The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is a novel written by Scottish juvenile fiction author R. M. Ballantyne during the peak of the British Empire. It was voted one of the top twenty Scottish novels at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference held in 2006. The story is written as a first person narrative from the perspective of one of three boys shipwrecked on the coral reef of a large but uninhabited Polynesian island, 15-year-old Ralph Rover. He and his companions – 18-year-old Jack Martin, and 14-year-old Peterkin Gay – are the sole survivors from the ship. At first their life 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.