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Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668) begins with a typical colonial encounter. The Dutch sea captain Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten reports that, upon approaching an unknown island, saw several persons promiscuously running about the shore, as it were wondering and admiring at what they saw. (1) According Van Sloetten, the Dutch appear as semi-gods the astonished savages: when we had our ship into harbour, you would have blest your self see how the Islanders flocked unto us, so wondering at our ship, as if it had been the greatest miracle of Nature in [the] whole World (3). To readers in the history of European travel and exploration literature, this scene in which the natives marvel at Western clothing and technology is all too familiar. What makes this account so unusual, however, is that, on this particular island, Van Sloetten is shocked to find in such a strange place, so many that could speak English and yet go naked (3). Contemporary readers must have been shocked as well since Neville's text became a sort of international publishing event, garnering over thirty editions in six different languages during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. (2) Modern scholars, however, have not recognized the importance of this tale, usually considering it a scurrilous piece of Restoration pornography or a minor addition the tradition of seventeenth-century utopian writing. (3) Further, scholars have not examined the process by which the pornographic and utopian urges in George Pine's story are quickly closed down and merged into a profound vision of English weakness and degeneration. The fact that Dutch explorers and traders bear witness this degeneration of English people also needs be taken into consideration, since the English had been recently humiliated in the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67). Dutch warships had destroyed the English navy at Chatham only a year before Neville's text appeared and had also nearly routed the English out of the East Indies and Western Africa in the course of their global conflicts. The fact that the text contains two first-person accounts of colonial trading voyages India, one Dutch and one English, signals that Neville's story is concerned about the relationship between the Dutch and English colonial projects. If, as Susan Wiseman has convincingly argued, the text provides a satire of Filmerite political philosophy, it is also important note how it also satirizes English efforts become a dominant force in world, and especially East Indian, trade. (4) It should come as no surprise, given Henry Neville's political views and experiences, that he should produce such a satire. As an important member of the Rump parliament who twice was elected the Council of State, Neville is generally considered have been a staunch supporter of the expansion of English imperialism and commerce. Blair Worden notes that Neville was a key proponent of the Commonwealth's aggressive foreign policy, including the first Anglo-Dutch conflict (1652-54), and that he worried that the Restoration had brought a return the impotence abroad that had characterized the early Stuart period too. (5) Neville proves an interesting historical figure, known both for his ribald political satires (6) and his unflinching support of republican and anti-Stuart politics: Neville a motion in the House in 1659 denounce the Stuarts even while the Restoration was a fait accompli. After the Restoration, Neville became a political exile and, after a brief imprisonment in 1663, eventually fled the country Italy, wanting return England but fearful for his life. In this light, I will suggest that the publication of the Isle of Pines in 1668, the year of both England's astonishing defeat by the Dutch and of Neville's return England, was a brilliant joke on both the Stuart regime and those who had supported the Restoration rather than a republican constitution. …
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