The word maroon, used for abandoning a sailor from about 1699, grew from a term for fugitive slaves, from the Spanish cimarrón and, linguists say, a Taíno word for wild that could describe a stray arrow lost in the wilderness. Pirates such as Bartholomew Roberts and John Phillips wrote marooning into their articles as the penalty for cheating, theft, or inciting mutiny, calling it being made governor of an island, and the victim was often left with a little water, a scrap of food, and a loaded pistol. In 1704 Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, on William Dampier’s expedition aboard the Cinque Ports, argued that the ship was unseaworthy and demanded to be left on Juan Fernández Island. The ship later sank, and Selkirk spent four years chasing goats on foot and taming feral cats to keep rats off him until Woodes Rogers arrived in 1709, a story that inspired Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe.

Official navies used the punishment too. In 1725 Dutch sailor Leendert Hasenbosch was marooned on barren Ascension Island for sodomy and died of dehydration. British sailors found his diary in 1726, and its account of drinking turtle blood and his own urine was published in London. In 1807 Captain Warwick Lake of HMS Recruit marooned impressed seaman Robert Jeffrey on Sombrero Island over stolen beer. Jeffrey survived eight days on limpets and rainwater until the American schooner Adams of Marblehead rescued him, and Lake was court-martialed and dismissed from the Royal Navy.

• Pirate Edward England survived his own marooning by flagging down a passing ship.
• Juan de Cartagena was marooned on Magellan’s voyage in 1520 after a failed mutiny.
• Marguerite de La Rocque, marooned on an island in Canada in 1542, survived two years by hunting.
• In the southern United States, marooning later became slang for a multi-day country picnic or camping trip.
• In 2012 Ed Stafford marooned himself on a Fijian island for 60 days and wrote Naked and Marooned.