In Search of In Search of the Castaways

One primary goal of my Third Decade Reading Plan (these plans have played such prominent roles in the last twenty-eight years of my life, I can’t help thinking of them as capitalized) was and is to put away heady, adult things like German philosophy and to replace those parts of the plan with adventure novels that would help me relive my avid adolescent reading experiences. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne all lie in the bull’s-eye of that target.

Most of the books by Verne on my current ten-year list I had already read by checking them out from Florissant Valley Public Library in the 1970s, but I had never read The Children of Captain Grant until the first two weeks of this year. And yet this book did more to revive my teenage enthusiasm than any book has for years. The whole story of finding a mysterious, mostly dissolved note in a bottle, following the southern 37th parallel around the entire globe in search of Captain Harry Grant, picking up an eccentric scientist by accident (can't we call nineteenth-century fictional geographers scientists?), and taking along the kids on a dangerous adventure, was just right. This book felt even more like the beloved Verne of my memories than Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea did, and that was a book I actually read before and remembered.

The first third, in which the party crosses the Andes and Patagonia, was the most appealing to my inner twelve-year-old with its blizzards and earthquakes and landslides and rescues by condor. (!) The second third, which involves the crossing of Victoria, Australia, had more geographical description than adventure, although the party’s lives lay in grave danger for a chapter or two near the end. All the fun returned, though, in the final third, which saw the party captured by cannibals in New Zealand.

OK, I’ll deal with this briefly. Although the narrative presentation of the Maori felt at times  uncomfortably racially disrespectful, Verne clearly, explicitly tried to treat these people in a Christian way that afforded them dignity. When he has to lay such foundations as correcting some of his characters in their belief that the native New Zealanders aren’t even human, we can’t expect him to be as progressive as a woke, twenty-first-century college student. And I always try to remember that our descendants will find the literature of today annoyingly hidebound in our own unexamined prejudices. Verne tried, and I give him credit for that. But I could understand it if a Maori found the book offensive.

I first wrote down the title In Search of the Castaways on my Plan for this year. But just before year 1 started, when I was trying to find a good translation of Off on a Comet, I discovered two important and amazing facts. (1) In Search of the Castaways was originally known as The Children of Captain Grant. (2) Most translations of Verne, including all the ones I had borrowed from Florissant Valley Public Library, were abridged. I searched last year for a good translation of this book for almost as long as Captain Grant’s children searched for their father. I even wrote to an author who, I learned, had finished a translation and was looking for a publisher. (He understandably didn’t want to share his work with me.) I ended up reading a translation freely available online, the work of D. A. Sample. Sample doesn’t know French well and used Google Translate to get started on the passages that had been left out of most English versions. But, with some scattered yet notable grammatical mistakes and typos, the translation is actually quite good. And in the online medium, Sample was able to format clearly by color the restored passages. It’s amazing what kinds of things earlier translators left out! The most astonishing was a beautiful description of the constellations and nebulas visible from the southern hemisphere. Who wouldn’t want to read that? I have less patience with these literary butchers than I have with Verne in his flawed but good-hearted treatment of the Maori.