The Coral Island
The
Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean
(1857) is a novel written by Scottish author R.
M. Ballantyne. 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 British imperialism in the South Pacific, and the
importance of hierarchy and leadership. It was the inspiration for William
Golding's dystopian
novel Lord
of the Flies (1954), 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.[1] He returned to Scotland in 1847 and for some years worked for
the publisher Messrs Constable,[2] first as a clerk[1] and then as a partner in the business.[3] 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 [he] may have acquired"[4] – and began his first book.[5] Ballantyne's Canadian experiences formed the basis of his
first novel, The Young Fur Traders, published in 1856,[1] 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.[2]
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".[6] His ignorance of the South Pacific caused him to
erroneously describe coconuts
as being soft and easily opened; a stickler for accuracy he resolved that in future,
whenever possible, he would write only about things he had personal experience
of.[7] 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.[8] He also borrowed from John Williams' Narrative of Missionary Enterprises (1837), to the
extent that cultural historian Rod
Edmond has suggested that Ballantyne must
have written one chapter of The Coral Island with Williams' book open in
front of him, so similar is the text.[9] Edmond describes the novel as "a fruit cocktail of
other writing about the Pacific",[10]
adding that "by modern standards Ballantyne's plagiarism in The Coral
Island is startling".[11]
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,[12]
to "preserve their newness" into the new year.[13] The Coral Island is Ballantyne's second novel,[14][a] and has never been out of print.[15] He was an exceedingly prolific author who wrote more than
100 books in his 40-year career.[16] 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".[17]
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.[18][b] Ballantyne received between £50 and £60,[20] equivalent to about £6500 as of 2017,[c] 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 [you have]
reaped the whole profits".[22]
The
Coral Island – still considered a
classic – was republished by Penguin
Books in 1995, in their Popular Classics
series.[8]
Literary and historical context
Published
during the "first golden age of children's fiction",[12]
The Coral Island began a trend in boys' fiction by using boys as the
main characters, a device now commonplace in the genre.[23] It preserves, according to literary critic Minnie Singh, the
moralizing aspects of didactic texts, but does so (and in this regard it is a
"founding text") 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.[23]
According
to literary critic Frank Kermode,
The Coral Island "could be used as a document in the history of
ideas".[24] A scientific and social background for the novel is found
in Darwinism, of the natural and the social kind. For instance, published a year before Origin
of Species (whose ideas were already being
circulated and discussed widely), Charles
Darwin's 1842 The
Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs
was one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the growth of coral.[25] Ballantyne had been reading books by Darwin and by his
rival Alfred Russel Wallace;[12] in later publications he also acknowledged the naturalist Henry
Ogg Forbes.[26] The interest in evolutionary theory was reflected in much
contemporary popular literature,[27]
and social Darwinism was an important factor contributing to the world view of
the Victorians and their empire building.[28]
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."[29]
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 succeeds 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"[30] 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.[31][32]
Genre and style
All
Ballantyne's novels are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young
folks", and The Coral Island is no exception.[17] It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel
Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe (1719),[33] one of the most popular of its type,[6] and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature
exclusively juvenile heroes.[23][34] Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that in comparison
to Robinson Crusoe such books generally replaced some of the original's
romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as The
Coral Island and Frederick
Marryat's 1841 novel Masterman Ready, or
the Wreck of the Pacific.[35] Romance,
with its attention to character development, was only restored to the genre of
boys' fiction with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure
Island argues literary critic Lisa
Honaker. The Coral Island, for all its adventure, is greatly occupied
with the realism
of domestic fiction (the domain of the realist novel); Ballantyne devotes about
a third of the book to descriptions of the boys' living arrangements.[31] The book exhibits a "light-hearted confidence" in
