The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Coral Island, by R.M. Ballantyne

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Title: The Coral Island

Author: R.M. Ballantyne

Release Date: June 7, 2007 [EBook #21721]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

THE CORAL ISLAND, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.

CHAPTER ONE.

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 on 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 any rate, 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