The Mysterious Island

The account which follows was first published in the New York Herald in the spring of 1868, and subsequently in a single volume which has since passed through several printings. That account, the published account, distinct from what you are now reading, was the work of a professional correspondent of twenty years’ experience, and it shows. It is well-constructed. It is readable. It contains everything that a responsible editor at a major American newspaper in 1868 would have permitted to appear in print, and nothing that he would not.

This is not that account.

What you hold is the private record: the notes and observations I kept alongside the published account during our time on Lincoln Island and in the months following our rescue. I kept two sets of records from the beginning, as any honest correspondent must. The published account serves the story. The private record serves the truth. They are not always the same document.

I have debated for some time whether to release this record. The people described in it are real, or were real, or have interests that extend beyond their deaths. Several of them are still living. The published account gave them versions of themselves they could live with. This one is less accommodating.

I have decided to release it for a reason I will state plainly: the published account erases the most significant person on that island. Not through malice. Through the ordinary operation of a narrative that knows, without being told, whose inner life is worth recording and whose is not. That operation has been the subject of no small self-examination on my part in the years since Lincoln Island, and the examination has not been comfortable.

His name is Nebuchadnezzar. He was called Neb. He was born in Cameroon and came to this continent by a passage that is not mine to describe. He was on the island for the same two and a half years the rest of us were. He was present in the published account on almost every page.

He is absent from it entirely.

What follows is my attempt to correct that absence, insofar as a correspondent can correct what a correspondent has done.

I make no claim to have succeeded. I had access to Neb’s observable behaviour and almost nothing of his interior life, which he kept with a discipline I understood was not incidental.

Some of what I write here is inference. I have labelled it as such throughout. Where I have reconstructed conversations I was not present for, I have said so. Where I have speculated about what someone thought or decided, I have been clear that I am speculating.

The reader should know one further thing: I am not a trustworthy narrator. I was aware of this during our time on the island and I am more aware of it now. I selected, shaped, and omitted in the published account with the full deliberateness of my profession, and I have done so again here, in different directions, for different reasons. The private record is more honest than the published account. It is not the whole truth. I am not certain the whole truth is available to anyone, including the people who were there.

What I can offer is this: the account of what happened on Lincoln Island, told by the person who watched most carefully and wrote most of it down, including the parts he chose not to publish.

The reader may judge the difference.

Gideon Spilett Correspondent, New York Herald New York, 1869

* * *

The question was not whether we should attempt it. The question was whether the attempt would kill us before the alternative did.

I have reported from seventeen engagements of the present war, have stood in the telegraph office at Fredericksburg with grape-shot audible through the window, and have on two occasions been required to swim for my life across bodies of water that did not invite the exercise. I record these facts not in the spirit of boast, the correspondent who boasts is the correspondent who embroiders, and I have endeavoured throughout my career to be guilty of neither, but to establish that I am not a man easily persuaded that his situation is without remedy. On the afternoon of March the twenty-third, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, suspended above the Pacific Ocean in a balloon that was no longer willing to remain so, I had no recourse, for the first time in my professional life.

We had been five days in the air.

I should explain, for those readers to whom the circumstances of our departure from Richmond may not be familiar, how five people came to find themselves in such a position. The facts are these: in the early weeks of March, eighteen sixty-five, with the Confederate capital preparing for what most men on both sides of the conflict privately understood would be its final siege, a military balloon was secured in the city for purposes of observation. It was not a large balloon. It was not, if I am honest, a well-maintained one. Harding had sourced it through channels he did not discuss, it was not a Confederate observation balloon, those had been gone since sixty-three, but something older and more civilian, acquired quietly and kept ready. The fact that he had kept it ready told me something I noted without comment: he had known departure was coming before he told any of us it was coming. It had been manufactured in better times from better materials and had since been subjected to four years of war. That it held together as long as it did is evidence either of the quality of its original construction or of the mercy of Providence, and I will leave the reader to determine which explanation carries more weight.

The decision to use it as a means of escape was Colonel Harding’s. I shall not elaborate on the precise sequence of events that made escape desirable, those events are, in several respects, still subject to the deliberations of parties whose interest in the matter I am not in a position to prejudice.