The Adventures of Captain Hatteras begins in 1860 as the reader is caught up in elaborate and detailed preparations for an unknown journey that neither the commander nor the crew fully understands. Verne’s fiction was prized for both its fantasy and its nuts and bolts descriptions of natural and often invented phenomena. “Hatteras” was preceded by Verne’s first polar adventure book titled Wintering in the Ice (1855).
#80 days north pole series
The original manuscript was published in France as part of Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages series by Pierre-Jules Hetze, which included classics such as Around the World in 80 Days.
It’s no wonder that early science-fiction writers like Jules Verne (1828-1905), who came of age reading Arctic adventure reports, were inspired to create works of popular fiction based on the grisly details of early polar exploration.Ī recent translation by William Butcher of Jules Verne’s second novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866), recounts a fictitious voyage to the top of the world complete with disloyal crew, an ice-bound ship, human tragedy, and short supplies. Drifts of ice and snow choked the ravines and hollows but, saving ourselves and the famished, skeleton-like survivors, not a living thing appeared on the whitened landscape. The raging of the wind and the pitiless sea, and the roar of the black water of the bay dashing over the ice-foot, made the lonesome picture look colder and more appalling. Melville, : “A cold, barren plateau, between a small outlying promontory and a bleak weather-riven rock of red syenite reaching to the skies, on which even the mosses and lichens would scarce grow.
Perhaps no better picture of terrors of the arctic and its stabbing cold can be found than that which is given by Mr.
The 1909 New York Times overview reported “a series of Arctic tragedies” as one adventurer after another set off to find fellow explorers lost in the arctic regions, and to discover uncharted waters along the way, often at great personal sacrifice: The article suggests that the reason for more polar exploration to the north rather than to the South Pole was due to the proximity of northern routes to European and North American ports, coupled with commercial companies’ interest in finding a northwest passage through the Arctic to establish a direct route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
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