Juana Maria: Eighteen Years Alone and the Name She Never Told Anyone

San Nicolas Island lies sixty miles southwest of this coast, the most remote of the Channel Islands, a flat windswept table of rock in open ocean. By eighteen thirty-five, the Nicoleño people who had lived there for centuries had been reduced by disease and by violence connected to Russian otter hunters and mainland raiding parties. That year a ship sent to evacuate the survivors brought the last of them to the mainland.

One woman did not make it onto the boat. Accounts from the period give different reasons; some suggest she jumped overboard when she realized a family member had been left behind. The ship did not return for her. She lived alone on San Nicolas Island for eighteen years.

When an otter hunting party led by Captain George Nidever found her in eighteen fifty-three, she was in good health. She had built herself a shelter. She was wearing a skirt made from cormorant feathers and shag. She had been living entirely alone, on an island with no fresh water source larger than rock-pool collection, since before the Mexican-American War.

She reached the mainland. She died seven weeks later, of dysentery, before anyone had recorded her name, her personal history, or a complete sentence of her language. Missionaries baptized her Juana Maria. The Nicoleño language, of which she was the last fluent speaker, died with her. The recorded vocabulary is fragmentary.

In nineteen sixty, a novelist named Scott O'Dell published a book called Island of the Blue Dolphins, drawing on her story. He gave her a name, Karana, and a narrative arc, and a voice. The novel has never gone out of print in sixty-five years. It is almost certainly better known than the historical person who inspired it. That person's actual name, the one she called herself on that island for eighteen years, has not been recovered. It may never be.