“Are we going up again?

No. On the contrary; we are going down!

Worse than that, Mr. Smith, we are falling!” (Beginning of the novel)

During the Civil War, four Americans and a dog escape from a Southern Confederate prison by hijacking an observation balloon. After flying days through a storm, they finally land on an island that is, it turns out on closer inspection, quite mysterious. The flora and fauna are an exotic mix of species from every continent, natural ressources and materials are plentiful and Divine Providence watches over our survivors at every turn. The island seems to be “created especially for people to be shipwrecked on” says one character. Published in 1875.

“In about 1871, Verne had apparently received lots of letters from women across the globe, begging him to reveal the identity of Nemo, left a mystery at the end of Twenty Thousand Leagues.” Verne thought he’d bring back Captain Nemo for a coda.

In the Introduction to his unedited unabridged translation (2001), Sidney Kravitz writes that Jules Verne had a different ending in mind:

Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne‘s publisher changed the ending of Mysterious Island. Hetzel, who famously advised Jules Verne that there was no future in science-fiction, insisted on countless changes. For example, he desperately wanted a native islander character. “I need a savage” he wrote. Jules Verne refused but he couldn’t help the ludicrous ending to the career of Captain Nemo that Hetzel contrived. In the Hetzel version, Nemo dies saying, “God and Country“, very much out of character for a lifelong misanthropic anarchist. In the original manuscript by Verne, Nemo’s last word was “Independence”, meaning freedom (from others).

In the published version, but not in the manuscripts, we read of a deathbed remorse by Nemo and a pompous and presumptuous assessment by Smith of his life as an “error.” In the book, Nemo gives the settlers Hetzel’s jewelry, whereas in the manuscript they get the giant pearl he had so carefully nurtured in Twenty Thousand Leagues. In Verne’s original idea, the destruction of the Island is the end of the novel; in the “Hetzelized” version, the settlers have to start again in Iowa. The captain’s dying words, the absurd “God and my country!” were brutally, criminally, imposed by Hetzel. The manuscript read simply “Independence!” Sidney Kravitz

Where is the Mysterious Island? Verne is not entirely consistant throughout the novel, even switching Meridians at one point. He also uses Tabor Island as a neighbor of Mysterious Island but gets the location wrong somehow. Tabor is also known as Maria Theresa Reef or Ernest Legouve Reef. Believed to exist for centuries, the New-Zealand Navy finally proved Tabor‘s inexistence in the 1970s. Or, perhaps, things really happened like they did in the book, as coordinates in the novel sit on top of an ocean ridge where an island could have existed once.

The approximate location of Mysterious Island is 34°57′S 150°30′W, nowhere in the middle of nowhere.

My favorite film version was directed in 1961 by Cy Endfield.

Fair use.wikipedia.org