sort of adventure instinctively engaged me on the path I was later to take. This is what led me to write The School for Robinsons, MI, and Two Years Vacation, whose heroes are close relatives of Defoe’s and Wyss’s …
These titles … were Le Robinson de douze ans by Mme Mollar [sic for Mallès] de Beaulieu and Le Robinson des sables du désert by Mme de Mirval. There were also of the same kind Les Aventures de Robert Robert by Louis Desnoyers, published in the Journal des enfants with so many other stories that I will never forget. Then came Robinson Crusoe, that masterpiece which is, however, only one episode in the long and tedious tale by Daniel Defoe. Finally, The Crater by Fenimore Cooper could only increase my passion for the heroes of the unknown islands of the Atlantic and Pacific …
If Mme de Montolieu was not the only person to translate The Swiss Family Robinson, she is also not the only one to have given it a sequel, since I have attempted to do so, under the title Second Homeland.
In addition, Hetzel and Co. published a new translation of this story in 1861 due to the collaboration of P.-J. Stahl and E. Muller, who revised it and gave it a more modern style and contents. Strictly speaking, it is from this edition, revised also from the scientific point of view, that Second Homeland follows on …
And then, by dint of dreaming … a phenomenon occurred: I came to believe that this New Switzerland really existed, that it was an authentic island situated in the northeast of the Indian Ocean …
Jules Verne
NOTES
1. Published only in the MER, vol. 19, first semester 1874, 1–2.
2. Published in the first illustrated edition of Two Years Vacation (1888).
3. Mme Mallès de Beaulieu (?-1825), Le Robinson de douze ans (1818). Ernest Fouinet, Robinson des glaces (1835—Gallica); Hetzel (using a draft by Verne) wrote in MER (March 1865, 2, 375) about Adventures of Captain Hatteras: “[the last part] could have been called the Robinson des glaces”; however, Fouinet’s novel shows few similarities to Verne’s works. Catherine-Thérèse Rieder Woillez, Emma, ou Le Robinson des demoiselles (1834/5).
4. Published only in the first illustrated edition of Second Homeland (1900).
ABBREVIATIONS
| c | circa (about) |
| cf. | compare |
| ch. or chs | chapter(s) |
| Corr. | Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1863–1886): Tome I (1863–1874) |
| fo | folio(s) |
| MER | Le Magasin d’éducation et de récréation |
| MI | The Mysterious Island |
| MS1 | the first manuscript of MI |
| MS2 | the second manuscript of MI |
| “UR” | “Uncle Robinson” |
Note: except where indicated, all longitudes in the critical material refer to the Greenwich meridian. Given the power of search engines, references to the World Wide Web will generally simply be indicated as “WWW,” or “Gallica” for texts available at the French National Library (http://gallica.bnf.fr). All translations in the critical material of French works (other than MI) are my own.
I THE CASTAWAYS FROM THE SKY
CHAPTER I
“Are we rising again?”
“No! On the contrary! We’re going down!”
“Worse than that, Mr. Cyrus!1 We’re falling!”
“For God’s sake, throw out the ballast!”
“There! The last sack is empty!”
“Is the balloon going up now?”2
“No!”
“I hear the splashing of waves!”
“The sea is under the basket!”
“It can’t be more than five hundred feet below us!”
Then a powerful, booming voice cut through the air:
“Throw everything overboard! … Everything! We are in God’s hands!”
Those were the words that resounded in the sky over the vast watery desert of the Pacific about four o’clock in the evening of March 23, 1865.
No one can forget the terrible northeast storm that erupted during the equinox of that year. The barometer fell to 710 millimeters. It was a storm that lasted from March 18 to 26 with no letup. It ravaged America, Europe, and Asia over a broad zone of 1800 miles along a line intersecting the equator, from the 35th north parallel to the 40th south parallel. Towns were knocked flat, forests uprooted, and shores devastated by tidal waves. Weather bureaus counted hundreds of ships beached along the coast. Entire territories were leveled by the waterspouts which pulverized everything in their path. Several thousand people were crushed on land or swallowed up by the sea. Such were the marks of fury this horrific storm left in its wake. It surpassed the disasters which had so frightfully ravaged Havana and Guadeloupe, one on October 25, 1810 and the other on July 26, 1825.
At this very moment when so many catastrophes were occurring on land and sea, a drama no less gripping was taking place in the stormy skies.
A balloon, carried like a ball at the top of a waterspout, was traveling through space with a velocity of 90 miles per hour,* turning around as if it had been seized by an aerial whirlpool.
A basket swung back and forth below the balloon with five passengers inside, barely visible in the thick fog.
Where did this plaything of the terrible storm come from? From which point on the earth’s surface did it arise? Evidently it could not have lifted off during the storm which had already lasted for five days, the first symptoms having been felt on the 18th. In the last 24 hours alone, the balloon had traveled more than 2000 miles.
The passengers had no way of knowing where they were because there were no points of reference. It was a curious fact that they had not suffered from the storm’s violence. They were carried along, spinning round and round, without having any sense of this rotation or of their horizontal movement.3 Their eyes could not pierce the thick fog. Everything was obscured. They could not even say if it was day or night. No reflection of light, no noise, no bellowing of the ocean could reach them so long as they remained at higher altitudes.4 Their rapid descent alone alerted them to the dangers they faced.
Relieved of heavy objects such as munitions, arms, and provisions, the balloon now rose to a height of 4500 feet. Realizing that the dangers from above were less formidable than those from below, the passengers did not hesitate to throw overboard even the most useful objects as they tried to lose no more of this gas, the soul of their apparatus,
