Adventure classics -- Castaways’ peaceable kingdom

The Swiss Family Robinson

by Johan David Wyss

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Why has it taken this long for me to realize how much I love castaway narratives? There’s something incredibly satisfying in reading about human beings surviving on their brains and gut. And in the case of Swiss pastor Johan David Wyss’s version, The Swiss Family Robinson, surviving on their hearts.

Because family love and cooperation trump all in this beguiling tale based on the stories Wyss told to his children before gathering the narratives into book form in 1812. The love between father and children, and, uniquely for such narratives, husband and wife, mother and children shines through the now somewhat antiquated language of early translations. (Yes, there’s a feisty, shipwrecked mom in the story, who stands up to her husband when she disapproves of his ideas, dons sailor’s trousers when her skirts become a hindrance, is handy with a gun and able to cook anything from flamingo to kangaroo.)

Jules Verne admired Wyss and hoped to out-Robinson him with his own castaway tale, The Mysterious Island. To do that, he dropped his own crew of castaways from a balloon onto an island filled with almost as improbable a menagerie of beasts and botanicals as Wyss. But he couldn’t come near Wyss’s tale for sheer loveableness.

Both Verne and Wyss’s stories hark back to the grandfather of all castaway stories, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In fact, the Swiss family’s surname is never revealed. The “Robinson” in the title of Wyss’s book merely serves to link them to the original doughty castaway.

I’ve never understood why Defoe’s version is shelved among children’s books. The early eighteenth century text is full of Crusoe’s spiritual wrestling with the grimly Calvinistic version of Christianity Defoe subscribed to. Fast forward a hundred years and Wyss, although still deeply religious, preaches only gently to his family of rowdy kids. He’s as much a loving parent entertaining his children with wild adventure tales as he is a spiritual advisor.

The story begins a shipwreck. (Defoe’s tale began with a history of the entire Crusoe family, the likes of which Wyss mercifully spares us.) The family¾ father William, mother Elizabeth, and their four sons, Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Franz¾ are sailing through the South Pacific bent on settling in Australia. Abandoned by the crew of their foundering ship, they sustain their courage through prayer and, sensibly, a meal and preparation of makeshift life jackets.

Escaping onto a deserted island, they find the only survivors are themselves, the excellent hounds of the ship’s captain (Verne remembered this when adding a helpful dog to his story) and a host of livestock. But their ship was laden with an incredible array of necessities for their anticipated destination. As industrious as they are lucky, they soon have a multilevel treehouse any kid would envy, a series of improbable domesticated wild animals including a buffalo (which seems to be a bison miraculously transported from the northern to southern hemispheres), but no books. (Yay, school’s out for the duration!)

What is there to fear? Angry natives? No. Pirates? No. Volcanoes, hurricanes, sharks? No, no and no. The worst possibility, in fact, is that a well-meaning rescuer will arrive to take them away from their peaceable kingdom. Even the arrival of another castaway, this one a girl, can’t drive a wedge in their familial happiness.

If you want to read a castaway narrative to your kids, make it this one. Or just pretend it’s for your kids and read it for yourself. It’s widely available, including free downloads from Project Gutenberg,
www.gutenberg.org/.

(Next Wednesday, alas, there’s no peace at the river as Adventure classics continues a September of young heroes with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

Adventure classics -- The hero who returns from the depths

The Mysterious Island

by Jules Verne

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In last week’s post about the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania, submariners were the villains. This week, the most famous submarine captain of all is the hero. I’m talking about Captain Nemo, of course, Jules Verne’s most famous hero.

Nemo first made his appearance in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Published in 1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues purports to describe the adventures of a renegade sea captain and his futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, beginning with its first appearance in 1866. The story ended with the disappearance of the Nautilus and Nemo in a gigantic maelstrom.

In a manner similar to the later disappearance of fellow Victorian superhero, Sherlock Holmes, readers are left to assume Nemo has died. But Holmes conveniently left no corpse, allowing his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, freedom resurrect the detective.

In Verne’s case, the resurrection of popular hero Nemo occurred before he had even vanished. Blame the chronological craziness it on the serialization of novels in the late nineteenth century.

Verne opens The Mysterious Island with some of the most dramatic dialogue ever written: “Are we rising? No! Quite the reverse! We’re sinking! Worse than that, Mr. Cyrus! We’re falling!” and continues in similar fashion for half a page.

(If the dialogue in your version of The Mysterious Island doesn’t read this urgently, pick up Jordan Stump’s 2001 English translation for the Modern Library Edition, which moves the story at breakneck speed.)

The frantic characters are five escaped Union prisoners marooned in Richmond, Virginia, in March 1865, near the end of the Civil War. Not realizing the Confederacy will fall in
less than a month, the five -- engineer and U.S. Army veteran Cyrus Smith, his freed slave Neb; journalist Gideon Spillett, sailor Bonaventure Pencroft and his young ward Harbert, escape in a Confederate spy balloon, only to blown by a hurricane halfway around the globe, on the deserted South Pacific island they name Lincoln Island. (Translator Stump anglicizes some names while restoring others of Verne’s originals.)

Determined to write a story about castaways more ingenious than previous versions by Daniel Defoe or Johann Wyss, Verne set his American heroes adrift in a balloon. I can imagine his fiendish glee as he deprives the castaways of the usual wrecked ship to salvage for their everyday needs. By the time they crash on that South Pacific island, they have nothing but the clothes on their backs, their watches, a dog, and a single match. Which shortly goes out.

Desperate as their situation was, there was an unseen benefactor watching over them, a benefactor sensed but unseen until nearly the end of the book.

