Castaway in the context of "Desert island"

Robinson Crusoe (/ˈkruːsoʊ/ KROO-soh) is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. It is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre, and has been described as the first novel, or at least the first English novel – although these labels are disputed.

Written with a combination of epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character (born Robinson Kreutznaer) 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" (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.

Aleixo Garcia, also known in Spanish as Alejo García, (died 1525) was a Portuguese explorer and conquistador in service to Spain. He was a castaway who lived in Brazil and explored Paraguay and Bolivia. On a raiding expedition with a Guaraní army, Garcia and a few colleagues were the first Europeans known to have come into contact with the Inca Empire.

The Convention of Kanagawa, also known as the Kanagawa Treaty (神奈川条約, Kanagawa Jōyaku) or the Japan–US Treaty of Peace and Amity (日米和親条約, Nichibei Washin Jōyaku), was a treaty signed between the United States and the Tokugawa Shogunate on March 31, 1854. Signed under threat of force, it effectively meant the end of Japan's 220-year-old policy of national seclusion (sakoku) by opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American vessels. It also ensured the safety of American castaways and established the position of an American consul in Japan. The treaty precipitated the signing of similar treaties establishing diplomatic relations with other Western powers.

Alexander Selkirk (1676 – 13 December 1721) was a Scottish privateer and Royal Navy officer who spent four years and four months as a castaway (1704–1709) after being marooned by his captain, initially at his request, on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean.

Selkirk was an unruly youth and joined buccaneering voyages to the South Pacific during the War of the Spanish Succession. One such expedition was on Cinque Ports, captained by Thomas Stradling, under the overall command of William Dampier. Stradling's ship stopped to resupply at the uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands, west of South America, and Selkirk judged correctly that the craft was unseaworthy and asked to be left there. Selkirk's suspicions were soon justified, as Cinque Ports foundered near Malpelo Island 400 km (250 mi) from the coast of what is now Colombia.

Pedro Luis Serrano, also referred to as Pedro de Serrano, was a 16th century Spanish sailor who was allegedly marooned for seven to eight years on a small desert island. Details of the story differ, but the most common version has him shipwrecked on a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua, sometime in the 1520s. Serrano survived by eating shrimp, cockles, and other animals he found washed up on the shore, and by collecting drinking water in sea turtle shells when it rained. When rainwater was unavailable, he also drank the blood of the turtles he had captured.

In some versions of the story, Serrano was joined by another Spanish castaway after three years on the island. Due to Serrano's isolation and unkempt state, both men initially mistook one another for the Devil, and quickly fled from each another. They reconciled when both men were able to invoke the name of Jesus Christ. The two men lived together on the island for about four years. They reportedly had a brief falling-out, in which each man isolated himself to one half of the island, but they were later re-reconciled.