I am currently with a small team hunting for something you wouldn’t understand on Lincoln Island.
Basically, think of it like this. Victorian Scientists did a lot of strange stuff. Things like taking babies and isolating them, ensuring that they were raised by nannies who were mute. Why? Because it was believed that if left isolated, they would revert to the original language spoken in the Garden of Eden.
Or collecting every dwarf, midget and Little Person in France, locking them in their own province to see if the King could breed a race of dwarfs because he thought they were funny-looking.
Or trying to create giant plants to feed people cheap. Or a gas-drug that would make the peasants complacent. Or playing with surgery to turn animals into people.
To those people, life was cheap and there was no agency to keep things clean. And when things went bad, the results were often simply killed and buried. I can’t blame them because the US did the same with the Syphilis Experiments in the South after WW-II. The US deliberately infected a bunch of Black men with Syphilis and watched them spread the disease and die… just to see what would happen. So we are as bad as everyone else. When I was a cop, I had to cover up one of those ‘Mengele-Incidents’ once when I really wanted to arrest the people responsible. So I’m as guilty as they were. And following orders isn’t a moral excuse, no matter how much I tried to justify it to sleep at night.
Well, someone got the bright idea of dumping these experiments on Lincoln Isl to get rid of them and to see what would happen. So the “Mysterious Island” has been a dumping ground for failed experiments for well over a hundred years. Mexico grabbed a bunch of people with Hypertrichosis, excess body and facial hair, you know, the bearded lady, the wolf boy… the people who used to be in freak shows, and dumped them there, partly to get rid of ‘ugly’ people, partially to see if they would breed true. The US took the Lepus and Wargs from that failed feed-the-masses recombinate-genetics project from Arizona and dumped them there. Even Russia jumped in and dumped a few Neanderthals they found in the Urals as well as the survivors from some of the gulag experiments and what they found at Chernobyl. Basically, if it was a monster or a freak or a failed experiment, it went to Lincoln! Some nations even dumped their incurably insane there. Not all of them, but enough.
Lincoln Isl is not a nice place. And the life expectancy is very short.
I am still alive only because I have Vartanian technology to help, though the Drakonian Tech-Laws mean that I cannot carry anything more advanced than can be built on Earth at that time. Fortunatly, get a Vartanian Techie, dump him into the most advanced lab on Earth and he’ll come up with some stuff the Military would kill for. We get to fudge the Tech-Laws and His Grace pretends he isn’t watching even though his own people get stuff that Earth SF writers cannot even dream of.