As his story spooled through the newspaper editions, did Verne toy with other possible benefactors before settling on Captain Nemo? Did his publisher or his reading public clamor for more about the enigmatic captain? At any rate, Verne reveals Nemo as the Americans’ unseen benefactor near the end of the book. Described as an elderly man who has been on the run for decades (although remember, he only made his first appearance in 1866, the year after the balloon castaways took flight), Nemo dies at last, sealed in the tomb of the sunken Nautilus.

Did Verne hope his readers had forgotten the chronology of Nemo’s earlier tale? Not to worry -- the ingenious story doesn’t suffer in the least from such discrepancies.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a September of young adventurers with Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson.)

Adventure classics -- A guide to the underworld

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

by Jules Verne

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How on earth -- or within it -- does an idea that hasn’t received serious scientific consideration for centuries have so much life? I mean, of course, the idea Jules Verne exploited so ably in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the notion of our planet as a hollow sphere nurturing a hidden inner life.

It’s an idea with almost embarrassingly fertile psychological connotations, deeply rooted in myths of the underworld. Ostensibly, Verne’s inspiration was his acquaintance with Charles Sainte-Claire Deville, explorer of the Italian island of Stromboli. But in Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction, biographer Peter Costello suggests an influence in Verne‘s own experience, a visit with a friend to Scotland’s Hebrides Islands with its volcanic Fingal’s Cave.

“. . . the waves break at the gigantic arch which forms the opening to the cave,” Verne would write in a later novel. “This frame, black as ebony, throws all the foreground features into full relief. Further out still, the horizon between sea and sky stretches out in all its splendor. . . What an enchanted palace this Fingal’s Cave is.”

It was to that enchanted palace of a cave, more than to the dark lava tunnels of volcanoes that Verne would return when in 1863, as Costello writes,  “(he) set out to explore a realm of pure imagination, a poetic elaboration of the prosaic facts of scientific geology.”

The story begins with the discovery by the learned Professor Hardwigg and his orphaned nephew Harry (to use the names of the novel’s English translation) of a mysterious medieval manuscript. Deciphered, the text declares the writer to have descended to the interior of the earth through a volcanic tunnel in Iceland. Faster than poor Harry can say holy Stromboli, the professor whisks him off to Iceland to explore the possibility for himself.

Despite the unlikely premise, Verne’s detailed settings (he would shortly become a member of the Geographical Society of Paris) and the humorous byplay between the single-minded professor, pragmatic Harry, and their coolly phlegmatic guide keep the pages flying past.

Soon lost in the maze of tunnels under the extinct Icelandic volcano, Harry tumbles down Verne’s version of an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, onto the shores of another world inside this world’s interior. Is this land, with its mushroom-like forests, strange central sea and prehistoric monsters the true center of the earth? Or does the center lie deeper still? The professors thinks so, but Verne declines comment.

I got dizzy trying to decide whether up should be down, but not dizzier than the explorers, who find themselves riding a passage back to the surface on the lava wave of erupting volcano. It spits them spits them out, not at their northern entry point, but on a fertile subtropical -- in fact, Stromboli.

(The island’s volcanoes have been active for most of recorded history.  Want to see videos of its 2012 eruption?  Check out www.youtube.com/.)

Unlikely though the prospect of an interior “lost world” now seems, Verne’s vision continues to inspire imitations well into the twenty-first century. Can we doubt that current interest in delving into the mysteries of the earth’s deepest places, even to the abyssal depths of the oceans, stems ultimately from Verne?

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics concludes a month of thrills and suspense with William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.)

Adventure classics -- Finding Nemo, captain, that is

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

by Jules Verne

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When I first read Jules Verne’s classic science fiction sea adventure, I was too young to realize that science fiction is usually about the future. So why did Verne set Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the past? The answer -- as with so many things (the U.S. debt ceiling debacle, anyone?) lies in politics.

The novel was published in 1870, although the narrator, French scientist Pierre Aronnax, begins by telling us of the remarkable appearance of a strange marine object, first sighted in 1866.

wikimedia commons

The earlier year makes sense when we realize that the mysterious Captain Nemo was originally intended to be a Polish nobleman revenging family members killed in retaliation for his part in the January Uprising of 1863 against Russia. Poland’s unhappy history provoked a lot of romanticized feeling among western Europeans as well as Americans in the nineteenth century. I’ve heard that Louisa May Alcott based the character of the hero Laurie in Little Women on a Pole she met during her travels in Europe.

But by the time Twenty Thousand Leagues appeared, France was allied with Russia. Vernes’ publisher persuaded him to make the unhappy captain an enemy of France’s old adversary, the British Empire, although Nemo’s supposed origins as descendent of a Muslim Indian ruler who resisted the British were not revealed until Twenty Thousand Leagues’ sequel, The Mysterious Island, published in 1874.

None of which detracts from the adventure of the book. Or of the kraken -- the giant squid who attack the submarine and whose existence was not documented at the time of the book’s publication.

Despite millennia of reports by seamen, giant squid were known to science only from occasional dead specimens until the twenty-first century. These deep sea dwellers generally were not able to withstand the enormous pressure changes of being brought to surface level. Dead specimens -- sometimes found in the stomachs of sperm whales that preyed on them -- were often in poor condition.

The first photographs of a live, mature giant squid was taken on January 15, 2002, on Goshiki beach in Japan. The captured animal died overnight. The first photographs of a live giant squid in its natural habitat were taken in September 2004 in a sperm whale hunting ground south of Tokyo. Although the animal broke free, later DNA tests confirmed it as a giant squid. Jules Verne, I think, would have been proud.

(Next Friday -- Adventure classics goes north -- with Jack London at his Nietzschean best in The Sea Wolf.)