The Coral Island

A Tale of the Pacific Ocean

Reading time: about 7 h
Length: 99,730 words · 182 pages
Structure: 34 chapters · 2 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Victorian

Three boys — Ralph Rover, Jack Martin and Peterkin Gay — are shipwrecked alone on an uninhabited South Pacific island, and the novel follows their resourceful, largely cheerful survival there before pirates and warring islanders bring real danger into their castaway idyll.

R. M. Ballantyne published The Coral Island in 1858; it became one of the most influential boys' adventure novels of the Victorian era, and its premise was later inverted by William Golding, who cites it directly, in Lord of the Flies.

Bibliomancer restores the 1858 text exactly as Ballantyne wrote it.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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