The Coral Island was written by R.M. Ballantyne. Ballantyne (1825-1894) was a popular and prolific author of children’s books, one of the foremost examples, with Mayne Reid (see: War Life), Frederick Marryat (see: Masterman Ready) and G.A. Henty, of Victorian Boy’s Own adventure fiction. Ballantyne is not much read today, for reasons which will shortly become apparent, but in his time he was a popular author, lecturer, shameless self-promoter, and humbug. The main characters from The Coral Island appeared in a sequel, The Gorilla Hunters (1861).

In The Coral Island Peterkin Grey and his two best friends, Jack Martin and Ralph Rover, go to sea and are marooned on a deserted South Pacific island. They use their knowledge and innate superiority to make a happy home for themselves, triumphing over the elements and the island’s wild animals. Peterkin, Jack, and Ralph defeat savage cannibalistic natives and bloodthirsty pirates and aid missionaries in converting heathens to Christianity. In The Gorilla Hunter, the trio, now in their early twenties, travel to Africa, where they go on safari and shoot large numbers of wild animals, including thirty-seven gorillas.

The Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters are excellent–one might say quintessential–examples of the type of imperialist fiction which was produced in such great quantities for British children in the nineteenth century. As such, they contain a large amount of material modern readers will find objectionable.

In Ballantyne’s favor it must be said that the novels are mostly readable and entertaining. Ballantyne’s style is utilitarian, and his characters have no internal life, but the novels move quickly and are full of the sort of action boys like. Although there are several moments of strained, artificial sentimentality and piety, they pass quickly, moving the reader on to the next adventure. The novels are full of accurate detail about the flora and fauna of the South Pacific islands. Ballantyne was known for writing stories about faraway places, but he never visited most of the places he wrote about. Ballantyne compensated for this by a doing great deal of research (although he occasionally got some details wrong), so that his books are lengthy and for the most part accurate descriptions of places most of his audience would never see. This is a large part of Ballantyne’s appeal for his readers, and something which must be appreciated when reading The Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters. Ballantyne’s readers did not have movies or television or radio to show them what the veldt of Africa or a Pacific coral island was like. In 1858 modern travel writing was still in its infancy. The magazines to which Ballantyne’s readers would have been exposed carried few articles describing remote areas of the world, and there was a minuscule chance that Ballantyne’s readers would ever visit those places. Ballantyne’s readers would have heard of these places, and may even have read brief accounts of them, but the sort of in-depth descriptions which Ballantyne provides would have been unknown to the average reader of Ballantyne’s work. So Ballantyne’s workmanlike descriptions would still be enough to excite the imaginations of his readers, and the descriptions, combined with the novels’ action and the youthful characters, would create thrilling fiction. Modern readers lack this sort of ignorance about the world, which is one reason why Ballantyne’s work is no longer so effective.

Moreover, The Coral Island was one of the first Robinsonades (stories of survival in isolated locations) to feature boys acting in a realistic fashion, without adults present. When Ballantyne wrote The Coral Island the trend in literature for boys to be shown acting like boys, rather than prim, moral, bloodless men, was only seven years old (see: Boy Heroes). The Coral Island was the best-written of these new novels which portrayed boys on their own and acting in a way that readers would recognize as realistic. Compared to works like Mayne Reid’s The Desert Home and W.H.G. Kingston’s Peter the Whaler, The Coral Island is excellent reading, and the youthful reading audience responded to it many times over, making it the most popular boys’ story of the century.¹

But the ideology of the books is unsavory. The two novels are, as critic John Sutherland puts it, “fable[s] of British imperialism, with Ballantyne’s lads as romanticised colonisers.”² This aptly describes the outlook of the novels. All the assumptions of imperialism are here, from the superiority of the white race to the barbarism of unreached peoples (and the corresponding need to spread Christianity) to the right of the English to transform alien (i.e., non-Western) landscapes for their own use. A comparison with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812-1827), which The Coral Island has much in common with, is instructive. Crusoe has a real sense of desperation and danger, a genuine feeling of the harshness and uncertainty of life on a deserted island. This feeling is missing from The Swiss Family Robinson, which takes the Robinsonade scenario and format and filters it through the prism of fundamentalist Swiss Calvinism, so that the Robinson family is in no danger as long as they trust to God. Ballantyne further removes the element of danger from the story, leaving the reader with the impression that being stranded on a remote Pacific island is one big lark. Ballantyne also replaces Wyss’ Calvinism with a broader Imperialist Christianity.³ The Coral Island provided no small amount of material for William Golding to satirize in Lord of the Flies (1954).

