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 interes…
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