Born in 1620, and educated at Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable practices, but escaped serious punishment.

He lived quietly for more than thirty years longer and died in 1694.

Besides _The Isle of Pines_ he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the best known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts, though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.
_The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written.

A certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but mostly naked.

The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather, George, has left a written account of the origin of the community.