Jules Verne (1828-1905) became known posthumously as ‘the inventor of science fiction’. However, as the biographer William Butcher points out, the passions of the prolific French author were not restricted to a technological future for many of his stories are about the sea and desert islands. Influenced by Daniel Defoe, Johann Rudolf Wyss and other writers of ‘Robinsonnade’ fiction, Verne had a particular penchant for ‘castaway’ narratives. Becoming a castaway invariably implies a shipwreck. In fact, more than a dozen of Jules Verne’s published novels and stories involve a fictional instance of a ship coming to grief on some unforgiving shore. As much as he was the inventor of science fiction, Jules Verne was also arguably literature’s greatest of purveyor of ‘fantasme de naufrage’, or shipwreck fantasy. These pages describe some of the fictional vessels that met a fictional end in the author’s work, and explore the reasons for this recurring theme of maritime destruction in his oeuvre.
Jules Verne’s interest in the sea was inherent to his upbringing. Born in Nantes on 8th February 1828, he’d spent his formative years in what was until its eclipse by Saint-Nazaire in the 1860s the busiest port on the Loire River. Jules and his brother Paul had spent many hours boating on the river. Paul himself spent several years at sea professionally, including a stint with the French Navy during the Crimea War. One of Jules’ uncles was a naval supplies officer. Before his 12th birthday, Jules had evidently tried to stow away on a three-masted oceanic sailing ship, only to be retrieved by his father, a lawyer who was intent on Jules eventually taking over the family business. In later life, he made an Atlantic crossing aboard the SS Great Eastern and sailed his own yachts along the French coast, even getting as far as North Africa on one occasion and the Baltic on another. As Jean Jules Verne wrote in a 1973 biography of his grandfather (as translated by Roger Greaves):
‘Even though he visited few of the faraway places frequented by his [fictional] heroes, he was a sailor, well-versed in sailing and broken to the dangers of the treacherous seas between Boulogne and Bordeaux.’ (p.119)
Like many boys of his generation, Jules would have grown up captivated by the exploits of French navy explorers such as the Comte de Lapérouse and Jules Dumont d’Urville. Astrolabe and Boussole, the two ships belonging to the Count’s ambitious scientific expedition, had mysteriously disappeared around 1788, shortly after reaching Australia. Despite subsequent searches along his planned route by the French navy, no immediate trace had been found of the ships or men. In fact, it was only in the year of Jules’ birth that definitive proof was found that Lapérouse had been shipwrecked on the remote island of Vanikoro in the South Pacific, some of his men surviving as castaways for a year or more. The true facts of the expedition’s demise are still the subject of debate today. d’Urville’s circumnavigational voyage in the late 1830s, which involved an attempt to reach the magnetic South Pole, would also have sparked the interest of the young Nantais [1].
Polar exploration was to become one of Verne’s literary obsessions. This is not altogether surprising as his coming of age coincided with the first great age of polar exploration, including the voyages undertaken by British explorers James Ross and John Franklin. The Franklin expedition was one of the most perplexing maritime mysteries of the 19th century. Franklin’s ships, HMS Erebus and Terror had set out to find the fable Northwest Passage in 1845, disappearing soon afterwards during the Polar winter. A series of rescue missions were launched over the following decade, including that commanded by Sir Edward Belcher, who lost four of his own search vessels due to the polar ice. John Rae had finally determined the grim fate of John Franklin and his men in 1854; they had perished from hunger and exposure after being cast ashore on King William Island [2].
Even in Verne’s increasingly technological time, when steam began to supersede sail, disasters at sea were frighteningly commonplace. Even ocean-going liners were vulnerable as evinced by the loss of the transatlantic paddle-wheelers SS Arctic and SS Pacific in 1854 and 1856 respectively; the latter disappearing with all hands. As a student in Paris, Verne would no doubt have admired and mused on Théodore Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse (Raft of the Medusa) on display at the Louvre, a painting depicting the horrific aftermath of the grounding of the French naval frigate Méduse on the West African coast in 1816; surely the most famous depiction of a shipwreck in art. Although none of his own boats suffered such a violent fate, Verne the sailor was no stranger to navigating rocky shorelines and rough weather.
