In Search of the Castaways

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In Search of the Castaways (original title Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, "The Children of Captain Grant") is a novel by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1867-1868. The original edition, by Hetzel, contains a number of illustrations by Edouard Riou.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The book tells the story of Mary and Robert, the young daughter and son of Captain Grant, captain of the Britannia. After finding a bottle cast into the ocean by the captain himself after the Britannia is shipwrecked, they, with the help of Lord and Lady Glenarven of Scotland, decide to launch a rescue expedition. The main difficulty is that the coordinates of the wreckage are half-erased, and only the latitude (37 degrees) is known; thus, the expedition would have to circum-navigate the 37th parallel.

Lord Glenarvan makes it his quest to find Grant; together with his wife, Grant's children and the crew of his yacht the Duncan they set off for South America. An unexpected passenger in the form of French geographer Jacques Paganel (he misssed his steamer to India by accidentally boarding on the Duncan) joins the search. They explore Patagonia, Tristan da Cunha Island, Amsterdam Island, Australia and New Zealand (a pretext to describe the flora, fauna and geography of numerous places to the targeted audience).

There, they find a former quarter-master of the Britannia, Ayrton, who proposes to lead them to the site of the wreckage. However, Ayrton is a traitor, who was not present during the loss of the Britannia, but was abandoned in Australia after a failed attempt to seize control of the ship to practice piracy. He tries to take control of the Duncan, but out of sheer luck, this attempt also fails.

Ayrton, made a prisoner, offers to trade his knowledge of Captain Grant in exchange for being abandoned on a desert island instead of being surrendered to the English authorities. The Duncan set sail for the Tabor Island, which, also out of sheer luck, turns out to be Captain Grant's shelter. They leave Ayrton in his place to live among the beasts and regain his humanity. Ayrton reappears in Verne's later novel, L'Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island, 1874). Template:Endspoiler

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Adaptations

Image:Kapgranta.jpg

The book enjoyed immense popularity in Imperial Russia, where it became arguably the most loved of Verne's novels. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union was the first country to release a film adaptation of the novel. Original score for the 1936 film was composed by Isaak Dunayevsky and is commonly regarded as his masterpiece.

In 1985, the accomplished Soviet director Stanislav Govorukhin filmed a 7-episode movie named "V poiskah kapitana Granta" ("В поисках капитана Гранта", "In Search of Captain Grant"). Although this adaptation of the novel is well comparable with the better half of adventure films made by western studios, a professional dialogue translation into English has not been made to date, making this film fully understandable only to those who speak Russian.

In the US, a film with the same name as the title of the book directed by Robert Stevenson was released in 1962 by Walt Disney Productions.

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