"The Isle of Pines" was Neville's fifth publication, issued nine years after his fourth, a political tract: "Shuffling, Cutting and Dealing in a Game of Picquet" Like most titles of the day, that of "The Isle of Pines" did not fail in quantity. It was repeated word for word, except the imprint, on the first page of the text. Briefly, the relation purports to have been written by an Englishman, George Pine, who at the age of twenty shipped as book-keeper in the India Merchant, which sailed for the East Indies in 1569.

Having rounded the Cape of Good Hope and being almost within sight of St. Lawrence's Island, now Madagascar,{1} they encountered a great storm of wind, which separated the ship from her consorts, blew many days, and finally wrecked the vessel on a rocky island. The entire company was drowned except Pine, the daughter of his master, two maid-servants, and one negro female slave. They gathered what they could of the wreckage, and Pine and his companions lived there in community life, a free-love settlement By the four women he had forty-seven children, and in his sixtieth year he claimed to have 565 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It was from one of his grandchildren that the Dutch ship received the relation. Apart from the title-page, the entire tract is occupied by the story of George Pine, from whom the island took its name. In 1667, or ninety-eight years after Pine was wrecked, the Dutch captain estimated that the population of the island amounted to ten or twelve thousand persons. Methuselah, with his years to plead for him, might boast of such breeding, but in ordinary man it is too near the verminous, the rat, the guinea-pig, and the rabbit, to be pleasant.

The publication must have attracted attention at once, for before the end of July Neville put forth a second part, "A New and further Discovery of The Isle of Pines," which purported to be the relation of the Dutch captain to whom the history of Pines had been confided. It is an unadorned story such as might have been gathered from a dozen tales in Hakluyt or Purchas, and is interesting only in giving the name of the Dutch captain—Cornelius Van Sloetton—and the location of the supposed island—longitude 76° and latitude 20°, under the third climate—which places it to the northeast of Madagascar. Almost immediately after the publication of the second part it was combined with the first part, as already described, and published late in July or early in August Cornelius Van Sloetton, as he signed himself in the second part, became Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten in the combined issue.