its description of an adventure that was above all fun.[36] As Ralph says in his preface: "If there is any boy or
man who loves to be melancholy and morose, and who cannot enter with kindly
sympathy into the regions of fun, let me seriously advise him to shut my book
and put it away. It is not meant for him."[29] Professor of English M. Daphne Kutzer has observed that
"the swift movement of the story from coastal England to exotic Pacific
island is similar to the swift movement from the real world to the fantastic in
children's fantasy".[37]
To
a modern reader Ballantyne's books can seem overly concerned with accounts of
flora and fauna,[38]
an "ethnographic gloss" intended to suggest that their settings are
real places offering adventures to those who can reach them.[37] They can also seem "obtrusively pious",[38]
but according to John Rennie Short, the moral tone of Ballantyne's writing is
compensated for by his ability to tell a "cracking good yarn in an
accessible and well-fashioned prose style".[17]
Themes
The
major themes of the novel revolve around the influence of Christianity, the
importance of social hierarchies, and the inherent superiority of civilised
Europeans over the South Sea islanders; Martine Dutheil, professor of English,
considers the novel "a key text mapping out colonial relations in the
Victorian period".[8] The basic subject of the novel is popular and widespread:
"castaway children assuming adult responsibilities without adult
supervision", and The Coral Island is considered the classic
example of such a book.[39]
I
saw that these inhuman monsters were actually launching their canoe over the
living bodies of their victims. But there was no pity in the breasts of these
men. Forward they went in ruthless indifference, shouting as they went, while
high above their voices rang the dying shrieks of those wretched creatures as,
one after another, the ponderous canoe passed over them, burst the eyeballs
from their sockets, and sent the life-blood gushing from their mouths. Oh
reader, this is no fiction! I would not, for the sake of thrilling you with
horror, invent so terrible a scene. It was witnessed. It is true – true as
that accursed sin which has rendered the human heart capable of such diabolical
enormities![40]
The
supposed civilising influence of missionaries in spreading Christianity among
the natives of the South Seas is an important theme of the second half of the
story;[16] as Jack remarks to Peterkin, "all the natives of the
South Sea Islands are fierce cannibals, and they have little respect for
strangers".[41] Modern critics view this aspect of the novel less
benevolently; Jerry Phillips, in a 1995 article, sees in The Coral Island
the "perfect realiz[ation]" of "the official discourse of 19th
century Pacific imperialism", which he argues was "obsessed with the
purity of God, Trade, and the Nation."[42]
The
importance of hierarchy and leadership is also a significant element. The
overarching hierarchy of race is informed by Victorian concepts, influenced by
the new theories of evolution proposed by Darwin and others. In morals and
culture, the natives are placed lower on the evolutionary ladder than are
Europeans, as is evidenced in the battle over the native woman Avatea, which
pits "the forces of civilization versus the forces of cannibalism".[43] Another hierarchy is seen in the organisation of the boys.
Although Jack, Ralph and Peterkin each have a say in how they should organise
themselves, ultimately the younger boys defer to Jack,[44]
"a natural leader",[39] particularly in a crisis, forming a natural hierarchy. The
pirates also have a hierarchy, but one without democracy, and as a consequence
are wiped out. The hierarchy of the natives is imposed by savagery.
Ballantyne's message is that leaders should be respected by those they lead,
and govern with their consent.[44] This educational message is especially appropriate
considering Ballantyne's adolescent audience, "the future rulers of the
world".[35]
Modern
critics find darker undertones in the novel. In an essay published in College
English in 2001, Martine Dutheil states
that The Coral Island can be thought of as epitomising a move away from
"the confidence and optimism of the early Victorian proponents of British
imperialism" toward
"self-consciousness and anxiety about colonial domination". She
locates this anxiety in what she calls the "rhetoric of excess" that
features in the descriptions of cannibalism, and especially in the accounts of
Fijian savagery provided by Bloody Bill (most notably that of the sacrifice of
children to the eel gods) and the missionary, a representative of the London Missionary Society, an "emblematic figure of colonial fiction".[8] Others have also linked popular boys' fiction of the period
with imperialism; Joseph Bristow's Empire Boys (1991) claimed to see an
"'imperialist manhood,' which shaped British attitudes towards empire and
masculinity."[45] The novel's portrayal of Pacific culture and the effects of
colonisation are analyzed in studies such as Brian
Street's The Savage in Literature:
Representations of 'Primitive' Society in English Fiction (1975)[46] and Rod Edmond's Representing the South Pacific:
Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (1998).[47][48] The domination imposed by "geographical mapping of a
