Jules Verne · 1878 · sea

Verne's 1878 novel. A whaler loses her captain and crew in a single hour and a fifteen-year-old apprentice takes command - while the cook quietly works an iron bar under the binnacle, so that a voyage steering for Valparaiso rounds Cape Horn without anybody noticing and fetches up in Angola.

1. 1
   Auckland

   The whaler Pilgrim sails for California with a shipowner's wife and son aboard, and a fifteen-year-old apprentice called Dick Sand - and then a whale hunt kills the captain and every man of the crew at once.

2. 2
   The Pacific

   A boy of fifteen in command of a ship he cannot navigate, with a cook who is quietly moving the compass and putting an axe under the binnacle - so that weeks of sailing east end up going somewhere else entirely.

3. 3
   Cape Horn

   The compass has been steering them south-east for weeks. Nobody aboard can take a proper sight, so the ship rounds the Horn without a soul on her knowing it - and sails on east into a different ocean entirely.

4. 4
   Angola

   They wreck on a coast they are told is Bolivia and is in fact Portuguese West Africa - and the deception holds for chapters, because a boy who has never seen either has no way of telling the difference.

5. 5
   Kazonnde

   Marched inland by slavers into one of the great slave markets of the interior - and Verne, writing in 1878, spends the second half of a boys' adventure on the East African slave trade in some detail.

6. 6
   The Coanza

   Escape downriver by canoe through country nobody in the party can read, with a termite mound flooding around them in one of the set pieces - and the long run back toward the sea.

7. 7
   Luanda

   The coast again, and a passage home - a novel that begins as a sea story, turns into a survival march, and ends as an argument about an institution Verne's readers were assured had been abolished.