The Isle Of Pines (1668) and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey Ford

"The Isle of Pines" by Henry Neville is a fanciful story about George Pine, an English sailor who gets shipwrecked on a mysterious island in the Southern Hemisphere. Shipwrecked with four women, George Pine starts a new society. The community quickly grows into thousands of people. The book uses adventure and comedy to explore what it means to survive, create families, and live as humans when cut off from the rest of the world. It's set in a time when people were very interested in exploration and building colonies, pushing readers to think about what's real versus and what's just a funny story.