territory and policing of its native inhabitants" is an important theme in
the novel both specifically and in general, in the topography of the island as
mapped by the boys and the South Pacific's "eventual subjugation and
conversion to Christianity", a topic continued in Stevenson's Treasure
Island.[49]
The
exploration of the relationship between nature and evangelical Christianity is
another typically Victorian theme. Coral connects the two ideas. Literary
critic Katharine Anderson explains that coral jewellery, popular in the period,
had a "pious significance".[d] The "enchanted garden" of coral the boys discover
at the bottom of their island's lagoon is suggestive of "missionary
encounters with the societies of the Pacific Island".[25] In Victorian society coral had been given an
"evangelical framing", and the little "coral insect"
responsible for building coral reefs[e] mirrored the "child reader's productive capacity as a
fundraiser for the missionary cause"; literary critic Michelle Elleray
discusses numerous children's books from the early to mid-19th century,
including The Coral Island, in which coral plays such an educational
role.[54]
The
novel's setting provides the backdrop for a meditation in the style of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who promoted an educational setting in which lessons are
provided by direct interactions with the natural world rather than by books and
coercive teachers.[55] Singh points out that Rousseau, in Emile, or On Education, promotes the reading and even imitation of Robinson
Crusoe;[23] literary critic Fiona McCulloch argues that the unmediated
knowledge the boys gain on their coral island resembles the "direct
language for children" Rousseau advocates in Emile.[12]
Critical reception
The
Coral Island was an almost instant success, and
was translated into almost every European language within fifty years of its
publication.[56] It was widely admired by its contemporary readers, although
modern critics view the text as featuring "dated colonialist themes and arguably racist undertones".[6] Ballantyne's blend of blood-thirsty adventure and pious
imperialism appealed not just to his target juvenile audience but also to their
parents and teachers.[57] He is today mainly remembered for The Coral Island,
to the exclusion of much of his other work.[58]
The
novel was still considered a classic for English primary
school children in the early 20th century.[59] In the United States it was long a staple of suggested
reading lists for high-school
students; such a list, discussed in a 1915 article in The English Journal, recommends the novel in the category "Stories for
Boys in Easy Style".[60] A simplified adaptation of the book was recommended in the
1950s for American 12–14 year olds.[61][62] Although mostly neglected by modern scholars[26] and generally considered to be dated in many aspects, in
2006 it was voted one of the top twenty Scottish novels at the 15th International World
Wide Web Conference.[63]
Influence
Robert Louis Stevenson's 1882 novel Treasure
Island was in part inspired by The
Coral Island,[64] which he admired for its "better qualities",[6] as was J.
M. Barrie's character Peter
Pan; both Stevenson and Barrie had been
"fervent boy readers" of the novel.[65] Novelist G.
A. Henty was also influenced by Ballantyne's
audience-friendly method of didactism.[23]
William
Golding's 1954 novel Lord
of the Flies was written as a counterpoint to
(or even a parody of)[66]
The Coral Island,[67] and Golding makes explicit references to it. At the end of
the novel, for instance, one of the naval officers who rescues the children
mentions the book, commenting on the hunt for one of their number, Ralph, as a
"jolly good show. Like the Coral Island".[68] Jack also makes an appearance in Lord of the Flies
as Jack Merridew, representing the irrational nature of the boys. Indeed,
Golding's three central characters – Ralph, Piggy and Jack – are
caricatures of Ballantyne's heroes.[23] Despite having enjoyed The Coral Island many times
as a child, Golding strongly disagreed with the views that it espoused, and in
contrast Lord of the Flies depicts the English boys as savages
themselves,[67] who forget more than they learn, unlike Ballantyne's boys.[16] Golding described the relationship between the two books by
saying that The Coral Island "rotted to compost" in his mind,
and in the compost "a new myth put down roots".[67] Neither is the idyllic nature of Ballantyne's coral island
to be found on Stevenson's treasure island, which is unsuitable for settlement
"but exists merely as a site from which to excavate treasure, a view
consistent with the late-Victorian imperial mission" according to Honaker.[31]
Television adaptations
The Coral Island was adapted into a children's television
series in a
joint venture between Thames Television and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation
in 1980, first shown on Australian and British television in 1983.[69] It was also adapted into a four-part children's television
drama by Zenith Productions, broadcast by ITV in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Island
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