Travel Scholarships. Jules Verne
and not until 1913–14 for the second. Finally, the cloth-or leather-bound and illustrated edition called “grand in-octavo,” highly prized by collectors today, was published on November 19, 1903, in a single run of 9,600 copies of which 403 copies remained in stock when Hetzel sold his publishing house at Libraire Hachette at the end of June 1914. Some copies from this reserve remained for sale until 1924. These numbers show that Travel Scholarships was not really a commercial success, at least in comparison to the other Extraordinary Voyages that had come before it. Only the posthumous novels published between 1906 and 1919 shared such disappointing sales numbers. The following year, in 1904, translations of Travel Scholarships were published in Germany and Italy. At present, this little-known Verne title has been translated into at least fourteen languages.20 Critical reception has mirrored the general public disinterest, as very few critical studies of the novel have appeared to date. With good reason or not? The reader must decide. The following is what is important to know about the novel.
THE “EXTRAORDINARY” IN THE ANTILLES?
We have seen that the 1902 Martinique volcanic eruption was central to Verne’s decision to prepare Travel Scholarships for publication in 1903. For several centuries, the Lesser Antilles had been a plaything of the great European powers, and Verne recounts this unsettled history with ironic detachment. The colonial period was marked by often-bloody conflicts, first between Europeans and the indigenous peoples (who were nearly exterminated), then among the Europeans themselves, and finally between European settlers and the former slaves imported from Africa who had been increasingly enfranchised from 1804 onward. Does this region, which was so well suited to European colonial appetites, lend itself equally well as a setting for an adventure novel? It would certainly be an exaggeration to call Travel Scholarships an Extraordinary Voyage, at least as most readers understand the epithet “extraordinary.” But few of Verne’s novels published after 1880 were, in the real sense of the word. The author was more interested in completing his “criss-crossing of the globe” (an expression used by Daniel Compère),21 a goal that Verne had made his life’s work, even though he knew the task would never be truly finished. Since the regions described in this novel were already well known, the idea of a journey of exploration had to give way to a simple tourist trip. The latter naturally elicited far less interest than the former, unless it were complemented by satirical or humorous elements, as in The Thompson Travel Agency (1907, L’Agence Thompson and Co), a late novel published by Michel Verne under his father’s name.
The Antilles provide the backdrop for the novel’s action, and the islands are discussed geographically one after another both before and after the protagonists’ long trans-Atlantic voyage. But in terms of their function in the plot, the islands are more or less interchangeable. Their individual importance stands in proportion to the affection that the heroes of this historical and geographical novel have for them. Verne’s love for details—which so impressed the translator of this English-language edition of the novel22—was made possible only by the author’s research, since he had never visited the area himself. It is true that his brother Paul, who had just died two years earlier in 1897, had traveled to the Antilles between 1851 and 1853, during which time the brothers also lost two friends who were living or had lived on the French islands there.23 Before participating in the Crimean War as a naval officer from 1853 to 1856, Paul Verne had begun his military career on a trip to Haiti (which had been independent from France since 1804). There, the French army had hoped that its very presence would discourage the despotic leanings of President Faustin Soulouque, who would become Faustin I in 1852 and who would attempt to extend his rule across the entire island of Hispaniola. The expedition then stopped in Cuba and Martinique. But there is no indication that Paul’s reminiscences had any influence on the action of Travel Scholarships, which in any case takes place a quarter-century later.24
Verne owes most of the historical and geographical information about the six islands visited by his characters to the renowned French geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Although Verne did not share the anarchist views of his eminent contemporary, he nonetheless held him in high esteem as a geographer who had distinguished himself with his abundantly illustrated New Universal Geography (Nouvelle Géographie Universelle) in twenty volumes (1876–1894). During an interview, Verne acknowledged: “I have all Reclus’s works—I have a great admiration for Elisée Reclus—and the whole of Arago.”25 It was specifically in volume 17 (West Indies [Indes Occidentales], 1891, pp. 837–900), of Reclus’s Geography that Verne found the information he needed about the Lesser Antilles; he even adopted the order in which Reclus’s described the islands. It would be pointless in the context of this Introduction to embark on a word-for-word comparison of the two books, but the borrowings were frequently noted in the novel’s manuscript by the abbreviation “R” (for Reclus), followed by the relevant page number. Further, Reclus is cited in the text of the novel itself, and in such way as to show that Verne had full confidence in the reliability of his source:
The impression of the young passengers, once they found themselves in the middle of the port, was exactly like the one Elisée Reclus details in his well-documented Géographie. They thought they had arrived at one of England’s ports, Belfast or Liverpool. There was nothing of what they had observed in Saint Thomas’s Charlotte-Amalia, or in Guadeloupe’s Point-à-Pitre, or in Martinique’s Saint-Pierre. As the great French geographer once remarked, palm trees seemed quite foreign to this island. (Part II, chap. 6)
Another lesser-used source was marked in the manuscript by the letter “P”—most likely designating a book about the island of Martinique by Jean-Marie Pardon.26
As usual, Verne’s textual borrowings are numerous and sometimes nearly word-for-word. For him, this practice enhanced the verisimilitude of the narrative, which was of utmost importance to him. Nonetheless, this same practice would undoubtedly be considered plagiarism today. It is rather surprising that no successful legal complaint was ever lodged against Verne by the authors from whom he repeatedly borrowed throughout his lengthy career.27 Verne’s frequent “recycling” has been often noted, but not discussed in detail and not yet satisfactorily explained. It might be that the change in genre—from popular science to fiction—helped to protect Verne from lawsuits, whereas substantial borrowings from other purely fictional novels would have been much more risky. It is also worth noting that the authors of such works of popular science of the period—the aforementioned Reclus, but also Louis Figuier, Arthur Mangin, and many others—were in the habit of copying from each other as well and probably would have had difficulty in proving their own originality, especially in court.
Verne limited himself to geographic descriptions of the Antilles and took very little inspiration for his story from their historical and social specifics. His compatriot Victor Meignan (1846–?), who published a travel narrative about the region in 187828 (the year following that in which Travel Scholarships is set), had blamed his native France for the unresolved social issues of the region. According to Meignan, the “mixing of races” had led to a multitude of gradations between “whites” and “blacks,” creating hierarchical conflicts not just between social groups but also within families.29 Reclus had silently glossed over these social problems by simply lauding the beauty of the Antillean people—an esthetic approach which masks any underlying racism. It is worth noting that, following his example, Verne also abstains from any racist polemic, which was otherwise quite standard and accepted at the time.
Another social conflict emerged when, in order to ensure successful sugar and tobacco harvests, Europeans began to replace emancipated slaves—who, left to their own devices, no longer had any economic value—with imported workers from the Indies and China. Known as “coolies,” they were poorly paid and kept in a state of dependency that effectively reduced them to slavery. The growing problems among these three groups who formed the Antillean populace were far from being resolved in 1877–78 and they still would not be in 1903, but they are alluded to only a few times in the novel.
THE COMPOSITION OF THE CAST
The