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Re: Superbe Orenoque

From: Walter J Miller <wjm2~at~nyu.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 13:35:37 -0700
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~math.technion.ac.il>
Cc: wjm2~at~nyu.edu

Dear Garmt and All: Apparently Chaffandon thought he had located the
source (Peter Costello suggests he may have faked it!) and you notice
that Verne goes no further really than to say that the Orinoco begins as
drops shed by the Parima range. In 1951 a Franco-Venezuelan expedition
built an airstrip in Esmeralda from which they flew repeated missions to
spot the ultimate source from the air. All this is laboriously detailed
in the annotations to the forthcoming Wesleyan University Press edition
edited by Arthur Evans and me. This is of course one of the agonizing
questions for the editors...but there are many more. Cheers! Walter
James Miller

----- Original Message -----
From: Garmt de Vries <G.deVries~at~phys.uu.nl>
Date: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 4:15 am
Subject: Superbe Orenoque

> Hi all,
>
> I am currently rereading Le Superbe Orenoque, and I'd like to
> share some
> thoughts with you.
>
> - It is not clear from the novel who actually discovered the
> sources of
> the Orinoco. In Ch. I, Verne mentions Diaz de la Fuente, Bobadilla and
> Schomburgk who 'remonterent l'Orenoque presque jusqu'a sa source', and
> Chaffanjon, who reached the slopes of the Parima, but he never
> tells us
> who really discovered the sources. Britannica.com says:
>
> In 1744 Jesuit missionaries reached the Casiquiare River.
> Alexander von
> Humboldt, the German naturalist, traveled more than 1,700 miles
> throughthe Orinoco basin in 1800. By 1860 steamships were
> navigating the Orinoco.
> The source of the river remained in dispute, however, until a
> Venezuelanexpedition finally identified it in 1951.
>
> So Jules Verne may make fun of Felipe and Varinas, but apparently the
> issue remained a point of debate until 1951!
>
> - I think that Le Superbe Orenoque is the novel in which Jules Verne
> mentions his source most explicitly and frequently. Hardly a
> chapter in
> which Jean Chaffanjon is not often cited or referred to. Moreover,
> a lot
> of people who are mentioned in Chaffanjon's book appear in the
> novel: M.
> Marchal, M. Mirabal, Manuel Assomption. This makes me wonder if these
> people knew that they were mentioned in a novel by Jules Verne...
>
> Regards,
> Garmt.
>
>
Received on Fri 20 Jul 2001 - 23:37:09 IDT

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