On the 6th of June 1612 the Philippe Virginie set off on her voyage of discovery. She had been at sea for one year and one hundred and thirty one days when she spotted an island. As night was falling the captain ordered that she should weigh anchor for the night
However due to the extreme currents around the island the Philippe Virginie slipped anchor and was wrecked against the nearby rocks
Happily all on board survived and made it to the long sandy beach
There were twenty-eight survivors in all
Twenty men and eight women
And a dog
The dog died
Their ages ranged from twenty-four to fifty-one
But not the dog
Which was dead
In the first few weeks after their stranding the survivors began to set up camp savaging from the wrecked ship until nothing was left
As the storms were sudden and violent the survivors decided to elect a leader using a democratic model
They elected an accountant from Rouen called Philippe Virginie who held the post for six weeks before he was drowned searching for gold
On the night of the drowning the wife of the cabin boy gave birth to a daughter who they called Marie Ange
The survivors now elected a second leader a short accountant from Rouen called Philippe Virginie
He lasted longer than his predecessor dying in incident with a venomous snake some twenty eight months later
Whilst they were electing a third leader the remaining survivors decided to build a university on the island which they named after the French writer Colette
The university was called Universite Colette
Indeed many underpasses and parks on the island were named after characters in Colette’s books
Twenty-eight days after the death of the second leader the remaining survivors gathered in groups of six and elected their third leader
His name was Philippe Virginie and he was an accountant from Rouen. At the time of his election his wife Marie Ange was heavily pregnant and gave birth to twins six days later
The twins, both girls were called Marie Ange
On hearing of the twins arrival the two oldest survivors built themselves a boat in the university workshop and sailed into the worst tropical storm to hit the island for ten years
Four hundred and ninety six years passed until on the 6th of June 2108 a nuclear device was tested on the nearby island of some one hundred miles away. The survivors took little notice of this as this was frequent occurrence and the testing produced little or no nuisance to them
Indeed the bright flash helped their studies of devout mathematics so much that a faculty was opened at the new university at the time of the initial test in 1954
But this test was different as for an undetermined reason it set off other nuclear devices in the area and created a radiation cloud which wiped out the world’s whole population
The twenty-eight survivors on the island were turned into butterflies within six days. Many different species were created and the colours were highly original
Nothing much happened for the next four hundred and ninety six years until a Captain Trestapol from the planet Pietro Cataldi which was eight thousand one hundred and twenty eight light years away from earth landed on the island
He began his studies of the various native butterflies almost immediately using the universities library and recreational facilities
Twenty-eight years later he completed his paper which he entitled
Butterflies of the Southern Tropics