This article is about a novel, for the video game, see Dolphin Island (video game)

Dolphin Island (video game)

Dolphin Island is a simulation video game for the Nintendo DS. The player works in a marine zoo on a tropical island. The zoo is threatened by a multi-national real estate company that plans construct a luxury hotel in its place. To save the park the player must care for and train over thirty...

Dolphin Island: A Story of the People of the Sea is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

 first published in 1963.

Summary

Late one night (in the world of the future), a giant cargo hover ship makes an emergency landing somewhere in the middle of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and an enterprising teenager named Johnny Clinton stows away on it. In the space of only a few hours the craft crashes into the Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

. The crew ("even the ship's cat") is offloaded onto lifeboats, leaving Johnny (who, as a stowaway, they didn't know was on board) adrift in the flotsam from the hovercraft. His life is saved by the "People of the Sea"--dolphins. A school of these fantastic creatures guides him to an island on Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

's Great Barrier Reef

Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is the world'slargest reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 2,600 kilometres over an area of approximately...

. Johnny becomes involved with the work of a strange and fascinating research community where a brilliant professor (Prof Kazan) tries to communicate with dolphins. Johnny learns skindiving and survives a typhoon--only to risk his life again, immediately afterwards, to get medical help for the people on the island.