Part 1

Jules Verne

THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

(1875)

Table of Contents

PART 1 THE CASTAWAYS OF THE AIR

CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII

PART 2 THE ABANDONED

CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX PART 3 THE SECRET OF THE ISLAND CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX

PART 1

THE CASTAWAYS OF THE AIR

CHAPTER I

“Are we rising?

-- No! On the contrary! We are descending!

-- Worse than that, Mr. Cyrus! We are falling!

-- For God's sake! Throw out the ballast!

-- There goes the last sack emptied!

-- Is the balloon righting itself?

-- No!

-- I hear a sort of lapping of waves!

-- The sea is under the car!

-- It cannot be more than five hundred feet below us!”

Then a powerful voice rent the air, and these words rang out:

“Overboard with everything that weighs!... everything! and trust in God!”

Such were the words that burst forth in the air, above that vast watery desert of the Pacific, toward four o’clock in the afternoon, on the 23rd of March, 1865.

No one has, doubtless, forgotten the terrible northeast gale which broke loose at the equinox of that year, and during which the barometer fell to seven hundred and ten millimeters. It was a hurricane, without intermission, which lasted from the 18th to the 26th of March. The ravages it produced were immense in America, in Europe, in Asia, over a zone eighteen hundred miles wide, which stretched obliquely across the equator, from the thirty-fifth parallel north to the fortieth parallel south!

Cities overthrown, forests uprooted, shores devastated by mountains of water that rushed in like tidal waves, ships cast upon the coast, which the records of the Bureau-Veritas numbered by hundreds, entire territories leveled by waterspouts that crushed everything in their path, several thousand persons crushed on land or swallowed up in the sea: such were the testimonies of its fury, left behind by that formidable hurricane. It surpassed in disasters those which so terribly ravaged Havana and Guadeloupe, the one on the 25th of October, 1810, the other on the 26th of July, 1825.

Now, at the very moment when so many catastrophes were being accomplished on land and sea, a drama, no less striking, was being enacted in the troubled air. In fact, a balloon, borne like a ball to the top of a waterspout, and caught in the rotary movement of the column of air, was traversing space with a speed of ninety miles an hour, turning upon itself, as if seized by some aerial maelstrom. Beneath the lower appendage of this balloon swung a car, which contained five passengers, barely visible amid those thick vapors, mingled with pulverized water, that trailed down to the surface of the Ocean.

Whence came this aerostat, a veritable plaything of the frightful tempest? From what point of the world had it launched forth? It had evidently not been able to start during the hurricane. Now, the hurricane had already lasted five days, and its first symptoms had manifested themselves on the 18th. It would therefore have been fair to believe that this balloon came from very far, for it could not have crossed less than two thousand miles in twenty-four hours; in any case, the passengers could have had at their disposal no means of estimating the route traversed since their departure, for all points of reference were lacking to them. There must even have occurred this curious fact, that, carried away amid the violences of the tempest, they did not suffer from them. They moved, they turned upon themselves without feeling anything of this rotation, nor of their horizontal displacement. Their eyes could not pierce the thick fog which piled up beneath the car. Around them, all was mist. So great even was the opacity of the clouds, that they could not have said whether it was day or night. No reflection of light, no noise of inhabited lands, no roaring of the Ocean could have reached them in that obscure immensity, as long as they held themselves in the upper zones. Only their rapid descent could have given them knowledge of the dangers they ran above the waves.

However, the balloon, lightened of heavy objects, such as ammunition, weapons, provisions, had righted itself in the upper layers of the atmosphere, at a height of four thousand five hundred feet. The passengers, after having recognized that the sea was beneath the car, finding the dangers less dreadful above than below, had not hesitated to throw overboard even the most useful objects, and they sought to lose nothing more of that fluid, of that soul of their apparatus, which sustained them above the abyss.

The night passed amid anxieties which would have been fatal to less energetic souls. Then day reappeared, and, with day, the hurricane marked a tendency to moderate. At the beginning of that day, the 24th of March, there were some symptoms of calming. At dawn, the clouds, more vesicular, had risen into the heights of the sky. In a few hours, the waterspout widened and broke. The wind, passing from the state of hurricane to that of “strong breeze,” that is to say, the speed of translation of the atmospheric layers was diminished by half. It was still what sailors call “a three-reef breeze,” but the improvement in the trouble of the elements was none the less considerable.

Toward eleven o’clock, the lower part of the air had sensibly cleared. The atmosphere gave forth that humid limpidity which is seen, which is even felt, after the passage of great meteors. It did not seem that the hurricane had gone further west. It appeared to have spent itself. Perhaps it had flowed away in electric sheets, after the breaking of the waterspout, as sometimes happens to the typhoons of the Indian Ocean.

