The Coral Island
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean is an 1857 novel written by Scottish author. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, 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, 19th-century imperialism in the South Pacific, and the importance of hierarchy and leadership. It was the inspiration for William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, which inverted the morality of The Coral Island; in Ballantyne's story the children encounter evil, but in Lord of the Flies evil is within them.
In the early 20th century, the novel was considered a classic for primary school children in the UK, and in the United States it was a staple of high-school suggested reading lists. Modern critics consider the book's worldview to be dated and imperialist, but although less popular today, The Coral Island was adapted into a four-part children's television drama broadcast by ITV in 2000.
Background
Biographical background and publication
Born in Edinburgh in 1825, and raised there, Ballantyne was the ninth of ten children and the youngest son. Tutored by his mother and sisters, his only formal education was a brief period at Edinburgh Academy in 1835–37. At the age of 16 he travelled to Canada, where he spent five years working for the Hudson's Bay Company, trading with the First Nations for furs. He returned to Scotland in 1847 and for some years worked for the publisher Messrs Constable, first as a clerk and then as a partner in the business. During his time in Canada he had helped to pass the time by writing long letters to his mother – to which he attributed "whatever small amount of facility in composition may have acquired" – and began his first book. Ballantyne's Canadian experiences formed the basis of his first novel, The Young Fur Traders, published in 1856, the year he decided to become a full-time writer and embarked on the adventure stories for the young with which his name is popularly associated.Ballantyne never visited the coral islands of the South Pacific, relying instead on the accounts of others that were then beginning to emerge in Britain, which he exaggerated for theatrical effect by including "plenty of gore and violence meant to titillate his juvenile readership". His ignorance of the South Pacific caused him to erroneously describe coconuts as being soft and easily opened. After learning of this mistake, he resolved to write only about things he had personal experience of. Ballantyne wrote The Coral Island while staying in a house on the Burntisland seafront opposite Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth in Fife. According to Ballantyne biographer Eric Quayle he borrowed extensively from an 1852 novel by the American author James F. Bowman, The Island Home. He also borrowed from John Williams's Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, to the extent that cultural historian Rod Edmond has suggested that Ballantyne must have written one chapter of The Coral Island with Williams's book open in front of him, so similar is the text. Edmond describes the novel as "a fruit cocktail of other writing about the Pacific", adding that "by modern standards Ballantyne's plagiarism in The Coral Island is startling".
Although the first edition is dated 1858 it was on sale in bookshops from early December 1857; dating books forward was a common practice at the time, especially during the Christmas period, to "preserve their newness" into the new year. The Coral Island is Ballantyne's second novel, and has never been out of print. He was an exceedingly prolific author who wrote more than 100 books in his 40-year career. According to professor and author John Rennie Short, Ballantyne had a "deep religious conviction", and felt it his duty to educate Victorian middle-class boys – his target audience – in "codes of honour, decency, and religiosity".
The first edition of The Coral Island was published by T. Nelson & Sons, who in common with many other publishers of the time had a policy when accepting a manuscript of buying the copyright from the author rather than paying royalties; as a result, authors generally did not receive any income from the sale of subsequent editions. Ballantyne received between £50 and £60, but when the novel's popularity became evident and the number of editions increased he tried unsuccessfully to buy back the copyright. He wrote bitterly to Nelsons in 1893 about the copyrights they held on his books while he had earned nothing: "for thirty-eight years reaped the whole profits".
The Coral Island – still considered a classic – was republished by Penguin Books in 1995, in their Popular Classics series.
Literary and historical context
Published during the "first golden age of children's fiction", The Coral Island began a trend in boys' fiction by using boys as the main characters, a device now commonplace in the genre. It preserves, according to literary critic Minnie Singh, the moralizing aspects of didactic texts, but does so by the "congruence of subject and implied reader": the story is about boys and written retrospectively as though by a boy, for an audience of boys.According to literary critic Frank Kermode, The Coral Island "could be used as a document in the history of ideas". A scientific and social background for the novel is found in Darwinism, of the natural and the social kind. For instance, although The Coral Island was published a year before Origin of Species, Charles Darwin's 1842 The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs was one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the growth of coral. Ballantyne had been reading books by Darwin and by his rival Alfred Russel Wallace; in later publications he also acknowledged the naturalist Henry Ogg Forbes. The interest in evolutionary theory was reflected in much contemporary popular literature, and social Darwinism was an important factor contributing to the world view of the Victorians and their empire building.
Plot summary
The story is written as a first person narrative from the perspective of 15-year-old Ralph Rover, one of three boys shipwrecked on the coral reef of a large but uninhabited Polynesian island. 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 especially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and unbounded amusement from its pages."The account starts briskly; only four pages are 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 13-year-old Peterkin Gay – are the sole survivors of the shipwreck. The narrative is 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.
Fruit, fish and wild pigs provide plentiful food, and at first the boys' life on the island is idyllic. They build 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 in the distance, one pursued by the other. The two groups of Polynesians disembark on the beach and engage in battle; the victors take fifteen prisoners and kill and eat one immediately. But when they threaten to kill one of the three women captured, along with two children, the boys intervene to defeat the pursuers, earning them the gratitude of the chief, Tararo. The next morning they prevent another act of cannibalism. The natives leave, and the boys are alone once more.
More unwelcome visitors then arrive in the shape of British pirates, who make a living by trading or stealing sandalwood. The three boys hide in a cave, but Ralph is captured when he ventures out to see if the intruders have left and is taken on board the pirate schooner. He strikes up a friendship with one of the crew, Bloody Bill, and when the ship calls at the island of Emo to trade for more wood Ralph experiences many facets of the island's culture: the popular sport of surfing, the sacrificing of babies to eel gods, rape, and cannibalism.
Rising tensions result in the inhabitants attacking the pirates, leaving only Ralph and Bloody Bill alive. The pair succeed in making their escape in the schooner, but Bill is mortally wounded. He makes a death-bed repentance for his evil life, leaving Ralph to sail back to the Coral Island alone, where he is reunited with his friends.
The three boys sail to the island of Mango, where a missionary has converted some of the population to Christianity. There they once again meet Tararo, whose daughter Avatea wishes to become a Christian against her father's wishes. The boys attempt to take Avatea in a small boat to a nearby island the chief of which has been converted, but en route they are overtaken by one of Tararo's war canoes and taken prisoner. They are released a month later after the arrival of another missionary, and Tararo's conversion to Christianity. The "false gods" of Mango are consigned to the flames, and the boys set sail for home, older and wiser. They return as adults for another adventure in Ballantyne's 1861 novel The Gorilla Hunters, a sequel to The Coral Island.