Adventure classics – A signal fire for the nuclear age

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

The Coral Island, by R.M. Ballantyne

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“Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun. . . (but) if a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire.”

So spoke Ralph, duly elected leader at age “twelve years and a few months” of the marooned, doomed youngsters in William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. Golding consciously followed the premise of R. M. Ballantyne’s 1858 boys’ adventure story, The Coral Island, and then stood it on its head.

When Ballantyne marooned three young British sailors – Ralph, Jack and Peterkin – on an uninhabited tropical isle, he was careful to set up a clear hierarchy among them. Jack was the oldest at 18, and already an experienced sailor. Ralph was 15, and on his first voyage, as was 14-year-old Peterkin Gay. The world they came from was an ordered one. Their country was the leader of a worldwide empire, most of whose possessions were at peace and where everyone from Queen Victoria on down knew his or her place. And because Ballantyne’s book was meant to set an uplifting example for its readers, young Ralph and Peterkin accepted Jack’s authority without question.

Almost exactly a century later, in 1954, and in a world so changed Ballantyne would hardly have recognized it, William Golding also marooned a group of British boys on an uninhabited island. Unlike Ballantyne’s castaways, shipwrecked in a storm while on a peaceful voyage, Golding’s were fleeing a world torn by war. Great Britain’s empire was dissolving in the aftermath of the second world war of the century. And over the entire globe hung the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation.

For better or worse, unthinking acceptance of authority was no longer an option for these new castaways. Golding’s Ralph and Jack were closer in age, more nearly balanced in size and experience than Ballantyne’s. And their Peterkin stand-in, the short, fat, asthmatic, lower class boy nicknamed Piggy, has only his glasses and a misplaced faith in rationality to set against their power stalemate.

Right, glasses. Because although Ralph hopes to attract rescuers with a signal fire, and the island has plenty of wood for fuel, the only way the boys have to start a fire is by using Piggy’s spectacles as a burning glass.

In The Coral Island, Peterkin suggested the same experiment, using the lens of a spy glass, a suggestion derided by the others at the time because the sun had set. Ballantyne’s Jack starts the fire by the time honored method of friction, a low-tech suggestion the boys’ in Golding’s book deride.

Ralph tells Piggy to keep track of the youngest boys, age six or so, collectively referred to as the “littluns.” Among the youngsters is one with a mulberry birthmarked face, “a shrimp of a boy.” He is the first to voice fear of a “beastie” in the woods, the first mention of menace on the apparently idyllic island. But the older boys deride his fears and the rest, wildly excited by the prospect of a bonfire, break free of Piggy’s feeble attempts to control them.

As the youngsters pile on fuel, the fire quickly rages as out of the control as Golding feared the nuclear weapons of the age would do to the world. When the first at last burns itself out, the boy with the marked face is not among the group. The genii in the bottle technology of Piggy’s glasses has claimed its first victim.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a September of young adventurers with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island.)

Adventure classics -- Merchant, debtor, author, spy

Robinson Crusoe

by Daniel Defoe

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“For all the writing that Defoe had done before the composition of Robinson Crusoe, indeed for all the prose fiction that he had written, Robinson Crusoe must have come to him as almost as wonderful a surprise as it was to his readers. . . For the first time Defoe created a work that drew upon all his talents, knowledge, and experience,” biographer Maximillian E. Novak writes in Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions.

Who but a writer of pamphlets satirizing German George I’s favoritism toward foreigners could imagine a quintessential English character whose family blandly anglicizes its German name of “Kreutznaer” to “Crusoe?” Who but a failed merchant imprisoned for debt could give his castaway a capitalistic fortune from earnings his properties accrued, without so much as a finger lift from him, during his absence on a tropical island? And who but a religious dissenter could imagine that island as a secular paradise where Protestants, Catholics and, yes, even pagan cannibals could live in peace?

But I’m getting ahead of the complex 1719 story of the world’s most famous castaway and the still more complex story of his inventor.

Robinson Crusoe runs away to sea, repents, runs away again, vows to change his way of life, and no sooner does so than he’s backing a scheme of illegal slave trading. For all these sins, he’s shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. While there, he finds a single human footprint where he thought nobody had set foot except himself.

How strange it was, Crusoe marvels, coming across the mysterious print, “That I, whose affliction was that I seemed banished from human society. . . that I was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent appearance of a man having set his foot in the island.”

He will go on to rescue a young cannibal he names “Friday,” for the day of his discovery. And he and Friday will in turn be rescued, even though inadvertently, by pirates (as fashionable among eighteenth century readers as they are today). And of course, he’ll find up fabulously rich.

In spite of -- or because of -- the money Robinson Crusoe’s four authorized editions made for the aging Defoe and his large family, casting doubt on Defoe’s accomplishments soon became a popular pastime.

The “real” Robinson Crusoe was Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, detractors said. Or a character imagined by medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl, living on an island without other human beings. Or Crusoe was “really” Henry Pitman, shipwrecked after escaping from a Caribbean penal colony. Pitman is a likely influence, since Defoe’s book was published by the same firm that published Pitman’s memoir. And since one of Defoe’s typically harebrained financial schemes was colonizing the territory around the mouth of the Orinoco River in South America, where he conveniently locates Crusoe’s island.

And by the way, others wrote, Crusoe’s companion Friday was really a marooned Native American whose story had been much publicized early in the eighteenth century. I don’t doubt Crusoe and Friday were all these. But they were also much more.


Defoe would go on to write more groundbreaking novels in the next decade, including A Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders. But no matter how much money his writing (and work as a secret agent for at least two political regimes) brought in, it was never enough. He died in 1731, having spent the last six months of his life hiding from his creditors.

Of course, Robinson Crusoe, Novak’s biography, and Tim Severin’s book, Seeking Robinson Crusoe, are available on Amazon. Perhaps even at your local library.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with Walter Lord’s story of the Titanic’s last hours, A Night to Remember.)

Adventure classics -- A dark and stormy horse

The Black Stallion

by Walter Farley

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The year 1941 was a momentous one for young writer Walter Farley.  It was the year he received his degree from Columbia University but perhaps more important – far more important for horse-loving young readers – it also saw the publication of his book, The Black Stallion.  That book, its sequels and movie adaptations, would keep Farley busy for the rest of his life.  The Black Stallion opens with teenaged Alec Ramsay returning to America following a visit with his uncle in Arabia.  One day, a wild black stallion is brought aboard – an unusual cargo for the tramp freighter they voyage on.  Alec investigates and succeeds in winning some degree of trust from the horse, but their lifelong bond is forged when they become castaways on a desert island – the only survivors of the wrecked freighter.  After mutually saving each other, the stallion teaches Alec a lesson reiterated in the current, unrelated movie, 127 Days – the value of a good knife.

On the island, Alec rides the stallion for the first time and is stunned by his speed.  After their rescue, the young man convinces his neighbor, retired racehorse trainer Henry Dailey, to train the horse secretly.  But without a known pedigree, the Black, as they call the stallion, cannot compete on the track except as the truly dark horse in a match race between two thoroughbred champions.  The rest is horse story history.

Farley was still a high school student, close to the age of his story’s protagonist, when he began writing the first and most famous of his books.  The Arabia of the story, the desert island, the improbable height of the mysterious horse, are mythic elements unknown in any geography book or breed standard.  If he’d realized how many sequels his story would sire, he might have given more thought to the mysterious horse’s background.  Or he might simply have felt overwhelmed and unequal to the task of writing one of the most iconic equine stories of the century.  In the end, all that matters is the wonder of a young dreamer finding himself swept away on the back of a marvelous horse.

In the accompanying picture, Equest therapy horse Sonny stands in for the Black.  Purists may object to Sonny’s white markings since Farley described his imaginary horse as being completely black.  But fans of the 1979 movie version will remember that Cass Ole, the Texas-bred Arabian stallion who played the Black, also had white markings that had to be dyed black for his role.