All Ballantyne's novels are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck. Three boys, fifteen-year-old Ralph Rover (the narrator), eighteen-year-old Jack Martin and fourteen-year-old Peterkin Gay, are the sole survivors of a shipwreck on the coral reef of a large but uninhabited Polynesian island. At first their life on the island is idyllic; food, in the shape of fruits, fish and wild pigs, is plentiful, and using their only possessions; a broken telescope, an iron-bound oar and a small axe, they fashion a shelter and even construct a small boat.
