The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Coral Island, by R. M. Ballantyne,
Illustrated by Dalziel

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Title: The Coral Island
a Tale of the Pacific Ocean

Author: R. M. Ballantyne

Release Date: April 12, 2007 [eBook #646]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CORAL ISLAND***

Transcribed from the 1884 Thomas Nelson and Sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

{Book cover: cover.jpg}

The Coral Island:
A Tale of the Pacific Ocean

{A coral island: p0.jpg}

BY

ROBERT MICHAEL BALLANTYNE,
AUTHOR OF "HUDSON'S BAY; OR, EVERY-DAY LIFE IN THE WILDS OF NORTH
AMERICA;
"SNOW-FLAKES AND SUN-BEAMS; OR, THE YOUNG FUR-TRADERS;"
"UNGAVA: A TALE OF THE ESQUIMAUX," ETC., ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY DALZIEL.

London:
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW.
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.
1884.

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. Nobo