Journal Reveals Details Of 16Th-Century Sex Colony Of Castaways

[Raistlin]

Free love – that was started by Californian hippies in the 1960s, wasn’t it?

Think again. Swinging sex was being practised 400 years earlier with eyewatering ardour by the famously uninhibited... er, English.

The island, which was called Isle of Pines in the journal, remains a mystery

According to a journal which has surfaced at auction, a 16th-century love colony was set up by a group of castaways when their ship was wrecked close to an uninhabited island off Australia.

The five who survived the 1569 East India Merchant disaster were George Pine, 20, and four women – master’s daughter Sarah English, two maidservants and a black slave.

Nearly a century later, in 1667, a Dutch ship was driven on to the island where the crew discovered an English-speaking settlement of 12,000 people.

Crewman Jeremiah Hanzen, fluent in English, extracted an astonishing tale from ‘Prince’ William Pine, grandson of the first man ashore 98 years earlier.

Pine Snr made all four women repeatedly pregnant, amassing 47 children and 518 grand and great-grandchildren.

He named the colony the Isle of Pines and before his death at 80 gave a written account of the island’s recent history.

With little else to occupy themselves, it was noted, the islanders ‘fell into whoredoms, incests and adulteries’.

Little more was heard of the story until in 1790 when it appeared in the Caledonian Mercury. An edition of the newspaper is expected to fetch up to £350 at a Charles Miller maritime auction in London tomorrow.

The Isle of Pines cannot be pinpointed and auctioneer Mr Miller says the story ‘is quite a tall one’ – but it may have inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1720.