The Coral Island

The Coral Island
A Tale of the Pacific Ocean
by R. M. Ballantyne

Preface
I was a boy when I went through the wonderful adventures herein set
down. With the memory of my boyish feelings strong upon me, I
present my book specially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may
derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and
unbounded amusement from its pages.
One word more. If there is any boy or man who loves to be melancholy
and morose, and who cannot enter with kindly sympathy into the
regions of fun, let me seriously advise him to shut my book and put it
away. It is not meant for him.
RALPH ROVER
CHAPTER I.

The beginning - My early life and character - I thirst for adventure in
foreign lands and go to sea.
ROVING has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my
heart, the very sunshine of my existence. In childhood, in boyhood, and
in man's estate, I have been a rover; not a mere rambler among the
woody glens and upon the hill-tops of my own native land, but an
enthusiastic rover throughout the length and breadth of the wide wide

world.
It was a wild, black night of howling storm, the night in which I was
born on the foaming bosom of the broad Atlantic Ocean. My father was
a sea-captain; my grandfather was a sea-captain; my great-grandfather
had been a marine. Nobody could tell positively what occupation HIS
father had followed; but my dear mother used to assert that he had been
a midshipman, whose grandfather, on the mother's side, had been an
admiral in the royal navy. At anyrate we knew that, as far back as our
family could be traced, it had been intimately connected with the great
watery waste. Indeed this was the case on both sides of the house; for
my mother always went to sea with my father on his long voyages, and
so spent the greater part of her life upon the water.
Thus it was, I suppose, that I came to inherit a roving disposition. Soon
after I was born, my father, being old, retired from a seafaring life,
purchased a small cottage in a fishing village on the west coast of
England, and settled down to spend the evening of his life on the shores
of that sea which had for so many years been his home. It was not long
after this that I began to show the roving spirit that dwelt within me.
For some time past my infant legs had been gaining strength, so that I
came to be dissatisfied with rubbing the skin off my chubby knees by
walking on them, and made many attempts to stand up and walk like a
man; all of which attempts, however, resulted in my sitting down
violently and in sudden surprise. One day I took advantage of my dear
mother's absence to make another effort; and, to my joy, I actually
succeeded in reaching the doorstep, over which I tumbled into a pool of
muddy water that lay before my father's cottage door. Ah, how vividly I
remember the horror of my poor mother when she found me sweltering
in the mud amongst a group of cackling ducks, and the tenderness with
which she stripped off my dripping clothes and washed my dirty little
body! From this time forth my rambles became more frequent, and, as I
grew older, more distant, until at last I had wandered far and near on
the shore and in the woods around our humble dwelling, and did not
rest content until my father bound me apprentice to a coasting vessel,
and let me go to sea.

For some years I was happy in visiting the sea-ports, and in coasting
along the shores of my native land. My Christian name was Ralph, and
my comrades added to this the name of Rover, in consequence of the
passion which I always evinced for travelling. Rover was not my real
name, but as I never received any other I came at last to answer to it as
naturally as to my proper name; and, as it is not a bad one, I see no
good reason why I should not introduce myself to the reader as Ralph
Rover. My shipmates were kind, good-natured fellows, and they and I
got on very well together. They did, indeed, very frequently make game
of and banter me, but not unkindly; and I overheard them sometimes
saying that Ralph Rover was a "queer, old-fashioned fellow." This, I
must confess, surprised me much, and I pondered the saying long, but
could come at no satisfactory conclusion as to that wherein my old-
fashionedness lay. It is true I was a quiet