soon to follow. For instance Journey to the Center of the Earth has its own threesome, except in this case the scientist is the comic figure, his nephew is the skeptical opposition, and the servant is essentially a mute role. Among further variants, two very different scientists supply the brainpower in Twenty Thousand Leagues, while The Mysterious Island (1874) spreads the three roles over a sizable cast complete with understudies (e.g., Pencroff hands off to Joop). In short, there are endless combinations and permutations, and Verne’s stories seem alert to them all. As for the oddity of Kennedy’s short-lived antagonism in Five Weeks, it too reappears: Captain Nicholl badmouths the scheme to go From the Earth to the Moon, then happily signs on in time for blastoff.
Yet, despite its normally lighthearted tone, Verne’s first novel does darken on occasion, although rarely in the vein of “A Journey by Balloon.” Significantly, the most intense of these moments frame the book’s halfway point: Chapter 20 unfolds a stomach-turning combat between two cannibal tribes; then come the events in chapters 21–23, less bloodcurdling but exceptionally somber for Verne as his heroes try to rescue a young missionary. In fact Verne repeatedly grieves the loss of European lives in Africa: Fergusson’s blunt description (chapter 13) of a typical “surface journey” is troubling to read, and even Joe (chapter 35) finds the exploring efforts of Europeans “senseless and even sad.” Still later, when his employer details the blood-spattered history of African exploration (chapter 38), the doctor’s tagline takes the form of a despairing elegy: “This country … has witnessed the noblest kinds of dedication, for which, all too often, death has been the reward.”
At times Fergusson seems to function as Verne’s spokesperson, certainly he’s our handy source for the information and insights that punctuate the action. Such educational nuggets are also standard ingredients in Verne, including full-scale lectures as in the just-mentioned chapter 38. Fergusson is no less diligent with the hard sciences, devoting all of chapters 7 and 10 to his balloon’s inventive design. Finally, as a change of pace, Verne even has Joe deliver a mock lecture—in chapter 9 the servant delivers a bogus description of the cosmos, discoursing “about Neptune where seamen get a hearty welcome, and Mars where soldiers hog the sidewalks.”
And finally Five Weeks contains pinches of the Vernian ingredient known to most: futuristic speculation. In chapter 16 Fergusson envisions a pattern of mass migrations with Africa emerging as “the center of the civilized world.” We’re not there yet, but another piece of speculation came to pass pretty quickly: in chapter 18 Fergusson and Co. pinpoint the Nile’s source, and it’s much as Henry Stanley confirmed it during the next decade. Prophetic also are the novel’s new ballooning technologies: as Verne’s grandson wrote a century later, “No satisfactory solution had yet been found for steering a balloon” (Jules-Verne, 57). His grandfather’s scheme entails a hydrogen balloon, a double envelope, and a pioneering version of today’s burner. Fergusson’s vehicle rises and descends in order to find air currents heading in the desired direction. In the past this was accomplished only by dropping ballast or expelling gas—but after a while the balloon would run out of both and the journey inevitably grind to a halt. Fergusson’s contribution is a heating system whereby the balloon “would rise to the appropriate altitude when the pilot heated water” (Lottman, xi). Warming up, the hydrogen expands and the balloon will climb; cooling off, the hydrogen contracts and the balloon will descend.
Critics Corner
It sounds simple and it is. Furthermore, Verne has been applauded by some commentators for coming up with an authentic innovation. The mechanism just described seems “to have been an invention of Verne himself,” Costello writes (75), and Walter James Miller agrees that the Frenchman had “invented a new and plausible kind of balloon control” (xv). Even three decades later, Verne scholar Jean-Marc Deschamps concurs: “No balloon in Jules Verne’s time had been equipped with such an ingenious arrangement” (15).
Yet Verne’s contraption makes Deschamps jittery: he labels it “a flying bomb,” marveling that it “never exploded despite the dangers lurking on every page” (15). Butcher likewise calls it a “frightening combination” (147), and naturally enough Verne’s device sounds dubious today: hydrogen has long had a shady reputation, ever since taking the fall for the 1937 Hindenburg tragedy. But Verne’s explanations were probably convincing in his own era when hydrogen was king—certainly Nadar was persuaded (Jules-Verne, 56). These days helium and propane often replace it, although it may be coming back in vogue: some space scientists now blame the Hindenburg fire on other causes, “as hydrogen produces none of the spectacular flames that consumed the airship” (David Owen, 63). In any case Verne’s concept still operates in the burners used by today’s hot-air balloonists: the purpose is still to climb and descend in search of favorable currents.
Other criticisms haven’t always been well founded. Costello worries that Verne “does not seem to have considered how dangerous it would be if any oxygen leaked into the system” (75). And yet Verne repeatedly emphasizes (chapters 10, 12, 19, and 42) that the balloon’s throat is hermetically sealed; further, when Fergusson finally resorts to oxygen for lift (chapter 43), the text explicitly tells us that “he took care beforehand to expel any remaining hydrogen through the valve.”
Jacques Noiray has different doubts: he wonders if Verne’s device is truly original, finding it “oddly similar” (45–46) to a so-called secret method used in an 1857 balloon flight to Algiers by the artist Paul Gavarni. I can find no official confirmation that the trip genuinely took place, but in any case it couldn’t have had much in common with Verne’s novel: Gavarni’s vehicle boasted a propeller, two side-by-side balloons, and the usual release of gas in order to descend. The undisclosed method is alleged to have replaced the lost hydrogen—which makes it an entirely different animal from Verne’s heating system.
As indicated, Verne’s candidate for the Nile’s source has sometimes been called prophetic: he opted for a stream flowing north from Lake Victoria (rather than Lake Tanganyika, as Burton argued). It was a prophecy “fulfilled in a matter of months when John Henning Speke returned from Africa to announce he had discovered the source of the Nile. But Verne’s hero … had already made exactly the same discovery” (Miller, xv). The hard facts leave no wiggle room: Five Weeks in a Balloon rolled off the presses on January 31, 1863; Speke’s famous telegram (“The Nile is settled.”) reached London on May 6, 1863, appearing in the Times on the following day (Benjamin Disraeli, 275).
Given this chronology, it seems bizarre of Martin to disparage Five Weeks by claiming that Speke had found the Nile’s source in 1858, long before the novel and that it was “something which has already been discovered” (35–36). Few agreed back then and few would agree now: as Fernández-Armesto reminds us, Speke “had seen only the southern shore of the lake and had not established how big it was or even whether it was a single body of water” (352). In fact
