finding an advanced society from which the travellers can learn, the explorers discover a primitive island race in need of rescue from the threat of civil war. Although the island initially seems a paradise of sexual freedom and idyllic plenty, the story is one of dystopia, a devolution into a primitive and crucially unproductive state. The lack of creativity and industry are heightened by the fact that the islanders themselves reproduce in great numbers, leaving in three generations a large population with no scientific or artistic development. Ibram X. Kendi writes: "The Isle of Pines was one of the first portrayals in British letters of aggressive hypersexual African femininity. Such portrayals served both to exonerate White men of their inhuman rapes and to mask their human attractions to the supposed beast-like women." Some critics have pointed to the possibility of Pines deriving from an anagram of penis, alluding to the sexual preoccupation of the early settlers. The book also has political overtones. Neville was an anti-Stuart republican, and as a political exile he was clearly conscious of the socio-political concerns of the end of the early modern period. The island narrative is framed by the story of the Dutch explorers who are more organized and better equipped than the English voyage of three generations earlier, and who are needed to rescue a small English colonial nation-state from chaos. It is interesting to note that the book was written at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. See also Robinsonade External links (by W. C. Ford, 1920). References Adam R. Beach, "A profound pessimism about the Empire: The Isle of Pines, English degeneracy and Dutch supremacy" (Eighteenth Century 41, 2000), pp. 21–36. Amy Boesky, "Nation, miscegenation: membering utopia in Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines" (Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37, 1995), pp. 165–84. Daniel Carey, "Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines: travel, forgery, and the problem of genre" (Angelaki 1:2, 1993/4), pp. 23–39. Pawel Rutkowski, "Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines: a pronotopia or new Eden?" (Acta Philologica 29, 2003), pp. 21–6. 1668 novels Novels set on islands Novels set in the Indian Ocean 17th-century English novels Utopian novels