I didn't realize this at the time, but it's abridged. Unabridged prints of this book are no longer available. In order to get such a copy, you will need to buy it used!

Let the reader be reminded that this book is 150 years old and that certain things written in the book were considered standard at the time such as the converting of indegenous people to Christianity in order to 'civilise' them. How times have changed!! Also the analysis in Lord of the Flies must be borne by the fact that a larger number of boys existed in that novel and both books were written 100 years apart.
Robert Ballantyne warns readers in the introduction that if they wish to be melancholy and morose, they not bother reading the book. I'm sure that the novel was not intended to be written for analysis 150 years later!

However this novel is a creative and educational story of three shipwrecked boys on a Coral Island and how they learn to survive in the wilderness and encouter natives and pirates. Captured by pirates, Ralph escapes back to the island and returns to Fiji with Jack and Peterkin to try and sort out family problems with some of the natives they met. This makes for an intersting conclusion...

R.M.Ballantyne never visited the Pacific but the colorful fiction he wrote in England circa 1843 became a major influence on children's literature. Young Robert Louis Stevenson was a great admirer of R.M.Ballantyne. "Lord of the Flies" was a 20th Century response to the 19th Century genre of altruistic boy's adventure stories that followed Ballantyne's highly successful novel "The Coral Island".

Where did Ballantyne get his information? Relatively few Europeans had visited the area he clearly described between Fiji & Samoa prior to the 1840s. Perhaps he got specific detailed accounts from an earlier book or from missionaries, whalers or members of the Wilkes or Belcher expeditions who may have visited the Lau Islands and then England prior to 1843 (please, does anyone know?).

Much of the action in Ballantyne's novel takes place on an island called "Mango" inhabited by fierce natives. That was apparently Mago Island in the Northern Lau Group in Fiji whose native population was displaced in the 1860s when Europeans moved in. Coincidentally it was three adventuresome young brothers who purchased Mago and landed there in their own boat a couple of decades after "The Coral Island" was written. Had they read Ballantyne's novel?? They made a fortune growing sea island cotton during the American Civil War. Mago Island and the plantation pioneered by the young Ryder brothers is today owned by the Tokyu Corporation of Japan and is practically uninhabited.