Desert island in the context of "Shipwreck"

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.

Petite Mustique (also called Petit Mustique) is a small island in the Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. About 100 acres (40 ha) in size, Petite Mustique is located 2 miles (3.2 km) northeast of Savan and 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the larger island of Mustique. Petite Mustique is uninhabited and undeveloped. Sedimentary in nature, the island is hilly, reaching 340 ft (100 m) high, and has no easy landings or large beaches. Locally, the name of the island is pronounced "petty."

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).

The provisions and resources available to castaways may allow them to live on the island until other people arrive to take them off the island. However, such rescue missions may never happen if the person is not known to still be alive, if the fact that they are missing is unknown, or if the island is not mapped. These scenarios have given rise to the plots of numerous stories in the form of novels and film.

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.

Marooning is the intentional act of abandoning someone in an uninhabited area, such as a desert island. 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 (rendered as "symeron" in 16th–17th century English), meaning a household animal (or slave) who has "run wild". Cimarrón in turn may be derived from the Taino word símaran (“wild”) (like a stray arrow), from símara (“arrow”).

The practice was a penalty for crewmen, or for captains at the hands of a crew in cases of mutiny. Generally, a marooned man was set on a deserted island, often no more than a sand bar at low tide. He would be given some food, a container of water, and a loaded pistol so he could die by suicide if he desired. The outcome of marooning was usually fatal, but survival was possible if the condemned could obtain a means of escape, as in the case of pirate Edward England.

The Senkaku Islands dispute, or Diaoyu Islands dispute, is a territorial dispute over a group of uninhabited islands known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan, the Diaoyu Islands in China, and Tiaoyutai Islands in Taiwan. Japan controlled the islands from 1895 until the end of World War II in 1945, after which the United States controlled the islands, which it administered as part of the Ryukyu Islands. In 1972, the United States transferred the islands to Japan. The islands are administered as part of the Okinawa Prefecture.

The islands are positioned close to key shipping lanes and rich fishing grounds, and there may be oil reserves in the area. Japan argues that it surveyed the islands in the late 19th century and found them to be terra nullius (Latin: land belonging to no one); subsequently, China acquiesced to Japanese sovereignty until the 1970s. According to Lee Seokwoo, China started taking up the question of sovereignty over the islands in the latter half of 1970 when evidence relating to the existence of oil reserves surfaced. Taiwan also claims the islands. The PRC and the ROC argue that documentary evidence prior to the First Sino-Japanese War indicates Chinese possession and that the territory is accordingly a Japanese seizure that should be returned as the rest of Imperial Japan's conquests were returned in 1945.

Devon Island (Inuktitut: ᑕᓪᓗᕈᑎᑦ, Tallurutit) is an island in Canada and the largest uninhabited island (no permanent residents) in the world. It is located in Baffin Bay, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. It is one of the largest members of the Arctic Archipelago, the second-largest of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Canada's sixth-largest island, and the 27th-largest island in the world. It has an area of 55,247 km (21,331 sq mi) (slightly smaller than Croatia). The bedrock is Precambrian gneiss and Paleozoic siltstones and shales. The highest point is the Devon Ice Cap at 1,920 m (6,300 ft) which is part of the Arctic Cordillera. Devon Island contains several small mountain ranges, such as the Treuter Mountains, Haddington Range and the Cunningham Mountains, as well as the Haughton impact crater. The notable similarity of its surface to that of Mars has attracted interest from scientists.