Island of the Blue Dolphins Trivia
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99 free Island of the Blue Dolphins trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is the rare school novel that is also a true story. Scott O'Dell built Karana from a real woman who spent nearly two decades alone on San Nicolas Island, and the archaeology of her life is still turning up surprises. These fifty questions move between the book and the history behind it: Karana's family and the Aleut hunters, the creatures she tames, what she wears and how she builds, then the real rescue of 1853, the people of the island, O'Dell's own unlikely career, the sequel Zia and the 1964 film. It suits anyone who read the novel in fifth or sixth grade and wants to know how much of it really happened, as well as teachers looking for a ready-made classroom round.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many years did the real Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island live alone before her rescue?
18
18 years: the schooner that removed her people in 1835 never came back, and nobody found her until the third search expedition of 1853.
Q 02Who runs back for a fishing spear, making Karana jump from the ship in Island of the Blue Dolphins?
Ramo
Ramo, her little brother, is killed by a pack of wild dogs soon afterwards, leaving Karana alone on the island for years.
Q 03What does Karana name the pack leader she wounds, then nurses back to health in Island of the Blue Dolphins?
Rontu
Rontu, whose pack killed her brother, becomes her closest companion; when he dies she adopts a lookalike pup and names him Rontu-Aru.
Q 04Which Aleut girl befriends Karana while she hides from the returning hunters in Island of the Blue Dolphins?
Tutok
Tutok and Karana exchange gifts, and only then does Karana realise how lonely she has been; the next day the hunters' ship sails.
Q 05Which sea creature does Karana finally hunt with her dog's help in Island of the Blue Dolphins?
A giant devilfish
A giant devilfish, the novel's name for a large octopus, drags Karana and her dog into a fight that injures them both, and she decides never to hunt one again.
Q 06Karana's finest dress, worn to meet her rescuers in Island of the Blue Dolphins, is made of what?
Cormorant feathers
Cormorant feathers also clothed the real Lone Woman when she was found in 1853; in the novel Karana's rescuers sew her a new dress before the ship sails.
Q 07Which material, used by Karana for her fence, framed the hut found in 1939 that may have been the real Lone Woman's?
Whale bones
Whale bones: San Nicolas had no trees, so the islanders framed their shelters with whale ribs, as Karana does her fence.
Q 08What name was the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island given at her deathbed baptism, her birth name being unknown?
Juana Maria
Juana Maria was the name a priest gave her in a conditional baptism as she lay dying, at the request of her rescuer's wife; her birth name was never recorded.
Q 09At which California mission was the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island buried in 1853?
Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara's mission cemetery received her, though the exact site of the grave has never been confirmed; she had spent her seven weeks on the mainland in her rescuer's family home.
Q 10How did the writer born Odell Gabriel Scott come to be known as Scott O'Dell?
A typesetter's error
A typesetter's error reversed his name on an early byline, and he liked 'Scott O'Dell' so much that he had it changed legally in the 1920s.
Q 11The hunters whose ship brings war to Karana's village in Island of the Blue Dolphins come for the pelts of which mammal?
Sea otter
Sea otter pelts drew Alaskan hunting parties to the real San Nicolas, where an 1814 party killed an unknown number of islanders after accusing them of killing a hunter.
Q 12Which captain leads the fur-hunting ship whose crew kills Karana's father in Island of the Blue Dolphins?
Orlov
Orlov's crew tries to sail off without paying for the pelts, and the battle that follows kills Karana's father and most of the village's men.
Q 13What is the name of Karana's father, the chief killed fighting the hunters in Island of the Blue Dolphins?
Chowig
Chowig confronts the hunters when they try to leave without paying; after his death a new chief paddles east for new land and sends a ship back for the survivors.
Q 21The Nicoleño of San Nicolas Island were thought closely related to which people, who also held Santa Catalina Island?
