Gorillas are herbivorous, predominantly ground-dwelling great apes that inhabit the tropical forests of equatorial Africa. The genus Gorilla is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four or five subspecies. The DNA of gorillas is highly similar to that of humans, from 95 to 99% depending on what is included, and they are the next closest living relatives to humans after chimpanzees and bonobos.
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children's novel by Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862–1863 as a serial for Macmillan's Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. It was written as part satire in support of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The book was extremely popular in the United Kingdom and was a mainstay of British children's literature for many decades, but eventually fell out of favour in America in part due to its prejudices against Irish, Jews, Catholics, and Americans.
Robert Michael Ballantyne was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction, who wrote more than a hundred books. He was also an accomplished artist: he exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Paul Belloni Du Chaillu was a French-American traveler, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched the prehistory of Scandinavia.
Tarzan of the Apes is a 1912 novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the first in the Tarzan series. The story was first printed in the pulp magazine The All-Story in October 1912 before being released as a novel in June 1914.
William Henry Giles Kingston, often credited as W. H. G. Kingston, was an English writer of boys' adventure novels.
Victorian literature is English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The 19th century is considered by some to be the Golden Age of English Literature, especially for British novels. It was in the Victorian era that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. English writing from this era reflects the major transformations in most aspects of English life, from scientific, economic, and technological advances to changes in class structures and the role of religion in society. The number of new novels published each year increased from 100 at the start of the period to 1000 by the end of it. Famous novelists from this period include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the three Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling.
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.
Representations of gorillas are common in popular culture in the Western world with the full range of electronic media having gorillas as mascots, gorillas behaving like humans, and humans behaving like gorillas.
Tarzan is a series of 24 adventure novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and published between 1912 and 1966, followed by several novels either co-written by Burroughs, or officially authorized by his estate. There are also two works written by Burroughs especially for children that are not considered part of the main series.
The Ballantyne Novels are a series of novels published between 1980 and 1984 by Wilbur Smith. They chronicle the lives of the Ballantyne family, from the 1860s to the 1980s against a background of the history of Rhodesia.
The Koolakamba or Kooloo-Kamba is a purported hybrid species of chimpanzees and gorillas. This alleged hybrid ape species has been reported in Africa as early as the mid 19th century. No empirical evidence has been found to substantiate the existence of the creature. The Koolakamba was referenced in the mid-19th century in French work by Franquet and in some descriptive work of Paul Du Chaillu from 1860, 1861, 1867, and 1899, some of which was republished in 1969.
Men of Men is a novel by Wilbur Smith, the second in the Ballantyne Novels series. It is set in the 1880s during the colonisation of Rhodesia and the First Matabele War and climaxes with the Shangani Patrol.
The Coral Island is a children's television series, adapted from the 19th-century novel The Coral Island by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. The series of 4 episodes was a joint production of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Thames Television. It was filmed on location in the western Samoan village of Salamumu and then on the Whitsunday Islands off the Queensland coast in 1981.
The Beti people are a Central African ethnic group primarily found in central Cameroon. They are also found in Equatorial Guinea and northern Gabon. They are closely related to the Bulu people, the Fang people and the Yaunde people, who are all sometimes grouped as Ekang.
The Eagle Cliff is a novel written in 1889 by the Scottish author R.M. Ballantyne. At the age of 16, he traveled to Canada, where he spent five years working for the Hudson's Bay Company, trading with the First Nations for furs. His Canadian experiences formed the basis for his first novel, The Young Fur Traders, published in 1856, the year he decided to become a full-time writer and embarked on the adventure stories for the young with which his name is popularly associated. His most popular novel was The Coral Island, published in 1858.
The Island Queen: or Dethroned by Fire and Water: a tale of the Southern Hemisphere (1885) is a novel written by Scottish author R.M. Ballantyne. The novel first appeared in Volume VI of Young England, an annual magazine published in London from 1880 to 1937. It was then published in paperback by J. Nisbet & Co. This novel was Ballantyne's 79th publication, written in the latter half of his career.
The Pirate City: An Algerine Tale, or simply The Pirate City, is a novel written by R. M. Ballantyne that was published in 1874. It is a work of juvenile fiction and adventure fiction which follows the Rimini family. The family disembarks from Sicily on a trading expedition only to be captured by Barbary Pirates and taken to the pirate city of Algiers, which is the present-day capital of Algeria.