The books are didactic. Ballantyne clearly felt the need to instruct his audience in the proper ways to act and live as well as in what sorts of plants and animals might be found in Africa or the Pacific. Among the lessons Ballantyne teaches are the necessity to keep a stiff upper lip, regardless of the situation; the pointlessness of books which have no practical use–books which teach you how to build a ship or what a breadfruit tree looks like are good, books of philosophy and literature are worse than useless; that doing is better than talking; that surviving in Africa or on a deserted Pacific island is a great doddle, if you have the right outlook; and that, come what may–shipwreck, cannibals, pirates, storms–a can-do British attitude will see you through.

Another of the books’ flaws is that Jack Martin serves as Ballantyne’s plot device for instructing the readers. Jack is a walking encyclopedia of useful knowledge, so that if food is needed on a Pacific island, Jack will suddenly know all about coconuts and breadfruit, and if fire is needed, Jack will know how to make a fire with only wood, steel, and flint. Much of the plot of The Coral Island is author-driven. Most of the novel’s incidents take place because Ballantyne needed to entertain his readers rather than because the incidents were likely to happen. In much the same way Jack Martin is an author-directed character, knowing what the author needs him to know for the convenience of the plot.

Most reprehensible is Ballantyne’s attitude toward animals. Castaway teenagers on a Pacific island cannot reasonably be expected to become vegetarians, nor is it reasonable to expect characters created by a British imperialist in 1858 and 1861 to have an enlightened attitude toward animals. But the attitude exhibited by the trio of boys in The Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters is appalling. “Bloodthirsty” does not begin to describe it. Peterkin, Ralph, and Jack display an almost psychotic maliciousness in their slaughter of huge numbers of animals, and Ballantyne’s novels find this praise-worthy. The trio are not much different from the big game hunters who appeared in Victorian and Edwardian literature, but the jolly lack of conscience the trio display, and the lightheartedness with which they kill and with which Ballantyne describes the kills, is exceptional, and stomach-turning.

And, of course, there are the perils posed by the “natives” in both books, fictional perils that resonated with the books’ audience as being what real-life English colonists in faraway colonies faced.

If the 1850s were "a turning point for imperialist ideology" (1988, 14), as Patrick Brantlinger has persuasively argued in Rule of Darkness, then Ballantyne's novel can be said to epitomize this turn from the confidence and optimism of the early Victorian proponents of British imperialism to self consciousness and anxiety about colonial domination¼what is exemplary about The Coral Island is not so much its crude representation of primeval savagery as its expression of the colonial double bind: the repetition of "the same old stories" is necessary in order to reassert the irreducible opposition between civilized identity and savagery, but it is also dangerous because it threatens this very distinction. From Ballantyne's complacent repetition of stereotypes of savagery in The Coral Island emerges what Homi Bhabha has identified as the deep ambivalence and intrinsic anxiety of colonial discourse.⁴

One cannot unrecommend The Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters strongly enough.

Print: R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island. Richmond, VA: Valancourt Books, 2015.

¹ John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1989), 147.

² Sutherland, Stanford Companion, 147.

³ Which undoubtedly explains The Coral Island’s twenty-first century popularity with a type of Christian homeschooling parent.

⁴ Martine Hennard Dutheil, “The Representation of the Cannibal in Ballantyne’s ‘The Coral Island.’ Colonial Anxieties in Victorian Popular Fiction,” College Literature 28, no. 1 (Winter, 2001): 106.