The Coral Island
By Robert Michael Ballantyne
The departure – The sea – My companions – Some account of the beautiful sights we saw on the great deep – A dreadful storm and a frightful wreck. It was a bright, beautiful, warm day when our ship spread her canvas to the breeze and sailed for the regions of the south. Oh, how my heart bounded with delight as I listened to the merry chorus of the sailors while they hauled at the ropes and got in the anchor!
The captain shouted – the men ran to obey – the noble ship bent over to the breeze, and the shore gradually faded from my view while I stood looking on, feeling that the whole was a delightful dream. The first thing that struck me as being different from anything I had yet seen during my short career on the sea was the hoisting of the anchor on deck and lashing it firmly down with ropes as if we had now bid farewell to the land forever, and would require its services no more.
“There, lass,” cried a broad-shouldered jack-tar, giving the fluke of the anchor a hearty slap with his hand after the housing was completed – “there, lass, take a good nap now, for we shan’t ask you to kiss the mud again for many a long day to come! And so it was. That anchor did not “kiss the mud” for many long days afterwards; and when at last it did, it was for the last time!
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Robert Michael Ballantyne
Robert Michael Ballantyne (24 April 1825 – 8 February 1894) was a Scottish juvenile fiction author who wrote over a hundred books.
Biography.
He was also an accomplished artist: he exhibited some of his watercolours at the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1847, Ballantyne returned to Scotland to discover that his father had died. He published his first book the following year, Hudson’s Bay: or Life in the Wilds of North America, and for some time was employed by the publisher Messrs Constable. In 1856, he gave up business to focus on his literary career and began the series of adventure stories for the young with which his name is popularly associated.
The Young Fur-Traders (1856), The Coral Island (1857), The World of Ice (1859), Ungava: a Tale of Eskimo Land (1857), The Dog Crusoe (1860), The Lighthouse (1865), Fighting the Whales (1866), Deep Down (1868), The Pirate City (1874), Erling the Bold (1869), The Settler and the Savage (1877), and more than 100 other books followed in regular succession, his rule being to write as far as possible from personal knowledge of the scenes he described. The Gorilla Hunters. A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (1861) shares three characters with The Coral Island: Jack Martin, Ralph Rover, and Peterkin Gay.
Here, Ballantyne relied factually on Paul du Chaillu’s Exploration in Equatorial Guinea, which had appeared early in the same year. The Coral Island is the most popular of the Ballantyne novels and is still read and remembered today. Still, because of one mistake in that book, in which he gave an incorrect thickness of coconut shells, he subsequently attempted to gain first-hand knowledge of his subject matter. For instance, he spent some time living with the lighthouse keepers at Bell Rock before writing The Lighthouse, and while researching for Deep Down, he spent time with the tin miners of Cornwall. In 1866, Ballantyne married Jane Grant (c. 1845 – c. 1924), with whom he had three sons and daughters.
Robert Michael Ballantyne
