The Coral Island (1858) was the second novel of the popular Scottish children’s writer R. M. Ballantyne and his most enduring literary legacy, frequently considered to be a classic of its kind. Based on the exotic shipwreck scenario most familiar from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, The Coral Island also draws on a number of more obscure sources, notably accounts of missionary travels in the Pacific and a now almost entirely forgotten 1853 novel The Island Home; or, The Young Castaways by the American James F. Bowman. Ballantyne’s tale is a blend of rollicking adventure and sanctimonious reflections on the virtues of Empire that comes with the characteristic racial prejudices and …
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