The Isle of Pines

The Isle Of Pines (1668), by Henry Neville

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Title: The Isle Of Pines (1668) and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey Ford
Author: Henry Neville
Commentator: Worthington Chauncey Ford
Release Date: May 9, 2007 [EBook #21410]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by David Widger

THE ISLE OF PINES
By Henry Neville
1668
An Essay in Bibliography
by WORTHINGTON CHAUNCEY FORD
Boston
The Club of Odd Volumes 1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE CLUB OF ODD VOLUMES
TO
Charles Lemuel Nichols
lover of books
colleague
FRIEND
ETEXT TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Numbers enclosed in square brackets are the page numbers of the 1920 edition. Numbers enclosed in double curly brackets are the page numbers of the original 1668 edition. A damaged and incomplete bibliography and index in several languages has not been included. The 1668 portion is a difficult read because of the use of the long "s" character which can only be displayed in text by using a unicode character set. In the present etext I have elected to replace the long "s" with the letter "f" which it most closely approximates in the ASCII and ISO-8859-1 charset, and which produces only a bit more difficulty to the reader than the long "s" itself. DW

PREFATORY NOTE
My curiosity on the "Isle of Pines" was aroused by the sale of a copy in London and New Tork in 1917, and was increased by the discovery of two distinct issues in the Dowse Library, in the Massachusetts Historical Society. As my material grew in bulk and the history of this hoax perpetrated in the seventeenth century developed, I thought it of sufficient interest to communicate an outline of the story to the Club of Odd Volumes, of Boston, Oftober 23, 1918. The results of my investigations are more fully given in the present volume. I acknowledge my indebtedness to the essay of Max Hippe, "Eine vor-De-foe'sche Englische Robinsonade," published in Eugen K?lbing's "Englische Studien" xix. 66.
WORTHINGTON CHAUNCEY FORD
Boston, February, 1920

THE ISLE OF PINES
The ISLE of P I N E S,
OR,
A late Difcovery of a fourth ISLAND in
Terra Auftralis, Incognita.
BEING
A True Relation of certain Englifh perfons, Who in the dayes of Queen Elizabeth making a Voyage to the Eaft India, were call' away, and wracked on the Ifland near to the Coaft of Auftralis, and all drowned, except one Man and four Women, whereof one was a Negro. And now lately Ann Dom. 1667, A Dutch Ship driven by foul weather there, by chance have found their Posterity (fpeaking good Englifh) to amount to ten or twelve thoufand perfons, as they suppofe. The whole Relation follows, written, and left by the Man himfelf a little before his death, and declared to the Dutch by His Grandchild.

THE ISLE OF PINES
[ 2 ]The scene opens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the year 1668, where in one of the college buildings a contest between two rival printers had been waged for some years. Marmaduke Johnson, a trained and experienced printer, to whose ability the Indian Bible is largely due, had ceased to be the printer of the corporation, or Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, but still had a press and, what was better, a fresh outfit of type, sent over by the corporation and entrusted to the keeping of John Eliot, the Apostle. Samuel Green had become a printer, though without previous training, and was at this time printer to the college, a position of vantage against a rival, because it must have carried with it countenance from the authorities in Boston, and public printing then as now constituted an item to a press of some income and some perquisites. By seeking to marry Green's daughter before his English wife had ceased to be, Johnson had created a prejudice, public as well as private, against himself.{1}
1 Mass. Hist Soc. Proceedings, xx. 265.
Each wished to set up a press in Boston itself, but the General Court, probably for police reasons, had ordered that there should be no printing but at Cambridge, and that what was printed there should be approved by any two of four gentlemen appointed by the Court. It thus appeared that each printer possessed a certain superiority over his rival. In the matter of types Johnson was favored, as he had new types and was a trained printer; but these advantages were partially neutralized by indolence and by Green's better standing before the magistrates.{1}
[ 3 ]In England the excesses of the printing-press during the civil war and commonwealth led to a somewhat strict though