Cussedness

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras by Jules Verne

There’s a passage towards the end of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, the first official Voyage Extraordinaire, that is so fantastic I really have to share it.  The captain and his few remaining crew members are making their final approach to the north pole through a terrible storm, in a tiny boat fashioned from the remains of a shipwreck…

Suddenly, a horrifying sight appeared before their eyes.

Less than sixty feet away an ice floe was oscillating on the stormy peaks of the waves; it descended and rose like the launch; it threatened them if it fell, for it had only to touch to crush them

But with this danger of being cast into the abyss, came another, no less terrible, for the ice flow was covered with polar bears, crushed against each other and mad with terror.

“Bears, bears!” cried Bell in a strangled voice.

And each saw, terrified, what he saw.

The ice floe was making alarming yaws; sometimes it leaned at such an acute angle that the animals rolled pell-mell into each other. Then they pushed and growled, partly covering the clamour of the storm as a formidable concert rose from this floating menagerie.

If this ice raft happened to turn over, the bears, rushing towards the boat, would inevitably try to climb aboard.

For fifteen minutes, a century, the launch and the ice floe sailed in tandem; now 120 feet apart, now about to collide; sometimes the floe hung over, and all the monsters had to do was drop down. (pp. 318-319)

Brilliant; you don’t get that in Jane Austen.  Other highlights include the fashioning of a bullet from frozen mercury, which is then used to procure vital food by shooting a polar bear with it, the destruction of a ship by a mutinous crew whilst their captain seeks emergency supplies to save their unworthy hides, and, naturally, this being Verne, a precipitous, spectacularly erupting volcano.

Hatteras himself is an archetypal Vernian hero, taciturn, steely, single-minded and driven to the point of madness by an overwhelming desire to measure himself against an arbitrary limit, in this case 90° north.  Also of note is Dr. Clawbonny, the optimistic and scientifically talented medical man, who serves as a sort of guardian of rationality in contrast to Hatteras’s visionary.  There are no female characters at all, as usual.

This is the earliest Verne I’ve read so far, being only the second or third thing he had published, but all the crucial ingredients are there to make an exemplary Voyage Extraordinaire.  The best bits are the sections dealing with life in the Arctic, and the extremes endured by those seeking the North-West passage or surveying the northernmost limits of the globe.  Verne took vast swathes of information directly from accounts by real-life explorers, so much of the novel has the ring of authenticity to it.

I read William Butcher’s translation, which is very enjoyable, and, assuming that his compendious notes and introduction are correct, which I’m sure they are, is also very accurate and scholarly.  He even includes a couple of significant differences between the manuscript and the published version, most notably the original ending, which I personally prefer.

5 comments • 2008-10-04 12:36 • Categories: Books, Reviews • Tags: Jules Verne, Novel, Voyages Extraordinaire