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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 people, and are also used as stereotypes for the idea of "paradise". Some uninhabited islands are protected as , and some are privately owned. Devon Island in Canada's far north is the largest uninhabited island in the world.
Small coral atolls or islands usually have no source of fresh water, but occasionally a freshwater lens can be reached with a well.
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".
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 Poaching of protected species.
| 1 | 55,247 | |||||
| 2 | Alexander Island (Alexander Island) | 49,070 | ||||
| 3 | 48,904 | |||||
| 4 | 44,000 | |||||
| 5 | 43,178 | |||||
| 6 | 42,149 | |||||
| 7 | 40 | Prince of Wales Island (Kinngailak) | 33,339 | 12,872 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 8 | 46 | Somerset Island (Kuuganajuk) | 24,786 | 9,570 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 9 | 47 | Kotelny Island (Kotelny Island) | 24,000 | 9,300 | Russia (Sakha Republic) | |
| 10 | 54 | Bathurst Island | 16,042 | 6,194 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 11 | 55 | Prince Patrick Island | 15,848 | 6,119 | Canada (Northwest Territories) | |
| 12 | 56 | Thurston Island | 15,700 | 6,100 | None | |
| 13 | 57 | Nordaustlandet | 14,467 | 5,586 | Norway (Svalbard) | |
| 14 | 59 | October Revolution Island | 14,170 | 5,470 | Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) | |
| 15 | 68 | Ellef Ringnes Island | 11,295 | 4,361 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 16 | 69 | Bolshevik Island | 11,270 | 4,350 | Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) | |
| 17 | 71 | Bylot Island | 11,067 | 4,273 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 18 | 77 | Prince Charles Island | 9,521 | 3,676 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 19 | 82 | Komsomolets Island | 9,006 | 3,477 | Russia (Krasnoyarsk Krai) | |
| 20 | 85 | Carney Island | 8,500 | 3,300 | None | |
| 21 | 107 | Coats Island | 5,498 | 2,123 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
| 22 | 111 | Amund Ringnes Island | 5,255 | 2,029 | Canada (Nunavut) | |
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,Amber Haque (2004), "Psychology from Islamic Perspective: Contributions of Early Muslim Scholars and Challenges to Contemporary Muslim Psychologists", Journal of Religion and Health 43 (4): 357–377 369. followed by an English language translation by Simon Ockley in 1708,Simon Ockley (1708), The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan, Oxford University. as well as German language and Dutch language translations.Martin Wainwright, Desert island scripts , The Guardian, 22 March 2003. 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.G. J. Toomer (1996), Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 222, Oxford University Press, . 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. Steampunk anthology, 2008, ed. Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, And Fantasies of Conquest, by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, University of Minnesota P, 2007, The novel features Man Friday, Crusoe's personal assistant. It is likely that Defoe took inspiration for Crusoe from a Scotland 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.Nawal Muhammad Hassan (1980), Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe: A study of an early Arabic impact on English literature, Al-Rashid House for Publication.Cyril Glasse (2001), New Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 202, Rowman Altamira, .
Noel Paul Stookey wrote 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.
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 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 Kensuke's Kingdom, both the book and the film, a boy, Michael, is swept overboard during a storm in the Pacific Ocean while sailing with his family. He Castaway on an island, where he meets Kensuke, a Japanese Navy sailor from World War II, who washed ashore in the last days of the war. Although Michael is rescued, Kensuke stays on the island to defend its wildlife, especially orangutans, from Poaching.
Desert island jokes are also a hugely popular image for , 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.
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".
Historical castaways
Essex
In 1820, the crew of the American 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 , while three of the men decided to remain on the island and survived there for four months until their rescue.
Strathmore
Survivors of the British Strathmore survived for seven months at a small island of the French Crozet Islands from 1875 to 1876. They survived by eating eggs and flesh of geese, albatrosses and other seabirds. They also ate root vegetables and fish. The survival was the input for among others the book Survival on the Crozet Islands: The Wreck of the Strathmore in 1875.
See also
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