TL;DR
6/10. A search for a shipwrecked captain across the southern hemisphere, and the first of three novels that turn out to be one story. Its lasting contribution is a mutinous quartermaster named Tom Ayrton, marooned on Tabor Island with a promise that someone will come back.
A bottle recovered from a shark contains a damaged message from Captain Grant, and Lord Glenarvan sets out to find him. The message survives in three languages, each partly destroyed, and the surviving fragments give a latitude and no usable longitude.
So the search party follows the thirty-seventh parallel around the world, crossing South America, then Australia, then New Zealand. The structure is a travelogue with a mystery attached, and Verne uses it exactly as you’d expect, stopping constantly to explain the geography, the fauna, and the local politics.
Verne’s lecturing habit wears thin in this one. I came for a missing captain and got long stretches on fauna and local politics, and the mystery keeps stalling while he explains a continent. Some readers enjoy that about him. I find myself wanting to skip ahead to the next clue.
It was serialized between 1867 and 1868. On its own it’s minor Verne. Its importance is what it sets up.
Who is Tom Ayrton?
He’s introduced as a villain and he’s a good one. Ayrton was quartermaster on Grant’s ship, conspired to seize it, and was put ashore before the wreck. He turns up in Australia presenting himself as a survivor, attaches himself to the search party, and betrays them, and when he’s caught he negotiates coolly for his own life. Instead of executing him the crew maroon him on Tabor Island, a speck in the Pacific, with the promise that somebody will return one day and take him off if he’s become a different man.
The marooning is the best idea in the book. A man left on a speck of rock with a promise nobody is obliged to keep makes a far better premise than the search that surrounds it, and Verne seems to half know it.
Verne never says what Ayrton did. The crimes remain a category instead of a list, and the vagueness suits an adventure novel written for boys because it lets a young reader move past the ugly part. It costs the character everything, because a man without specific crimes isn’t a man, he’s a position in an argument about mercy.
That vagueness does more damage than any timeline error. A villain whose crimes stay a category can’t be redeemed in any way that means something, and Verne threw away the most interesting man in the book to keep things tidy for young readers.
How does In Search of the Castaways connect to the other two novels?
Three books are involved and Verne wrote them out of order relative to the story they tell.
This one, 1867 to 1868, maroons Ayrton. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870, introduces Captain Nemo and leaves his fate unresolved. The Mysterious Island, 1875, brings both threads together on one island, and it’s the book in which everything set up here gets paid.
Ayrton reappears in that third novel, found after twelve years alone, having lost the power of speech and most of what made him a person. That novel tests the mercy this book offers, and the answer comes back complicated. Something was salvaged. A great deal was destroyed getting there.
Verne was building a shared universe with a returning cast roughly a century before anybody had a name for it, and he ran into the same problem every such project has. I admire the ambition and I’m less charmed by the execution. A returning cast built across a decade of serials took nerve, and Verne had it long before anybody called it a franchise. The seams show, though, as the next section makes painfully clear.
Does the timeline in In Search of the Castaways work?
No, and the contradictions are worse than a casual reader would guess. Most modern editions carry a footnote admitting it.
This novel is set in 1864 and 1865, and Ayrton is abandoned in March 1865. In The Mysterious Island, Ayrton says he was marooned twelve years earlier, in March 1855. That’s before this book takes place at all.
Verne moved a decade because he needed to. Two years alone doesn’t produce a man who has lost speech. Twelve years does. The character required the longer interval and the chronology got sacrificed to it. That tells you what Verne thought mattered.
I’m on Verne’s side here. A dozen years is what that ruin of a man needed, and I’d sacrifice a calendar for a character any day. The critics who treat the date slip as the scandal have missed what he was protecting.
The Nemo dates are worse still, since The Mysterious Island has to place the Nautilus somewhere that contradicts the ending of the previous book. Serial fiction written across a decade does this, and Verne never went back to reconcile it.
Why this book matters to my own
The gap is the reason I wrote Eurydice.
Verne gives Ayrton a marooning, a redemption, and no interior. We never learn what he did, we’re never inside the twelve years, and the man who’s found is described from outside by the people who find him.
That’s an enormous amount of space for a novelist. Eurydice is Ayrton’s own account, and it gives him the crimes Verne wouldn’t name, because a redemption is worth nothing if the thing being redeemed is left blank.
Verdict
The weakest of the three connected novels and the one you can most safely read second. Take it as the setup: it establishes Ayrton, the marooning, and the promise that gets kept eight years later.
Read it after The Mysterious Island and the payoff runs in reverse, which I think is more interesting, since you meet the broken man first and then find out what was done to him. Six out of ten feels right to me. It’s a slow, lecturing adventure with one great idea buried in it, and the idea only pays off in another book. Read it for Ayrton and forgive it the geography lessons.
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