In Search of the Castaways

Summary

In Search of the Castaways, also known as The Children of Captain Grant, is a three-part voyage around the world along a single line of latitude. It begins off the coast of Scotland when the crew of Lord Glenarvan's new steam yacht, the Duncan, catch a shark and find in its stomach a bottle holding three damaged messages, in English, German and French. Pieced together, they reveal that Captain Harry Grant of the lost ship Britannia was wrecked two years earlier somewhere on the thirty-seventh parallel of south latitude, and they beg for rescue. The British government refuses to help, so Glenarvan and his kind young wife Helena resolve to go themselves, taking Grant's children, sixteen-year-old Mary and twelve-year-old Robert. On board they discover an accidental passenger: Jacques Paganel, a learned and wonderfully absent-minded French geographer who boarded the wrong ship and who learned Portuguese instead of Spanish. Paganel's changing interpretations of the damaged documents drive the plot. In the first part the party crosses South America from Chile to the Atlantic, surviving an earthquake in the Andes, a condor that seizes Robert, floods and wolves on the Pampas, with the help of the noble Patagonian guide Thalcave. In the second part, convinced the wreck lies in Australia, they cross the continent and are betrayed by Ayrton, a former quartermaster of the Britannia turned convict leader, who plots to seize the Duncan. In the third part, shipwrecked in New Zealand, they are captured by Maori warriors and escape by a daring ruse. At last, sailing home in despair, they find Captain Grant and two sailors on tiny Tabor Island in the Pacific. Ayrton, unrepentant, is marooned there in Grant's place, with a promise that someone will one day return for him, a thread Verne picks up in The Mysterious Island. The novel celebrates loyalty, family love and generous adventure, and teaches a great deal of geography. Its descriptions of native peoples belong to the nineteenth century and should be read with that context in mind.

Top Lessons

• Loyalty that does not give up

  Glenarvan keeps searching through setback after setback for a man he has never met.

• Learning from mistakes

  Paganel's errors, from boarding the wrong ship to misreading the documents, are funny but also teach that knowledge must be held humbly.

• Justice tempered with hope

  Ayrton is not executed but left on an island where he may repent.

Verified Quotes