The Tongva
The Tongva of today's Los Angeles basin held the southern Channel Islands, but a later study of the Lone Woman's recorded words argued her speech was closer to Luiseño than to theirs.
Q 22Surviving Nicoleño words such as 'toygwah' for sky place the Lone Woman's language in which family?
Uto-Aztecan
Uto-Aztecan is the family, but linguist Pamela Munro concluded the language sat closest to Luiseño in the Cupan group, possibly as a branch of its own.
Q 23Whose Native Alaskan hunters, arriving on the brig Il'mena in 1814, carried out a massacre on San Nicolas Island?
Q 14What is the name of Karana's village in Island of the Blue Dolphins, also the Chumash name for San Nicolas Island?
Ghalas-at
Ghalas-at is what the Chumash called the real island; the islanders' own name for themselves has never been recovered.
Q 15Which fur trapper led the 1853 expedition, his third attempt, that brought the Lone Woman off San Nicolas Island?
George Nidever
George Nidever had already failed twice; this time one of his men spotted footprints and seal blubber drying on the beach, and the search was over.
Q 16Which schooner carried off the people of San Nicolas Island in 1835, leaving the Lone Woman behind?
Peor es Nada
Peor es Nada never came back for her: the little schooner is said to have sunk at the mouth of San Francisco Bay before it could return, and a shortage of other ships is usually blamed for the delay.
Q 17Seven weeks after reaching the mainland in 1853, the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island is thought to have died of what?
Dysentery
Dysentery, which her rescuer blamed on her sudden fondness for green corn, vegetables and fresh fruit after years of shellfish and seal fat.
Q 18The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island's dress was reportedly sent where, only to be lost?
The Vatican
The Vatican apparently received it but it has never been found; her basket, another of the last Nicoleño objects, burned after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Q 19Which organisation marked the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island's burial place with a plaque in 1928?
Daughters of the American Revolution
The Daughters of the American Revolution placed it in the mission cemetery, although the exact site of her grave has never been confirmed.
Q 20In Island of the Blue Dolphins, the custom of Karana's tribe forbids women to make what?
Weapons
Weapons were men's work, so Karana first searches the empty village for spearheads; finding none, she breaks the taboo and makes her own bow, arrows and spear.
The Russian-American Company
The Russian-American Company's own letters record the killings, though not the toll; by the 1830s only about twenty islanders are thought to have remained.
Q 24Which Spanish explorer named San Nicolas Island after sighting it on Saint Nicholas's feast day in 1602?
Sebastián Vizcaíno
Sebastián Vizcaíno saw it on 6 December 1602, and the name stuck even though the islanders themselves were later known by it as the Nicoleño.
Q 25Who controls San Nicolas Island today, using it as a missile test range that is closed to the public?
The United States Navy
The United States Navy runs missile tests and mock streets for urban-warfare training there; visitors can only see similar islands in Channel Islands National Park.
Q 26San Nicolas Island was one of eight candidate sites for what, before White Sands in New Mexico was picked?
The first atomic test
The first atomic test, Trinity, needed somewhere remote, flat and nearly windless, and in September 1944 the planners chose the New Mexico desert over the island.
Q 27How many Nicoleño words were ever translated, all of them recorded from the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island?
Four
Four words (tocah, nache, toygwah and puoochay: hide, man, sky and body) plus two songs are all that remain of the language.
Q 28Officially uninhabited, San Nicolas Island is counted by the Census Bureau as part of which California county?
Ventura
Ventura County: the census counts the island as uninhabited, yet staff live and work there.
Q 29Which international prize, honouring a children's author's whole body of work, did Scott O'Dell receive in 1972?
The Hans Christian Andersen Award
The Hans Christian Andersen Award came only twelve years after his first children's book, which O'Dell had published when he was already past sixty.
Q 30In which country did a translation of Island of the Blue Dolphins win the national youth-literature prize in 1963?
West Germany
West Germany's Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis went to the German edition, Insel der blauen Delphine, two years after the Newbery.