But, toward that hour also, it might have been noted anew, that the balloon was slowly lowering, by a continuous movement, into the lower layers of the air. It even seemed that it was gradually deflating, and that its envelope was lengthening as it distended, passing from the spherical form to the ovoid form.

Toward noon, the aerostat no longer hovered at a height of more than two thousand feet above the sea. It measured fifty thousand cubic feet, and, thanks to its capacity, it had evidently been able to maintain itself long in the air, whether it had reached great altitudes, or whether it had moved in a horizontal direction. At this moment, the passengers threw out the last objects which still weighed them down, the car, the few provisions they had kept, everything, even to the small utensils that filled their pockets, and one of them, having hoisted himself onto the ring to which the cords of the net were gathered, sought to fasten securely the lower appendage of the aerostat.

It was evident that the passengers could no longer maintain the balloon in the elevated zones, and that the gas was failing them!

They were therefore lost! in fact, it was neither a continent, nor even an island, that spread beneath them. Space offered not a single point of landing, not a solid surface on which their anchor might bite.

It was the immense sea, whose billows still clashed with an incomparable violence! It was the Ocean without visible limits, even for them, who dominated it from on high and whose glances then extended over a radius of forty miles! It was that liquid plain, beaten without mercy, whipped by the hurricane, which must have appeared to them like a galloping of disheveled waves, over which was flung a vast network of white crests! Not a land in sight, not a ship!

It was necessary, at any cost, to arrest the descending movement, to prevent the aerostat from engulfing itself amid the billows. And it was evidently to this urgent operation that the passengers of the car were applying themselves. But, despite their efforts, the balloon kept lowering, at the same time that it moved with extreme speed, following the direction of the wind, that is to say, from northeast to southwest.

Terrible situation, that of those unfortunates! They were no longer masters of the aerostat. Their attempts could not succeed. The envelope of the balloon was more and more deflating. The fluid escaped without it being in any way possible to retain it. The descent was visibly accelerating, and, an hour after noon, the car was suspended no more than six hundred feet above the Ocean.

This was because, in fact, it was impossible to prevent the escape of the gas, which was freely issuing from a tear in the apparatus. By lightening the car of all the objects it contained, the passengers had been able to prolong, for some hours, their suspension in the air.

But the inevitable catastrophe could only be delayed, and, if some land did not appear before night, passengers, car and balloon would have definitively disappeared in the waves.

The only maneuver that remained to be done was done at this moment. The passengers of the aerostat were evidently energetic people, and who knew how to look death in the face. Not a single murmur would have been heard escaping their lips.

They were decided to struggle to the last second, to do all to delay their fall. The car was but a sort of wicker chest, unfit to float, and there was no possibility of maintaining it at the surface of the sea, if it fell there.

At two o’clock, the aerostat was scarcely four hundred feet above the billows. At this moment, a manly voice — the voice of a man whose heart was inaccessible to fear — made itself heard. To this voice replied no less energetic voices.

“Is everything thrown out?

-- No! There is still ten thousand francs in gold!”

A heavy sack fell immediately into the sea.

“Is the balloon righting itself?

-- A little, but it will not be long before it falls again!

-- What remains to be thrown out?

-- Nothing!

-- Yes!... The car!

-- Let us cling to the net! and overboard the car with the sea!”

It was, in fact, the only and last means of lightening the aerostat. The cords which attached the car to the ring were cut, and the aerostat, after its fall, rose two thousand feet.

The five passengers had hoisted themselves into the net, above the ring, and held themselves in the mesh, looking at the abyss.

It is known with what static sensitivity aerostats are endowed. It suffices to throw the lightest object to provoke a displacement in the vertical sense. The apparatus, floating in the air, behaves like a balance of mathematical exactness. It is understood then, that, when it is lightened of a relatively considerable weight, its displacement is important and sudden. This is what happened on this occasion.

But, after having for an instant equilibrated itself in the upper zones, the aerostat began to redescend.

The gas was fleeing by the tear, which it was impossible to repair.

The passengers had done all that they could do. No human means could save them henceforth. They had no longer to count but on the help of God.

At four o’clock, the balloon was no more than five hundred feet from the surface of the waters. A sonorous barking was heard. A dog accompanied the passengers and held clinging near his master in the meshes of the net.

“Top has seen something!” cried one of the passengers.

Then, immediately, a strong voice made itself heard:

“Land! land!”

The balloon, which the wind never ceased to carry toward the southwest, had, since dawn, crossed a considerable distance, which numbered by hundreds of miles, and a rather elevated land had, in fact, just appeared in that direction.

But this land was still thirty miles to leeward. No less than a great hour was needed to reach it, and still on condition of not drifting. An hour! Would not the balloon, before then, be emptied of all that it had kept of its fluid?

