But several things distinguish Marguerite’s account from most of these comparisons.

She was not shipwrecked.

She was deliberately abandoned — a fundamentally different situation that adds the dimension of betrayal by the social and political system that was supposed to protect her.

This is not simply a story of nature versus human endurance; it is a story of human authority deliberately choosing to expose a person to lethal conditions.

She was a woman in a world that consistently doubted women’s capacity for the kind of physical and psychological endurance that survival required.

The accounts of her story that circulated in the sixteenth century were partly fascinating precisely because their protagonist was female — because the survival of a woman alone on an island in the North Atlantic challenged assumptions about what women could do.