To see the transcribed text with images (if available) use the FB2 version. This book is a most enjoyable read. We can, however, detect that Ballantyne had been reading up various works by W.H.G. Kingston and by G. Manville Fenn. It's just the knowledge of forest life in Java and Sumatra that makes us think that. But that knowledge is good, for it makes those parts of the book that take place in these forests ring all the more true. As so often with Victorian authors writing for teenagers there is a delightful coloured auxiliary hero. But there is another even more important auxiliary hero, van der Kemp, and it is this man and his doings that form the real interest of this story. He had made himself a home in an island of the Krakatoa group, and a very interesting home it is, too. He travels about, mostly, in a three-seater canoe of the Rob Roy type, that seems able to travel great distances over the sea, sailing some of the way, and to withstand heavy weather, in a most surprising manner. There is a good description of the eruption, or rather explosion, of Krakatoa. This was one of the major geological events of the century, and might well have been taken for granted, with the author assuming that his youthful readers knew all about it, but, thank Goodness, he does not. First published 1889.