The Gates of Morning
book by Henry De Vere Stacpoole
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"?
Plot summary
The novel picks up a day or so after the events after The Garden of God. Dick Lestrange, son of Dicky and Emmeline Lestrange, is about 14 or 15. He has come to love Katafa, a Spanish girl who is the adopted daughter of the Kanaka people of the island of Karolin, about 40 miles (64 km) from the island (Palm Tree) where his parents lived. Now, she has brought him to her island, and due to a series of complicated political circumstances, the people have declared him their new king.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Gates of Morning” as book by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as book by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3987187. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 1908 and 1923.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Gates of Morning” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.