The Swiss Family Robinson
Johann David Wyss, 1812.
Before you read: A shipwreck fantasy. The family tames the island very easily. Treat the animals and the “empty land” idea as fiction from 1812, not as a how-to.
A family is wrecked on an island and turns it into a treehouse kingdom. They find useful animals and plants at a rate no real island would allow. Wyss wrote it as lessons for his sons: building, naming, and staying cheerful. As a story it is a catalogue of inventions. As a picture of the world it imagines land as empty and waiting. Read the building chapters for fun, and say out loud that real islands were not empty and real castaways were not this lucky.
Public-domain text.