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 would expect, stopping constantly to explain the geography, the fauna, and the local politics.
It was serialised between 1867 and 1868. On its own it is minor Verne. Its importance is what it sets up.
Who is Tom Ayrton?
He is introduced as a villain and he is 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 is 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 has become a different man.
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 is not a man, he is a position in an argument about mercy.
How does In Search of the Castaways connect to the other two novels?
Three books are involved and they were written 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 is 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. The mercy offered in this book is tested there 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.
Does the timeline work?
No, and the contradictions are worse than a casual reader would guess. Most modern editions carry a footnote quietly 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, which is before this book takes place at all.
Verne moved a decade because he needed to. Two years alone does not produce a man who has lost speech. Twelve years does. The character required the longer interval and the chronology got sacrificed to it, which tells you what Verne thought mattered.
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 are never inside the twelve years, and the man who is found is described from outside by the people who find him.
That is an enormous amount of space for a novelist. Eurydice is Ayrton’s own account, and it gives him the specific crimes Verne would not 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 is arguably more interesting, since you meet the broken man first and then find out what was done to him.
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