The Gates of Morning

The Gates of Morning is a romance novel by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, first published in 1925. It is the third and final novel of the Blue Lagoon trilogy which began with The Blue Lagoon (1908) and continued with The Garden of God (1923).

Stacpoole wrote this third book as a kind of exposé of the despoiling of South Sea Island cultures and people by Europeans. His introduction says:

Never in the history of the world has ruin fallen on a people as it has fallen upon the natives of these far islands; nowhere else will you find the remains of a once noble race left in its original setting of pure air, yet stinking of gin and petrol and exhibited at times to the world between the finger and thumb of Romance or Realism. Could it speak, this remnant, would it not say: "White man, you have taken from us all good things but Death; you have given us all bad things but Pride; make one return -- Silence. Do not write about us; or, writing, remember only what we were"?