Such was the terrible question! The passengers saw distinctly that solid point, which must be reached at any cost. They ignored what it was, island or continent, for they scarcely knew toward what part of the world the hurricane had carried them! But this land, whether it were inhabited or not, whether it should be hospitable or not, must be reached!

Now, at four o’clock, it was visible that the balloon could no longer sustain itself.

CHAPTER II

It was grazing the surface of the sea. Already the crest of the enormous waves had several times licked the bottom of the net, still further weighing it down, and the aerostat no longer raised itself but halfway, like a bird that has lead in its wing. Half an hour later, the land was no more than a mile away, but the balloon, exhausted, flaccid, distended, crumpled in great folds, no longer conserved gas but in its upper part. The passengers, clinging to the net, still weighed too heavily for it, and soon, half plunged in the sea, they were beaten by the furious waves. The envelope of the aerostat then made a pocket, and the wind, engulphing itself there, pushed it like a ship before the wind.

Perhaps it would thus reach the coast!

Now, it was but two cable-lengths from it, when terrible cries, issuing from four chests at once, rang out. The balloon, which seemed no longer able to rise again, had just made yet an unexpected bound, after having been struck by a formidable breaker. As if it had been suddenly lightened of a new part of its weight, it remounted to a height of fifteen hundred feet, and there it met a sort of eddy of the wind, which, instead of carrying it directly to the coast, made it follow an almost parallel direction. Finally, two minutes later, it approached obliquely, and it fell definitively on the sand of the shore, out of reach of the waves.

The passengers, aiding one another, managed to disengage themselves from the meshes of the net. The balloon, lightened of their weight, was taken again by the wind, and like a wounded bird which finds an instant of life again, it disappeared in space.

The car had contained five passengers, plus a dog, and the balloon cast but four onto the shore.

The missing passenger had evidently been carried off by the breaker which had just struck the net, and this is what had permitted the lightened aerostat, to rise one last time, then, a few instants after, to reach the land.

Scarcely had the four castaways — one may give them this name — set foot on the soil, than all, thinking of the absent one, cried: “He is perhaps trying to reach land by swimming! Let us save him! let us save him!”

These were neither professional aeronauts, nor amateurs of aerial expeditions, that the hurricane had just cast upon this coast. They were prisoners of war, whom their boldness had pushed to flee in extraordinary circumstances.

A hundred times, they should have perished! A hundred times, their torn balloon should have precipitated them into the abyss! But heaven reserved them for a strange destiny, and on the 20th of March, after having fled Richmond, besieged by the troops of General Ulysses Grant, they found themselves seven thousand miles from that capital of Virginia, the principal stronghold of the secessionists, during the terrible war of Secession. Their aerial navigation had lasted five days.

Here, besides, are the curious circumstances in which the escape of the prisoners had been produced — an escape which was to end in the catastrophe known.

This very year, in the month of February 1865, in one of those bold strokes which General Grant attempted, but in vain, to seize Richmond, several of his officers fell into the power of the enemy and were interned in the city. One of the most distinguished of those taken belonged to the federal staff, and was named Cyrus Smith.

Cyrus Smith, native of Massachusetts, was an engineer, a scientist of the first order, to whom the government of the Union had confided, during the war, the direction of the railroads, whose strategic role was so considerable. A true American of the north, lean, bony, lanky, aged about forty-five years, he was already grizzled in his close-cropped hair and in his beard, of which he kept only a thick mustache. He had one of those beautiful “numismatic” heads, which seem made to be struck in medals, with ardent eyes, a serious mouth, the physiognomy of a scientist of the militant school. He was one of those engineers who wished to begin by handling the hammer and the pick, like those generals who wished to begin as simple soldiers. Also, at the same time as the ingenuity of mind, he possessed the supreme skill of hand. His muscles presented remarkable symptoms of tonicity. Truly a man of action at the same time as a man of thought, he acted without effort, under the influence of a large vital expansion, having that vivacious persistence which defies all ill fortune.

Very learned, very practical, very “resourceful,” to employ a word of the French military tongue, he was a superb temperament, for, while remaining master of himself, whatever the circumstances, he fulfilled in the highest degree these three conditions whose ensemble determines human energy: activity of mind and body, impetuosity of desires, power of will. And his motto might have been that of William of Orange in the seventeenth century: “I have no need to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.” At the same time, Cyrus Smith was courage personified. He had been in all the battles during that war of Secession. After having begun under Ulysses Grant in the volunteers of Illinois, he had fought at Paducah, at Belmont, at Pittsburg-Landing, at the siege of Corinth, at Port-Gibson, at the Black River, at Chattanooga, at the Wilderness, on the Potomac, everywhere and valiantly, as a soldier worthy of the general who answered: “I never count my dead!” And, a hundred times, Cyrus Smith should have been among those whom the terrible Grant did not count, but in those combats, where he spared himself little, chance always favored him, until the moment when he was wounded and taken on the battlefield of Richmond. At the same time as Cyrus Smith, and the same day, another important personage fell into the power of the southerners. This was none other than the honorable Gideon Spilett, “reporter” of the New-York Herald, who had been charged with following the vicissitudes of the war amid the armies of the North.

