!"#!$$
%&'(!)$*(++,-.%/-##-0/-)11/20322
*45%#6&*
6#7748-4-7-9/97--/:#7748-4-7-9/97--/;
! & < 4<44 $
#77---747#7+=7
6&4
6&'#-#>4$
44&447#<-1#
$$#444#4#$44&4#
$4$#440$0#?##
< # # #&44 4 $ #
4&<#4764#-!
4<-@4
$4<$#$#4- !$#
M---7#-
!44A$?#4&$4
4&4<##-!447$
#4& $ #& #' < #
B4-
Access Provided by Northumbria University at 10/26/12 8:50AM GMT
In the summer of 1668, a short pamphlet on the alleged discovery of a new
island in the Pacific Ocean became an instant bestseller on the European
market, with more than twenty foreign editions printed in five western Eu-
ropean languages within a few months of its first publication. Further ver-
sions of the story made it into contemporary newsbooks and gazettes, and
the story even traveled across the Atlantic to the American colonies. The
Isle of Pines; or, A late Discovery of a fourth Island in Terra Australis In-
cognita, published by Allen Banks and Charles Harper in London, claimed
to be “A True Relation” of the experience of a group of English people who
had been shipwrecked on a lonely island during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign
and whose descendants were found several generations later, in 1667, by
the crew of a Dutch ship (I). As would later emerge, the pamphlet was a
“sham”—a literary hoax by the English republican Henry Neville, who used
the story to satirize the Restoration regime in England and the failures of its
foreign policy after the defeat in the recent Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667).
By depicting the patriarchal ruler of a remote island who preferred sexual
relations with women to looking after his political affairs, it ridiculed both
the depraved morals of the Stuart court and the patriarchal political theory
used by Charles II to defend his authority by divine right.
1
Ever since Roland Barthes announced “the death of the author” in the
1960s it has been argued in literary scholarship that the reader, not the au-
thor, creates the meaning of a work.
2
However, rarely has this authorial loss
of control or the writer’s loss of authority been illustrated so vividly as in
the case of Neville’s pamphlet. Once off the press, The Isle took on a life of
its own and traveled in numerous versions across the European continent.
With no international copyright laws in place to prevent unauthorized uses
of the text, the pamphlet was up for grabs.
3
Soon after its first publication in
London, it was translated into Dutch, from Dutch into German and French,
Authors Losing Control
!
The European Transformations of Henry Neville’s
The Isle of Pines (1668)
Gaby M. Mahlberg
Book History2
from French into Italian, and from German into Danish. And what readers,
translators, printers, and publishers made of it was more often than not
quite different from what the author might have intended.
4
Much of the
political criticism of Stuart England in the parable simply got lost in transla-
tion. Nevertheless, while some readers might initially have been fooled into
reading the story as news, early modern audiences were generally capable
of making informed judgments and understanding the nature of the text
at hand. The “truth” transported in the pamphlet was of a moral rather
than factual nature. An assessment of the various readings of The Isle thus
requires more subtlety. In what follows I trace some of the transformations
The Isle underwent as it was translated and edited, analyzed and responded
to, cut down, and adapted for ever-changing audiences, in an attempt to un-
derstand some of the complexities of the pamphlet’s contemporary impact
and significance.
“Reception” is not an adequate concept to deal with the changes The Isle
underwent in its transmission process. “Reception” implies passive reading
or absorbing of a story as it is, whereas translation always involves an ele-
ment of interpretation. The printer/publisher or translator is the first reader
of a text, whose choice of words and whose decision about what to include
or what to leave out already make a judgment on the text. Equally, a change
of the title, the addition of a letter of recommendation, the inclusion of a
story in a newsbook, or the binding of a pamphlet in a series with others
are all comments on the text that say something about the way in which the
agent placed the piece. Therefore, the term “transformation” will be pre-
ferred here because we are not dealing with passive readers, but translators,
editors, publishers, and booksellers who more or less consciously interfered
with the text and made deliberate changes to the pamphlet according to
their needs and purposes, so that what was left in the end more often than
not bore little resemblance to the original piece that Neville had licensed in
London.
The English Text
The pamphlet about the marooned English society was only the first of three
parts of the story Neville had published in London between June and July
1668 after his return from Italy, where he had spent several years in exile
after the Restoration.
5
This first part of The Isle of Pines, licensed on 27
June 1668,
6
tells the story of bookkeeper George Pines, who in 1589 leaves
Authors Losing Control 3
for East India with his master to set up business there “for the advantage of
Trade” (I, 1). Having made it past the Cape of Good Hope, the ship carrying
Pines and his master encounters a storm, drifts off course, and finally wrecks
off the coast of an uninhabited island near the mythical Terra Australis
Incognita, or Great Southern Land.
7
Most of the company perish except
for Pines and four women—his master’s daughter, two maidservants, and a
black slave—who had managed to save themselves on the ship’s bowsprit.
As the only male in the group, Pines sets himself up as their protector and
ruler, and on the lonely island he soon enters into sexual relations with all
four women, which results in an ever-growing family. When Pines’s eldest
son is old enough, his father gives him a mate and subsequently settles the
younger generation across the river. By the time Pines has reached the age
of sixty, his society has grown to 565 people. He marries the females of one
family to the males of another to avoid the incest that the previous genera-
tion had to resort to and exhorts them to have the Bible read regularly at
a monthly meeting. Shortly before Pines’s death, he passes on his rule to
his eldest son, who becomes “King and Governor of all the rest” (I, 8) and
again assembles his people, who now number 1,798. He divides them into
four tribes named after their mothers (the English, the Sparks, the Trevors,
and the Phills) and gives them a blessing, with which the pamphlet ends.
The second installment of the story published by Neville in London was
A New and further Discovery of The Isle of Pines in A Letter from Cor-
nelius Van Sloetten a Dutch-man. It is written from the perspective of the
ship’s captain who had discovered the island and addressed “to a Friend
of his in London” with “a Relation of his voyage to the East Indies” (I, 1).
This pamphlet, dated 22 July 1668, relates the encounter of the Dutch with
George Pines’s grandson William, the present ruler of the island, as well as
the story of the intervening years since the founder’s death. Assuming that
his readers are familiar with the first pamphlet,
8
the narrator explains that,
after the death of George Pines, corruption and licentiousness spread on
the island. The “grandest offender,” a descendant of the black slave, was
punished by being thrown from a high rock into the sea, before Pines’s suc-
cessor, Henry, gave a basic code of law to his people (II, 11–12). These laws
had kept the country in order to the present day. But just as the Dutch sail-
ors are about to leave the island, a rebellion breaks out instigated by a de-
scendant of the black woman and ruler of the Phills, who had raped the wife
of another tribal leader. Unable to cope with the insurrection by himself,
William Pines asks the Dutch for help, who easily put down the rebels with
a few shots from their guns before returning to Europe. To add credibility to