Jules Verne was hardly the first writer intrigued by shipwrecks. One of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, The Tempest, has one at its core, as does Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726. In addition to Defoe and Wyss, Verne was heavily influenced by the sea stories of Edgar Alan Poe, a man he described as a ‘magician poet’ and the ‘the greatest poet of the New World. The most well-known of these, MS Found in a Bottle (1833) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) contained elements that would figure in Verne’s stories – mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism and extreme latitudes – though without Poe’s patina of mysticism. Verne went further than these literary forerunners in providing greater detail about his wrecks; not just the names of the ships and the circumstances of their loss, but often giving precise coordinates to the wreck-sites.
Verne’s first fictional shipwreck is one recounted in the third person by a character in Martin Paz, a short story published in the magazine Musée des familles in 1851. Also known as The Pearl of Lima or The Indian Patriot, Martin Paz is a South American historical romance centering on an indigenous man battling racial and societal prejudice to be with the woman he loves. Sarah believes she is the daughter of a Jewish merchant named Samuel, but her father is really a Spanish nobleman, their separation having been the result of a shipwreck. Martin learns of this fact while eavesdropping on a conversation between Samuel and the ‘mestizo’ he hopes to marry her off to for a substantial dowry. Samuel relates how Sarah and her mother had departed Valparaíso aboard the ‘San José’ in order to join her father in Lima. Also among the passengers was Samuel. The ship had been struck by a hurricane and disabled on its way into Callao [1]. Frighted by the ‘furious waves’, Sarah’s mother refused to follow the other passengers into the lifeboat as the ship filled with water:
“The San José, having five feet of water in her hold, drifted on the rocks of the shore, where she broke to pieces. The young woman was thrown into the sea with her daughter: fortunately, for me,” said the Jew, with a gloomy smile, “I could seize the child and reach the shore with it.”
Martin Paz has not aged well as a story due to its crude racial stereotypes and the agency denied its female characters. Nevertheless, it marks Verne’s first published venture into the realm of shipwreck fantasy.
1855 saw Verne’s first attempt to incorporate his passion for polar exploration into a fictional tale in another story published in the Musée des familles. In A Winter Amid the Ice,a young sea captain is carried to the Arctic wastes after boarding a stricken Norwegian schooner during a North Atlantic maelstrom. A rescue mission undertaken by the man’s father and fiancée succeed in finding him alive on the northeast coast of Greenland; the schooner, named ‘Froöern’ having been crushed in the winter ice.
Despite the modest success of Martin Paz and A Winter amid the Ice, Jules was initially drawn to writing for the theatre, and the 1850s were largely spent in a fruitless search for literary recognition via the French stage. In addition, Jules had financial worries which pushed him into a marriage of convenience with a widow, and through her connections a somewhat grudging career in stockbroking. It wasn’t until 1862, when he secured the first of several increasingly lucrative contracts with the renowned publisher Jules Hetzel, that Verne could fully devote himself to writing of the kind he is now remembered for – his ‘Voyages extraordinaires’, a series of over 50 novels published between 1863 and his death in 1905, including what are now regarded as his most famous works.
[1] Ironically, d’Urville would die in a train wreck in the Parisian suburbs in 1842.
[2] The wrecks of the Erebus and Terror were only discovered in 2014 and 2016.
[3] Verne places this disaster near ‘Juan Fernandez’, presumably due to its association with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. However, the real Juan Fernandez Islands are located far to the south on a similar latitude to Valparaiso in Chile. A more apposite location for the wreck would have been the San Lorenzo Islands, which lie only a few miles outside Lima’s port.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 