This relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "with man and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two white maidservants, and a negro girl.

The island proves pleasant and habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect harmony.

Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that brothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four original wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their own.

A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty, and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously praying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of the gospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well.

The writer's cunning is shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with some subsequent and quite _verisimilar_ experiences of the Dutch ship.
The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England, though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly.