While exploring the Pacific island on which they have been shipwrecked, the three British boys of R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) stumble across ‘a small hut or cottage’ containing two skeletons. On leaving the ‘melancholy stillness’ of the scene, the boys ‘brought the whole hut in ruins to the ground, and thus formed a grave to the bones of the poor recluse and his dog’. Understanding the dead recluse to be white given his form of habitation, the boys’ deployment of the cottage as a tomb frames this episode as one of failure, specifically a Western failure to establish ongoing domestic settlement of the island. But why does a boys’ adventure narrative linger on this episode of domestic desolation and decay? What are we to make of the relocation of the iconic English cottage to an island in the South Pacific? And how does masculinity inhabit the cottage's traditional alignment with domestic femininity? This reading of The Coral Island turns to the intersecting axes of gender, missionary culture and settlement in order to address these questions.

The Coral Island is a landmark text in the development of the Victorian boys’ adventure genre, which projected British boys successfully negotiating imperial cultures, peoples and landscapes to British ends through a series of exotic adventures. And there is no shortage of adventure in The Coral Island.