Castaway

A castaway is a person who is cast adrift or ashore. While the situation usually happens after a shipwreck, some people voluntarily stay behind on a deserted island, either to evade captors or the world in general. A person may also be left ashore as punishment (marooned).

The provisions and resources available to castaways may allow them to live on the island until other people arrive to take them off the island. However, such rescue missions may never happen if the person is not known to still be alive, if the fact that they are missing is unknown or if the island is not mapped. These scenarios have given rise to the plots of numerous stories in the form of novels and film.

Icelander Thorgisl set out to travel to Greenland. He and his party were first driven into a remote sound on the east coast of Greenland. Thorgisl, his infant son and several others were then abandoned there by their thralls. Thorgisl and his party traveled slowly along the coast to the Eystribyggð settlement of Erik the Red on the southwest coast of Greenland. Along the way they met a Viking, an outlaw who had escaped to East Greenland. This history is told in Flóamanna saga and Origines Islandicae and occurred during the early years of Viking Greenland, while Leif Ericson was still alive.

Icelander Grettir Ásmundarson was outlawed by the assembly in Iceland. After many years on the run he and two companions went to the forbidden island of Drangey, where he lived several more years before his pursuers managed to kill him in 1031.

The Portuguese Fernão Lopes was marooned on the island of Saint Helena in 1513. He had lost his right hand, the thumb of his left hand, his nose and his ears as punishment for mutiny and apostasy for converting to Islam. For the rest of his life - he died about 1545 - Lopes stayed on the island, except for two years around 1530, when the Portuguese king helped him travel to Rome, where the Pope granted him absolution for his sin of apostasy.

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