“The Countrey being thus ſettled”: The Development of Indigenous Culture

As a metafiction, The Isle of Pines both reflects the context of its delivery and influences the terms of its own reception. Thus, it seems a predictable extrapolation when a 1688 German translation of Mocquet’s Voyages includes a version of Part One, told by a “Pineser” whom the narrator meets in Lisbon. ¹ The insertion of Neville’s fiction within a generally factual volume confirms, like the Stichter map, the expectations and interpretive methods brought to it. The Isle of Pines appears to take place in a real world, described the way that science describes reality, and the responses it elicits—urges to acquire information, to categorize evidence, to test hypotheses—involve the kinds of activities that are coming to dominate European concepts of knowledge. Given such an episteme, and considering the rapid growth of European travel, it is entirely plausible that the island should have been revisited in the 20 years between Van Sloetten’s voyage and Mocquet’s encounter, that eventually a “Pineser” would appear in a busy European port and tell his story from the viewpoint of one who has left home. This is how things happen in the world of expansion and progress. If the narrative raises questions of desire and opportunity, problems of race and gender, considerations of language and interpretation, their main effect is to produce feedback that closely resembles the pressure brought upon European self-concepts by factual experience. The development of cultural configurations within the island utopia draws upon a range of possibilities conceivable and available within European actuality, which the fiction uncouples from the limiting historical reality by proposing a century of isolation.