Juana Maria: Eighteen Years Alone on San Nicolas Island

In eighteen thirty-five, missionaries arranged for a ship called the Peor es Nada, which translates roughly as Better Than Nothing, to collect the last surviving members of the Nicoleño people from San Nicolas Island, the most remote of the Channel Islands. The evacuation was hasty. The island is forty miles offshore, beyond the others, and it had been years since a ship had called. When the Peor es Nada arrived, it gathered the remaining people, somewhere between eighteen and twenty in all, and prepared to leave.

One woman did not board. Accounts differ about exactly why. She may have realized her infant was still ashore. She may have jumped from the ship before it cleared the anchorage. By the time the crew understood what had happened, the wind had changed. The ship left without her.

She remained alone on the island for eighteen years.

What she survived on, and how, is partially recoverable from what Captain George Nidever found when he arrived in eighteen fifty-three: three huts framed with whalebones, a cache of dried meat, woven grass baskets, and a bone needle. She was alive. She was, by most accounts, in good health. She had made a life entirely alone on a rock in the Pacific Ocean, without tools she had not made herself, without any human contact for nearly two decades.

She was brought to Santa Barbara. She was baptized Juana Maria, because her original name was never recorded by anyone who transcribed it, and if she gave it, no one preserved it. She died of dysentery seven weeks after reaching the mainland. Her language, the Nicoleño language, died with her. It had been spoken on these islands for centuries and was never written down by anyone who heard it.

Scott O'Dell based his novel Island of the Blue Dolphins on her story. Millions of children have read it. The island where she spent those eighteen years is now an active Navy installation, closed to civilians, inside the same weapons testing corridor you are driving past right now.