averroes effectively marks the end of a particular discipline of Islamic philosophy usually called the Peripatetic Arabic School, and philosophical activity declined significantly in Western Islamic countries, namely in Islamic Spain and North Africa, though it persisted for much longer in the Eastern countries, in particular Persia and India where several schools of philosophy continued to flourish: Avicennism, Illuminationist philosophy, Mystical philosophy, and Transcendent theosophy.
The terms Muslim world and Islamic world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs, politics, and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is practiced. In a modern geopolitical sense, these terms refer to countries in which Islam is widespread, although there are no agreed criteria for inclusion. The term Muslim-majority countries is an alternative often used for the latter sense.
Edward Pococke was an English Orientalist and biblical scholar.
Marooning is the intentional act of abandoning someone in an uninhabited area, such as a desert island, or more generally to be marooned is to be in a place from which one cannot escape. The word is attested in 1699, and is derived from the term maroon, a word for a fugitive slave, which could be a corruption of Spanish cimarrón, meaning a household animal who has "run wild". Cimarrón in turn may be derived from the Taino word símaran (“wild”), from símara (“arrow”).
Arabic literature is the writing, both as prose and poetry, produced by writers in the Arabic language. The Arabic word used for literature is Adab, which comes from a meaning of etiquette, and which implies politeness, culture and enrichment.
Arabic epic literature encompasses epic poetry and epic fantasy in Arabic literature. Virtually all societies have developed folk tales encompassing tales of heroes. Although many of these are legends, many are based on real events and historical figures.
Ibn Ṭufayl was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath: a writer, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, astronomer, and vizier.
The Incoherence of the Philosophers is a landmark 11th-century work by the Muslim polymath al-Ghazali and a student of the Asharite school of Islamic theology criticizing the Avicennian school of early Islamic philosophy. Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and al-Farabi (Alpharabius) are denounced in this book, as they follow Greek philosophy even when, in the author's perception, it contradicts Islam. The text was dramatically successful, and marked a milestone in the ascendance of the Asharite school within Islamic philosophy and theological discourse.
Robinsonade is a literary genre of fiction wherein the protagonist is suddenly separated from civilization, usually by being shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island, and must improvise the means of their survival from the limited resources at hand. The genre takes its name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The success of this novel spawned so many imitations that its name was used to define a genre, which is sometimes described simply as a "desert island story" or a "castaway narrative".
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Abī Ḥazm al-Qarashī, known as Ibn al-Nafīs, was an Arab polymath whose areas of work included medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic studies, jurisprudence, and philosophy. He is known for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The work of Ibn al-Nafis regarding the right sided (pulmonary) circulation pre-dates the later work (1628) of William Harvey's De motu cordis. Both theories attempt to explain circulation. The 2nd century Greek physician Galen's theory about the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged until the works of Ibn al-Nafis, for which he has been described as "the father of circulatory physiology".
A castaway is a person who is cast adrift or ashore. While the situation usually happens after a shipwreck, some people voluntarily stay behind on a desert island, either to evade captors or the world in general. A person may also be left ashore as punishment (marooned).
Islamic literature is literature written by Muslim people, influenced by an Islamic cultural perspective, or literature that portrays Islam. It can be written in any language and portray any country or region. It includes many literary forms including adabs, a non-fiction form of Islamic advice literature, and various fictional literary genres.
Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān is an Arabic philosophical novel and an allegorical tale written by Ibn Tufail in the early 12th century in Al-Andalus. Names by which the book is also known include the Latin: Philosophus Autodidactus ; and English: The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān was named after an earlier Arabic philosophical romance of the same name, written by Avicenna during his imprisonment in the early 11th century, even though both tales had different stories. The novel greatly inspired Islamic philosophy as well as major Enlightenment thinkers. It is the third most translated text from Arabic, after the Quran and the One Thousand and One Nights.
Pikelot Island is one of the outer islands of the State of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia. It is a low coral islet, with a wet, tropical climate. It is uninhabited. Since the 1970s, sailors have stranded on the island on several occasions.
Theologus Autodidactus is an Arabic novel written by Ibn al-Nafis, originally titled The Treatise of Kāmil on the Prophet's Biography, and also known as Risālat Fādil ibn Nātiq. It was written sometime between 1268 and 1277 and is considered one of the earliest examples of a novel in Arabic literature. The novel contains elements of science fiction and is an early example of a coming-of-age tale and a desert island story. It was partly a response to the philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Andalusi writer Ibn Tufail.
There was cultural contact between Europe and the Islamic world from the Renaissance to Early Modern period.
Theological fiction is fictional writing which shapes or depicts people's attitudes towards theological beliefs. It is typically instructional or exploratory rather than descriptive, and it engages specifically with the theoretical ideas which underlie and shape typical responses to religion. Theological fiction, as a concept, is used by both theists and atheists, such as in fictional pantheons and cultures in theological fantasy literature.
The Tongan castaways were a group of six Tongan teenage boys who shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of ʻAta in 1965 and lived there for 15 months until their rescue. The boys ran away from their boarding school on the island of Tongatapu, stealing a boat in their escape. After a storm wrecked the boat, they drifted to the abandoned, remote island of ʻAta and managed to keep themselves in good order for the duration under the circumstances. Long thought dead, they were discovered and rescued in September 1966 by Australian lobster fisher Peter Warner.