Gideon Spilett was of the race of those astonishing English or American chroniclers, of the Stanleys and others, who recoil before nothing to obtain exact information and to transmit it to their journal in the briefest delays. The journals of the Union, such as the New-York Herald, form veritable powers, and their delegates are representatives with whom one reckons. Gideon Spilett ranked in the first rank of these delegates.

A man of great merit, energetic, prompt and ready for all, full of ideas, having run the whole world, soldier and artist, boiling in counsel, resolute in action, counting neither pains, nor fatigues, nor dangers, when it was a question of knowing all, for himself first, and for his journal afterward, a veritable hero of curiosity, of information, of the unpublished, of the unknown, of the impossible, he was one of those intrepid observers who write under the bullets, “chronicle” under the shells, and for whom all perils are good fortunes.

He too had been in all the battles, in the front rank, revolver in one hand, notebook in the other, and the grapeshot did not make his pencil tremble.

He did not fatigue the telegraph wires with incessant messages, like those who speak when they have nothing to say, but each of his notes, short, neat, clear, threw light on an important point. Besides, “humor” was not lacking to him. It was he who, after the affair of the Black River, wishing at any cost to keep his place at the window of the telegraph office, in order to announce to his journal the result of the battle, telegraphed for two hours the first chapters of the Bible. It cost the New-York Herald two thousand dollars, but the New-York Herald was the first informed.

Gideon Spilett was of tall stature. He was at most forty years old. Blond whiskers tending to red framed his face. His eye was calm, lively, rapid in its movements. It was the eye of a man accustomed to perceive quickly all the details of a horizon. Solidly built, he had tempered himself in all climates like a bar of steel in cold water. For ten years, Gideon Spilett had been the regular reporter of the New-York Herald, which he enriched with his chronicles and his drawings, for he handled the pencil as well as the pen.

When he was taken, he was in the midst of making the description and the sketch of the battle. The last words noted in his notebook were these: “A southerner aims at me and...” And Gideon Spilett was missed, for, following his invariable habit, he got out of this affair without a scratch.

Cyrus Smith and Gideon Spilett, who did not know each other, save by reputation, had both been transported to Richmond.

The engineer rapidly recovered from his wound, and it was during his convalescence that he made the acquaintance of the reporter. These two men pleased each other and learned to appreciate one another. Soon, their common life had but one aim, to flee, rejoin Grant’s army and fight again in its ranks for the federal unity.

The two Americans were therefore decided to profit by any occasion; but although they had been left free in the city, Richmond was so severely guarded, that an escape must be regarded as impossible. In the meantime, Cyrus Smith was rejoined by a servant, who was devoted to him unto life, unto death.

This intrepid one was a negro, born on the engineer’s estate, of a slave father and mother, but whom, for a long time, Cyrus Smith, an abolitionist of reason and of heart, had freed. The slave, become free, had not wished to leave his master.

He loved him unto death for him. He was a lad of thirty years, vigorous, agile, clever, intelligent, gentle and calm, sometimes naive, always smiling, helpful and good. He was named Nebuchadnezzar, but he answered only to the abbreviated and familiar appellation of Nab.

When Nab learned that his master had been made prisoner, he left Massachusetts without hesitation, arrived before Richmond, and, by force of ruse and address, after having risked his life twenty times, he managed to penetrate into the besieged city. What were the pleasure of Cyrus Smith, on seeing again his servant, and the joy of Nab at finding his master, this cannot be expressed.

But if Nab had been able to penetrate into Richmond, it was quite otherwise difficult to get out, for the federal prisoners were very closely watched.

An extraordinary occasion was needed to be able to attempt an escape with some chance of success, and this occasion not only did not present itself, but it was hard to bring it about.

However, Grant continued his energetic operations. The victory of Petersburg had been very dearly disputed to him. His forces, united to those of Butler, obtained yet no result before Richmond, and nothing foretold that the deliverance of the prisoners was to be near. The reporter, to whom his fastidious captivity no longer furnished a single interesting detail to note, could no longer hold out. He had but one idea: to get out of Richmond and at any cost. Several times, even, he attempted the adventure and was stopped by insurmountable obstacles.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”