Five Weeks in a Balloon. Jules Verne

Vacation [1888]).

      Beyond the aeronautics in Five Weeks, its events, settings, technology, and ethical content were additional influences on Verne’s later fiction. Its side issue of determining the Nile’s headwaters becomes a major objective in another novel about a big river, The Mighty Orinoco. Similarly, the lighthearted bets placed in chapter 2 are warm-ups for many a later wager, sometimes incidental (The Meteor Hunt), sometimes pivotal (Around the World in Eighty Days). In fact the latter dusts off several plotlines from Five Weeks: the rescue of the missionary from homicidal natives is echoed in the rescue of Lady Aouda from Brahman fanatics … the servant Joe gets separated from his master and two story lines advance concurrently, ditto with Passepartout in Eighty Days … and the last-minute dismantling of the balloon Victoria prefigures the climactic burning of the merchant steamer Henrietta.

      As for settings, one geographic feature in Five Weeks became a leitmotif in these novels. The Victoria flies over a raging volcano in chapter 22, and this Vernian vision is amplified in most of his books over the next decade—Journey to the Center of the Earth, Captain Hatteras, Captain Grant’s Children, Circling the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues, The Mysterious Island … and onward to the volcanoes in late-career titles such as Propeller Island (1895) and Master of the World.

      Moving on to technology, the Victoria’s slow death in the desert (chapters 24–27) is the first instance of Verne devising an impressive vehicle, then evenhandedly exposing its Achilles heel (the balloon isn’t self-propelled). A few years later he stages a similar exposé in Twenty Thousand Leagues when the submarine’s single weakness (she can’t manufacture oxygen) creates a life-threatening problem under the polar ice. And comparable things go wrong in Circling the Moon, The Earth Turned Upside Down, and Propeller Island. Verne may have faith in science, but it isn’t blind faith.

      Of course the close descriptions of Fergusson’s mechanism are the forerunners of other famous hardware passages in these novels: the development-by-committee of the space capsule in From the Earth to the Moon … the specs on Nemo’s diving gear in Twenty Thousand Leagues … the disquisitions on aerodynamics in Robur the Conqueror. But Five Weeks also offers another shrewd insight: men bond with machinery. As Alain Froidefond observes, Verne “eliminates or renders inaccessible female heroes as often as possible, instead giving a primal role to the machine” (24). Sure enough, the balloon Victoria is literally the love interest: “I’ve gotten attached to her,” Joe admits in chapter 41. “It’ll be hard to part with her!” Then at the close when she sinks into the Senegal River, he moans “Poor Victoria!” while even the doctor “couldn’t keep back a tear.” And this moist moment won’t be the last in these novels. In The Sphinx of the Ice Realm (1897), when the stoic first officer sees his ship go down, Verne writes: “He was a man of the sternest fiber, and yes, he wept.” Or in The Steam House (1880), when the robot elephant meets its explosive doom: “Poor creature!” the inventor says, and then follows up with “a huge sigh.”

      Five Weeks also introduces a number of ethical issues that are often debated in later books. One, Verne’s pacifism, is only hinted at in chapter 20, where, as usual, Fergusson seems to be the author’s mouthpiece: “If our supreme commanders could look down on their fields of operation as we’re doing now, maybe they’d ultimately lose their stomach for blood and conquest.” But two other issues get more extended coverage in Verne’s first novel.

      Greed and gold are the first. Kennedy leads off: early on he kills an elephant, damages one of its tusks, and bemoans the loss of thirty-five guineas. But the most biting passages are in chapter 23 and involve the valet Joe squabbling over gold deposits with Dr. Fergusson, who reveals an unsuspected gift for deadpan comedy. In essence Joe has great difficulty deciding between keeping his gold and dying of thirst, and this form of insanity is a thread Verne will follow repeatedly—mid-career in Hector Servadac and The Earth Turned Upside Down, near the end in The Meteor Hunt and The Golden Volcano (1906).

      But ecological concerns seem to arouse Verne’s deepest anxieties, and there are several caustic passages in Five Weeks. Dick Kennedy figures in most of them, a hunter so obsessed with his firearms (chapter 42) that he would rather finish the trip on foot than give them up. Elsewhere (chapters 28 and 31) he can’t remember his kills and lives only for the next one—as an old adage on addiction puts it, “A thousand aren’t enough.” Finally in chapter 31 Fergusson reprimands him: “what’s the point of shooting animals you can’t make use of?” he asks the Scot. “To slay an antelope or gazelle for no good reason other than to satisfy your everyday hunting urges—that really isn’t justified.”

      Verne takes up this environmental cudgel again in Twenty Thousand Leagues, accurately predicting the near extinction of many marine mammals. Here Kennedy’s stand-in is Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner; when Land wants to attack a pod of inoffensive baleen whales, Captain Nemo’s refusal expands on Fergusson’s reprimand: “It would be killing just for the sake of killing…. When your colleagues, Mr. Land, destroy decent, harmless creatures like the southern right whale or the bowhead whale, they’re guilty of criminal behavior … and they’ll ultimately wipe out a whole class of beneficial animals.”

      Translating for Today

      Even in the twenty-first century, then, Five Weeks in a Balloon is a novel with a good deal going for it:

      • It’s Verne’s first novel, his breakthrough book.

      • It was his second biggest seller, after Around the World in Eighty Days.

      • It launched his famed series of Voyages extraordinaires.

      • It’s the classic ballooning novel.

      • It’s the first steampunk story.

      • It’s a triple-threat mix of adventure, comedy, and hard science fiction.

      • It wrestles with ecological and economic issues that are still unresolved.

      The present Wesleyan edition is the first complete English translation of this seminal work. It’s not, however, the earliest translation in our language: the immediate popularity of Five Weeks led to the rapid publication of several English versions—nearly all in Verne’s lifetime, during the high noon of his fame. As Evans reports in “The English Editions of Five Weeks in a Balloon” at the website Verniana, there have been six prior translations of this novel: three identify their translators (William Lackland, Frederick Amadeus Malleson, and Arthur Chambers), the other three keep them anonymous (the publishers are Chapman and Hall, Routledge, and Goubaud).

      A seventh, much later version appeared in the 1960s under I. O. Evans’s byline, but it proved to be an abridged spin-off of the Malleson rendering. Nor, alas, are any of the other editions responsibly complete. The Chapman and Hall text eliminates a good quarter of the book and goes to the rear of the class; Malleson, Routledge, and Goubaud condense almost every chapter, while Chambers’s 1920s rendering often slurs details, seemingly out of carelessness. Lackland’s is the fullest text, yet it has its problems too: the author’s many footnotes are omitted, and there are a variety of small mishaps—dropped lines, missing details, technical errors, fleeting mistranslations, unnecessary glosses, etc.

      Beyond these questions of omitting and condensing,