author

Alfred St. Johnston

d. 1891

A late-19th-century adventure writer with a strong feel for the South Pacific, he wrote lively tales of danger, travel, and survival. His books often drew on places he knew firsthand, giving them an extra sense of atmosphere.

1 Audiobook

In Quest of Gold; Or, Under the Whanga Falls

In Quest of Gold; Or, Under the Whanga Falls

by Alfred St. Johnston

About the author

Alfred St. Johnston was a British-born author and traveller, generally dated to about 1858–1891. Library and archival records link him with both Fiji and Queensland, and modern reference sources describe him as having worked as an official in Fiji before writing fiction set around the South Pacific.

He is known for a run of adventure novels including Camping Among Cannibals (1883), Charlie Asgarde: The Story of a Friendship (1884), In Quest of Gold; Or, Under the Whanga Falls (1885), Twycross's Redemption (1887), and A South Sea Lover: A Romance (1890). These books were aimed at popular readers of the time and often mixed action, travel, and colonial-era ideas about island life.

Reliable sources about his personal life are fairly limited, but the surviving record suggests a short career and an early death in 1891. Even so, his work remains of interest today for readers of Victorian adventure fiction and for anyone curious about how the South Pacific was imagined in popular writing of the period.