The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean

Chapter 2: Preface

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About This Book

Three shipwrecked boys make a prolonged stay on a remote coral island in the South Pacific and survive by improvising shelters, finding food, and coping with storms and illness. Their island life is punctuated by encounters with visiting islanders and hostile outsiders, leading to episodes of conflict, daring rescues, and practical ingenuity. Interwoven with action are moral reflections and explicit Christian instruction that stress self-reliance, courage, duty, and a Victorian perspective on order and cultural contrast.

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