Desert islands and shipwrecked crews are apparently very old themes in French prose fiction. There is a desert island episode in Les Amours de Clidamant et de Marilinde, a sentimental novel of 1603. The shipwreck of a Portuguese merchantman is the prelude to L'Isle des hermaphrodites, a satirical work of 1605. Accounts of such adventures in the “true voyage” literature of the first half of the 17th century in France are numerous. To cite only some works which went through several editions in this period, the Voyages of Jean Mocquet contains the story of a lone European on an unknown shore. Repeated editions in French translation of Garcilaso's Historia de los Incas contain the better known Serrano desert island story, while two editions of the Voyages du sieur Vincent Le Blanc furnish other material of like nature.