Publisher's Synopsis
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is a novel written by Scottish juvenile fiction author R. M. Ballantyne at the height of the British Empire. The story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck. A typical Robinsonade - a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe - and one of the most popular of its type, the book first went on sale in late 1857 and has never been out of print. Among the novel's major themes are the civilising effect of Christianity, the spread of trade in the Pacific and the importance of hierarchy and leadership. It was the inspiration for William Golding's dystopian Lord of the Flies (1954), which inverted the morality of The Coral Island; in Ballantyne's story the children encounter evil, but in The Lord of the Flies evil is within them. Although considered by modern critics to feature a dated imperialist view of the world, The Coral Island was voted one of the top twenty Scottish novels at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in 2006. The story is written as a first person narrative from the perspective of one of three boys shipwrecked on the coral reef of a large but uninhabited Polynesian island, 15-year-old Ralph Rover. Ralph tells the story retrospectively, looking back on his boyhood adventure: "I was a boy when I went through the wonderful adventures herein set down. With the memory of my boyish feelings strong upon me, I present my book specially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and unbounded amusement from its pages."[8] Jack, Ralph and Peterkin after reaching the island, from an 1884 edition of the novel The account starts briskly, with only four pages devoted to Ralph's early life and a further fourteen to his voyage to the Pacific Ocean on board the Arrow. He and his two companions - 18-year-old Jack Martin and 14-year-old Peterkin Gay - are the sole survivors of the shipwreck. The narrative is essentially in two parts. The first describes how the boys feed themselves, what they drink, the clothing and shelter they fashion, and how they cope with having to rely on their own resources. The second half of the novel is more action-packed, featuring conflicts with pirates, fighting between the native Polynesians, and the conversion efforts of Christian missionaries. At first the boys' life is idyllic. Food in the shape of fruits, fish, and wild pigs is plentiful, and they fashion a shelter and construct a small boat using their only possessions: a broken telescope, an iron-bound oar, and a small axe. Their first contact with other humans comes after several months, when they observe two large outrigger canoes land on the beach. The two groups of Polynesians disembark and engage in battle; the three boys intervene to defeat the attackers, earning them the gratitude of the chief, Tararo. The natives leave, and the boys are alone once more.
