The Mighty Orinoco. Jules Verne

Jules Verne to the English-speaking world. For this is the first time that his Le Superbe Orénoque, published in French in 1898, has appeared in English. And add this bonus, perhaps in partial recompense for Anglo-American publishers’ long neglect of the essential Verne: we English-speaking admirers can boast that we are the first—in his international audience—to honor him with such annotated critical editions.¹

      This Wesleyan University Press edition helps correct a long-standing censorship of the Great Romancer—for The Mighty Orinoco was the first of his works to be totally suppressed in English, largely for political reasons. The work you now contemplate also helps destroy two hoary myths about Verne: that he rarely wrote about women and love, and that he seldom attempted to portray the working class. Many such misunderstandings of Verne have been based on the persistent unavailability of several of his titles and on the gruesome fact that, with few exceptions, the “standard translations” of most other titles were greatly abridged—omitting from 20 to 40 percent of Verne’s originals.

      The Mighty Orinoco also gives us one more sterling example of how Verne regarded science as inseparable from life. His reputation as a “futurist” is here reaffirmed as he involves his characters in a major nineteenth-century scientific question that would remain unsolved for fifty-seven years after he started to write this book—that is, until the middle of the twentieth century.

      In Orinoco he further proves his enduring literary value by his masterful handling of a beautiful and ingenious plot and of such themes as the Quest for the Father and, more daunting, the basic androgyny of human personality. With deep intuition he recreates perfectly that nagging “anguish of modernity,” as Edmund J. Smyth so aptly terms it.² This angst is produced, in part, by our conflicts over our self-righteous, self-serving “idea of progress” on the one hand and the human rights of those with alternative programs on the other.

      Verne measures up to the challenge that these themes inevitably pose. He creates an array of unique characters who can successfully face such conflicts. These include a young French adventurer capable of rapid psychological growth, a builder of a utopia on the model set by Bishop Bartolomeo de las Casas, a charming Indian boy caught too early in one of life’s great crises, and several heroic, skillful boatmen.

      This edition will also help us understand why Verne has been such a powerful influence on world literature in those countries where he could be read in his original French or in complete (e.g., Spanish, Russian, German) translations.

      Some of the questions I’ve raised so far are best answered in detail later, in my notes; they cannot be developed here without destroying your enjoyment of Verne’s delicious suspense. But a few of these questions can and should be explored now because they will help us to keep Jules Verne’s novel and Stanford L. Luce’s translation in better perspective.

      Most urgent perhaps is the question of “suppression,” for which leading scholars see a build-up of three cumulative causes. First, as Arthur B. Evans points out, “Verne was the victim of his own success.” By the end of the nineteenth century he had so popularized his new genre, the “scientific romance,” that a “veritable host of ‘Verne school’ writers”—mainly imitators—was now tapping his market. On that ground alone, English publishers grew wary about new translations. And, in those days, American publishers took their cues from the English.³

      Second, translations of the earlier works—like From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870)—had been so shamelessly bungled and cut that Verne’s reputation in the English-speaking world had suffered almost irreparably. And so, of course, did sales. Just one example of his undeserved humiliation: in 1961, Galaxy magazine published an article on “The Watery Wonders of Captain Nemo,” in which Theodore L. Thomas discussed egregious “errors” in mathematics and science that he claimed he had found in Verne. As a result of such attacks, Verne was judged by critics and readers as unfit for even the juvenile market. This, mind you, about an author famous the world over for his ability to excite and satisfy readers from eight to eighty!

      Shortly thereafter, I discovered how thoroughly Thomas had misrepresented Verne when Simon and Schuster asked me to prepare a new edition of the “standard translation” by the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier (who hid his sins behind a pen name: Mercier Lewis). Checking Lewis against the original French, I discovered that almost all the multitudinous errors the critics had attributed to Verne were actually the translator’s. Thomas and his editors, as well as many others in publishing, had simply failed to check whether the errors were actually in the original Verne. Lewis not only made childish mistakes in science and mathematics, he omitted 23 percent of Verne’s text. This omission, nearly a quarter of the novel, included most of the intellectual, theoretical, scientific, and—here’s the rub—political passages. Later, in doing an annotated translation of From the Earth to the Moon, I found that Lewis had gutted that work too for the English-speaking adult market.⁴

      The third reason for suppressing Verne in English is best expressed by Brian Taves, senior author of The Jules Verne Encyclopedia. He flatly states that by 1898 political questions became the deciding factor in whether Verne books were translated into English. Heretofore censorship, alterations, and rewritings had sufficed to mute Verne’s politics, but now Verne books were “suppressed by simply not translating them” at all.⁵

      What were these political questions that helped deprive English readers of the genuine Verne? Just as I had discovered in my annotated editions, Taves found that many other Verne works had been censored in whole or in part because they dealt with “questions of injustice and colonialism.”⁶ For example, take Verne’s recurrent discussion of England’s oppression of India. Lewis cut the indicting passage from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; W. H. G. Kingston rewrote such passages in The Mysterious Island; I. O. Evans simply omitted a whole chapter about English treatment of India from The Steam House.⁷

      Verne’s oeuvre contains numerous attacks on imperialism. In From the Earth to the Moon, he satirizes American militarists who cannot keep their eyes off Mexico. In one of his short stories, an indigenous Peruvian dies heroically leading a rebellion against Spanish conquistadors (“Martin Paz,” 1875). In Purchase of the North Pole (1890), Verne challenges the very premise of colonial conquest. Mistress Branican (1891) contains the pronouncement that “annihilation of a race of human beings is the final word in colonial progress.”

      Taves sees The Mighty Orinoco as portraying “colonial depredations within a tale of three … expeditions exploring the South American river.” In the opening chapter, Verne gives us his first hint that the white man’s standard description of the Indians is often false and tendentious. Note how slyly he uses the word “sometimes” in a sentence about “massacres and looting” (p. 13). Throughout the novel he portrays many nonwhites sympathetically, often warmly; the only genuine villain in Orinoco is a European. He accurately depicts a land dominated by a resented foreign race. Then he sums up these views by reminding readers that Jean Chaffanjon, France’s esteemed nineteenth-century explorer, had risked his life to prove that certain accusations, including the charges that the Guaharibos were dangerous and that Indians were all cannibals, were unjust. These were the accusations that had been used to justify the depredations the foreign rulers had visited on them.

      The year Orinoco appeared in French, 1898, was the year procolonialist Anglo-American publishers decided to end their twenty-five-year tradition of promptly offering Verne’s latest work in English. The translation would have appeared between the time the United States took Cuba and Puerto Rico and the time Rudyard Kipling urged Americans to crush Filipino patriots as America’s part in taking up the “white man’s burden”—when an American general thought it would be necessary to kill half the Filipino rebels in order to “civilize” the other half. At the same time, the major powers were all rushing to plunder big chunks of Africa and Asia. Suppression of an anticolonialist writer was ideologically well timed.

      Yet when you go from this introduction to the text of Orinoco itself, you will be properly perplexed. In the very opening chapter, Verne drops an unpleasant remark about “Negro blood.”