Jules Verne Forum

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Re: Hatteras and Les Foreceurs de blocus

From: thomas mccormick <tom_amity~at~hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:58:36 +0000
To: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il

Indeed, Verne is following a tradition here. In many nineteenth-century sea
stories, there is a mysteriious crew member, and sometimes the captain
himself is a mystery. This is true of some of Fenimore Cooper's sea-stories;
for example, The Red Rover has a mysterious captain pursued by a disguised
British Navy agent, thus making two "doppelganger" mystery men! In Moby
Dick, Melville makes Ahab a mystery by keeping him out of sight until the
voyage of the Pequod has been under way for several days, when he appears in
time to establish that the ship is on a mission of revenge---and the
mysterious Parsi, Fedullah, is stowed away for a long period after his
arrival on the same ship. And of course Captain Nemo remains a mystery for
the entire novel in which he first appears! And one also thinks of Marryat
in this connection.

A mysterious presence on a sailing ship is somehow always appropirate---for
certain something mobile in what's already mobile! The sea is a fitting
place for mysterious personages... one is almost disappointed to read a
sea-yarn without one. Paganel may not be "mysterious" exactly, but his
presence on the Duncan is at least serendipitous---providential, one might
say.

Tom

>From: ithompson~at~geog.gla.ac.uk
>Reply-To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>
>To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>
>Subject: Hatteras and Les Foreceurs de blocus
>Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 19:05:57 +0100
>
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Received on Tue 26 Jul 2005 - 03:58:47 IDT

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