'Gay Robinson Crusoe': The Tragic True Story of the Sailor Left on an Island to Die

Currently, 64 countries around the world still criminalize same-sex relationships, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA).

Punishments range from imprisonment to the death penalty.

The past is equally riddled with cruel rebukes. In one notable case from the 18th century, a Dutchman was marooned on a desert island—a story nearly lost to time until it was reconstructed by two historians.

Three hundred years ago, Leendert Hasenbosch wrote these words after being marooned on Ascension Island, a remote volcanic outcrop in the Atlantic, about 940 miles off the coast of Africa and 1,400 miles from South America:

"Saturday, May 5, 1725.

By order of the commander and captains of the Dutch Fleet, I, Leendert Hasenbosch, have been left on this desolate island, to my great distress."

By writing these first words in his diary, Hasenbosch was beginning the final chapter of his life, a story that would have remained unknown for centuries had it not been rediscovered.

In the 18th century, stories about shipwrecked people were popular. A few years earlier, Robinson Crusoe, a character created by the English writer Daniel Defoe and inspired by a true story, had captured the imagination of readers.

But Hasenbosch's fate was unique. According to historian Elwin Hofman, Hasenbosch did not end up on Ascension Island by accident: he was deliberately left there, convicted as a "sodomite," a criminal term used at the time for same-sex acts.

The abandoned sailor

The story of Hasenbosch first came to light in January 1726, when a group of British sailors landed on Ascension Island and found a makeshift tent. Inside was a diary, but there was no sign of who had written it.

The diary was taken by the group back to England, where it was translated and sensationally published in several editions, including one entitled Sodomy Punished.

Although these publications preserved fragments of Hasenbosch's story, his name was erased, making him an anonymous example used for moral warning.

Leendert Hasenbosch was born in 1695 in The Hague, the only child of Johannes Hasenbosch and Maria van Bergende.

After his mother's death, his father moved to Batavia (today Jakarta), while Leendert stayed.

At the age of 18, he joined the Dutch East India Company (VOC), starting as a soldier and later rising to the rank of trusted accountant.

The VOC, considered the world's first multinational corporation, wielded immense commercial power in Asia, but its workers experienced extremely harsh working conditions.

For almost a decade, Leendert served in VOC posts in Batavia and Cochin (now Kochi, India). Until, in October 1724, for unknown reasons, he set sail for the Netherlands, a journey home that he never completed.

Turtle meat, blood and urine

At some point during the journey, Hasenbosch was accused of somodia, considered one of the most serious sins at the time.

The Dutch East India Company usually punished such accusations with execution, but in his case the sentence was abandonment.

On May 5, 1725, Hasenbosch was abandoned on Ascension Island with a tent, a Bible, some seeds and a nearly empty water barrel.

For the first month, he explored the barren island in search of fresh water and prayed for rescue. His loneliness soon became unbearable. He tried to tame a bird for companionship, but the bird died.

He also planted onions, peas and beans, but almost nothing grew from the soil.

In June, Hasenbosch began having hallucinations and visions. He said one of the spirits "was a man I once knew and who stayed with me for a while."

It is still unclear whether these words were actually written by him or whether they were added by the British editions to add more drama to the story.

As the island’s only natural water source — known as Dampier’s Drip — dried up, Hasenbosch grew weak. With no strength left to hunt goats and rats eating what little he could grow, he turned to desperate measures.

"August 22:

I caught a big turtle and drank almost a quarter of its blood...I drank my own urine"

By October, he was barely hanging on, surviving on turtle meat, blood, and urine. The last entries in his diary, dated October 14, 1725, are disturbing:

"I lived here the same way as before."

Discovering the story

For more than two centuries, Hasenbosch's story was partly forgotten. British publications of Sodomy Punished (1726) or An Authentic Intercourse (1728) preserved parts of her suffering but hid her identity.

In 1990, Dutch historian Michiel Koolbergen found a rare edition of An Authentic Relationship in English at the Amsterdam Maritime Museum. The book told the real-life story of a 'Dutch Robinson Crusoe' who had been marooned on an island for the crime of sodomy.

Intrigued, he delved into the VOC archives and there discovered Hasenbosch's name.

A chilling entry in the VOC's wage register confirmed the Dutchman's fate: "On April 17, 1725, on board the Prattenburg, he was sentenced to be abandoned, being a villein, on Ascension Island or elsewhere, and his wages to be confiscated."

Koolbergen published his findings in 2002, with the book Een Hollandse Robinson Crusoe (Dutch Robinson Crusoe, in the free translation into Portuguese), but ended up dying of cancer shortly before the work was released.

Three years later, historian and writer Alex Ritsema stumbled upon Koolbergen's work in a bookstore in Deventer.

A collector of island stories, Ritsema was captivated and in 2011 published A Dutch Castaway on Ascension Island, bringing the long-buried story of Hasenbosch to English-speaking readers.

He dedicated his book to "two Dutch men who died too soon: Leendert and Michiel." Alex Ritsema also tragically passed away from cancer in 2022.

Today, Hasenbosch, Koolbergen and Ritsema remain linked across the centuries – three Dutch men whose lives intertwined in the effort to ensure that Leendert’s story would not be lost.

'We are no longer invisible'

Leendert Hasenbosch’s suffering may seem distant, but the forces behind his persecution remain familiar.

According to historian Elwin Hofman, in the Netherlands in the 18th century, sodomy was generally ignored or silently tolerated, until a perceived "crisis of masculinity" after military defeats triggered a wave of persecution. Sodomites became scapegoats for the decline of society.

"There was this feeling of decline, and the solution found was a more severe persecution of sodomites," he explains.

"This serves as a warning to us today. In times of crisis, there is a risk that we will try to restore masculinity by punishing the LGTBQIA+ community more harshly."

Just five years after Hasenbosch's death, trials in Utrecht for sodomy resulted in the indictment of around 300 people. Many of them were publicly executed, with penalties ranging from burning at the stake to strangulation, until the law was finally abolished in 1803.

Today, echoes of this scapegoating strategy are visible in the rise of anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in countries like Russia, Uganda, and Poland, often presented as a way to protect “traditional values.”

In the United States, since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has signed executive orders that critics say are a setback for LGBT rights in the country. Among the revoked orders are guidelines aimed at preventing discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

Trump also signed an order recognizing only two sexes — female and male — and declared that this cannot be changed.

Laws like this contribute to erasing the existence of LGBTQIA+ people from history, turning their lives into cautionary tales, says Julia Ehrt, executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association.

But she adds: "We've always been here. The push to exclude LGBT people from 'respectable' society may be as strong as ever, but we are no longer invisible."