The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
Verne’s The Mysterious Island is a cracking adventure story featuring a volcano, pirates, castaways and even some orang-utans. Set during the American Civil War, four Union soldiers and their dog find themselves stranded on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean, after a daring escape from a Confederate prison in a makeshift balloon, and a terrifying ride over thousands of miles carried in the teeth of possibly the fastest moving and largest storm in literature. Forced to fight for survival, the stranded soldiers start out with next to nothing, scattered across the island by their crash landing, but slowly gather resources and bootstrap their way up, determined to make their new home a self-sufficient colony of the USA.
Their technology progresses from barely meeting only their most basic needs with scavenged food, fire and shelter, through hunting, agriculture and construction, to shipbuilding, metallurgy and explosives, up to the point where the colonists are able to sail to an island over a hundred miles away, and to wage a war on some invading pirates. The parallel is with the arc of human technological development, the strivings of mankind to move forward embodied in the superhuman abilities of the leader of the colonists, Captain Harding, a self-sufficient hero similar to Nemo and Fogg. Verne may not have been a great admirer of progress and science in general, but he certainly appreciated the achievements of technology and its ability to elevate man far above the level of subsistence, and much of this novel is spent in detailing how the marooned soldiers manage to build complex and useful machines and systems from the raw materials available to them on the island. It is a readable tale, with a twist that should please any fan of Verne.
I can’t comment on the quality of the translation, and there is no information given regarding the translator, so as ever with Verne in English, caveat lector. I have read that there have been serious omissions in the English version(s) regarding the history and motivations of one of the key characters, but whether or not those changes are present in the Project Gutenberg version I am unable to say. The story is entertaining irrespective of the alterations, so prospective readers should not be put off by this.