The Mysterious Island

Several months ago, a friend of mine read The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, and highly recommended it. I've read a few other books by Verne and enjoyed them, so I thought that I'd give this one a try. It's the story of five men, on the Union side in a town being occupied by Confederate forces, that escape by hot air balloon. Unfortunately, they are blown off course by a huge storm and end up being stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere. The bulk of the book tells their tale of life on the island. In many ways, it reminded me of Swiss Family Robinson, which I read many, many times as a child- I guess that survival on a deserted island is similar, regardless of when and where you are.

The thing that I thought rather comical is that anytime someone in books is stranded on an island, there is at least one person in the group who has the background to identify eatable plants/ build machines/ perform surgery... in spite of the adverse conditions. Within a month of being stranded on the mysterious island, the stranded men were smelting ore and distilling various plant extracts to make nitroglycerine... very Gilligan's Island.

At times, Verne tends to wax prosaic with the natural history passages.

"Eucalypti!" cried Herbert.

They were, in fact, those splendid trees, the giants of the extra tropical zone, the congeners of the Australian and New Zealand eucalyptus, both situated under the same latitude as Lincoln Island... Nothing is more wonderful or more singular than those enormous specimens of the order of the myrtaceae, with their leaves placed vertically and not horizontally, so that an edge and not a surface looks upwards, the effect being that the sun's rays penetrate more freely among the trees.

... The eucalyptus belongs to a family which comprises many useful members; the guava-tree, from whose fruit guava jelly is made; the clove=tree, which produces the spice; the pomegranate-tree, which bears pomegranates; the Eugeacia Cauliflora, the fruit of which is used in making a tolerable wine; the Ugui myrtle, which contains an excellent alcoholic liquor; the Caryophyllus myrtle, of which the bark forms an esteemed cinnamon; the Eugenia Pimenta, from whence comes Jamaica pepper; the common myrtle, from whose buds and berries spice is sometimes made; the Eucalyptus manifera, which yields a sweet sort of manna; the Guinea Eucalyptus, the sap of which is transformed into beer by fermentation...

You get the idea... In spite of this, I rather enjoyed this book. I knew nothing of the story ahead of time, so the twist at the end was quite unexpected. I came to really like the characters. And the copy of the book that I read had the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth that were just outstanding.

And for the record, if I'm ever stranded on an island, Cyrus Harding is the one I would want to be with.

What had Pencroft to say? He could say nothing, for, in the bottom of his heart he shared the confidence which his companions had in Cyrus Harding. The engineer was to them a microcosm, a compound of every science, a possessor of all human knowledge. It was better to be with Cyrus in a desert island, than without him in the most flourishing town in the United States. With him they could want nothing; with him they would never despair. If these brave men had been told that a volcanic eruption would destroy the land, that this land would be engulfed in the depths of the Pacific, they would have imperturbably replied, "Cyrus is here!"