Jules Verne · 1866 · sea
The first of Verne's Extraordinary Journeys. A brig sails from Liverpool in 1860 with sealed orders and no captain aboard - because no English crew would sign on for the North Pole, and John Hatteras has to get them into the ice before he can tell them where they are going.
- 1Liverpool
5 April 1860, and a notice in the Liverpool Herald: the brig Forward, K.Z. captain, will clear from New Prince's Docks, destination unknown - and no captain aboard, only sealed letters telling the mate where to steer.
- 2Cape Farewell
The southern tip of Greenland, reached on 20 April exactly as the letters instructed - and the crew already uneasy about a ship whose owner will not show himself and whose orders arrive one envelope at a time.
- 3Davis Strait
Up between Greenland and Baffin Island into ice, and the letter revealing the captain has been aboard all along - John Hatteras under an assumed name, because no crew would have signed on knowing where he meant to go.
- 4Melville Bay
The Devil's Thumb and the ice barrier, where Parry and Ross and every Franklin search party turned - and where Hatteras loses first the coal, then the argument, and finally the crew.
- 5Beechey Island
Franklin's first wintering place, and his men's graves in the gravel - which Verne uses to remind an 1866 reader exactly what happens to English captains who insist on going further north than the ice permits.
- 6Victoria Bay
The Forward is burnt by mutineers and the remnant walk - Hatteras, the doctor, the carpenter, the bosun and an American rival, hauling a sledge across the pack in search of fuel and open water.
- 7The polar sea
Verne's open sea at the top of the world, which nineteenth-century geography half believed in - and a boat built from the wreck, rowed north across water nobody had proved was there.
- 8The North Pole
An island with an active volcano on it, and Hatteras walking up the side of it toward the crater - and the original ending, which Verne's publisher made him change, has him go in.