The account which follows was first published in the New York Herald in the spring of 1868 and subsequently in a single volume that has passed through several printings. It was the work of a professional correspondent of twenty years’ experience, and it shows. It is well constructed. It is readable.
It contains everything a responsible editor at a major American newspaper in 1868 would have permitted to appear in print, and nothing he would not.
This is not that account.
What this is, is the private record. The notes and observations Spilett kept alongside the published one during two and a half years on Lincoln Island and in the months after the rescue.
The published account serves the story. The private record serves the truth. They are not always the same thing.
Why a private journal instead of a straight retelling?
Two reasons, and the first is simply how I write.
Very little of my fiction uses an outside narrator. It is a standing preference instead of a decision I made for this book, and I find an interior viewpoint more interesting to write and more interesting to read.
The second reason is specific to a correspondent, and the book turns on it. There is always a difference between what a reporter files and what a reporter keeps in his notes. Always. There are things that do not go in the public record, and the reasons vary, and none of them are recorded anywhere a reader can see.
Once you accept that, a Verne novel narrated from outside becomes something else entirely. It stops being the story and becomes the published version of the story. Then the obvious question arrives: what does the other version say.
What does a two-record premise do to a reader?
It changes what reading is, for the length of the book.
A normal historical novel asks you to accept the narrator. This one asks you to hold two versions at once, and to notice the shape of the gap between them. Every scene arrives with a question attached: what did the Herald get, and why was this the part that could not go in.
That is a demanding thing to ask, and it only works because the reader already knows the published account exists. Verne’s novel is famous. Most readers have some version of it in their heads, even if only the shape of it, and the prior knowledge holds up half the structure without my having to build it.
It also means the book can accuse without ever raising its voice. Spilett does not denounce his younger self. He simply records what he wrote and what he knew, side by side, and lets a reader do the arithmetic. A man explaining his own omissions is more damning than any narrator condemning him would be.
What did Spilett leave out?
The entire story of Neb.
His name is Nebuchadnezzar. He was called Neb. He was born in Cameroon and came to this continent by a passage that is not Spilett’s to describe. He was on the island for the same two and a half years as everybody else.
He was present in the published account on almost every page.
He is absent from it entirely.
That is the sentence the book is built around, and it is exactly the mechanism by which a person disappears from a narrative while appearing constantly in it. Neb is there in every scene, doing things, being loyal, being useful. He is never once in a sentence that matters. No interior life, no motive of his own, no moment where the narrative pauses to ask what he thought about any of it.
It is not done with malice. It happens through the ordinary operation of a narrative that knows, without being told, whose inner life is worth recording and whose is not.
Why could the truth not be printed?
Because of what the relationship between Neb and Cyrus Harding was.
It was close. Closer than the published account allows, and equal in ways the published account cannot represent. It was not sexual and nothing in the book suggests otherwise. It was a genuine bond between two men who had been through the same things.
In 1868, three years after the war, that was unpublishable.
Not the friendship in the abstract. The equality in it. A white engineer and a Black man on those terms, written plainly, would not have survived an editor at a major American newspaper, and Spilett knew it before he wrote a word.
So he wrote a loyal servant instead. Devoted, capable, always present, entirely flat. The version the readership could accept.
That is the thing the private record exists to correct, and correcting it required a book instead of a paragraph.
How do you write a character the original erased?
Carefully, and from outside.
I knew before I started that writing a Black Cameroonian’s interior life in 1865 was the hardest thing in this book. I did the historical research, the necessary part and the easy part to describe.
The harder decision was structural. I could have written the book from Neb’s point of view. That is the obvious modern correction and there is a version of this project that does it.
I chose not to, and I chose it deliberately.
Writing from an exterior viewpoint, a white man observing during an extremely biased and prejudiced period, meant I did not need to go inside Neb’s head and declare what he was thinking. That gave me distance as a writer and a certain amount of leeway to be wrong, because the errors belong to Spilett’s perception instead of to a claim about Neb’s interior.
I think that is more honest than the alternative. A white man in the twenty-first century writing a Black man’s inner life directly and presenting it as recovered truth is a larger claim than I am able to make. A white correspondent in 1868 admitting he has only the observable behavior and is inferring the rest is a claim I can stand behind.
What does the labeling do?
Spilett marks his own guesses, and it is the device I am most pleased with.
He says outright that he had access to Neb’s observable behavior and almost nothing of his interior life, which Neb kept with a discipline Spilett understood was not incidental. Where the record contains inference, it is labeled as inference. Where a conversation has been reconstructed from something Spilett was not present for, he says so. Where he is speculating, he says he is speculating.
That does two things at once.
It is true to what a correspondent’s private notes would look like, because a working reporter of twenty years distinguishes reflexively between what he saw and what he assembled.
And it keeps the book honest about its own limits. A reader is never told this is what Neb felt. A reader is told this is what one man observed and what he made of it, and the gap between those two is left open where it belongs.
The discipline Neb kept is itself part of the answer. A man in his position in 1865 who let his interior show would not have survived the surviving. That he gave Spilett almost nothing is the record.
What about Harding?
In the original he is a genius who is always right. Engineer, leader, solver of every problem the island presents.
The competence is real and I did not diminish it. What I added is the moral life underneath it, left unexamined in the published account.
He did something in the war. It was not examined then and he would prefer it not be examined now. The island does not give him that option, because two and a half years with the same five people and nowhere to go is not an environment in which a man gets to keep a thing sealed.
The racism of the original stays in this version and gets examined. Neb is still in the world that did what it did to him. Harding is still who he is. The gap between the published account and the truth is, in part, the gap that race makes in deciding who gets to be a full person on the page.
I tried to close that gap without pretending it was not there.
There is a content warning on this book and it means what it says. Slavery, Civil War violence, and the racism of 1865 written as it was.
That decision needs saying outright. A version of this project sands the period down until a modern reader is comfortable. That version lies about the century. The prejudice in Verne’s original is not the invention of a French novelist. It is the water everybody in 1865 was swimming in, and removing it would make the erasure of Neb inexplicable, since the erasure is a product of exactly that water.
So it stays, and it gets examined instead of excused. Those are different operations and only one of them is worth a reader’s time.
Why add Magdalena Vasquez?
Because the story needs a woman.
Verne’s island has five men on it and no one else. That choice made sense to him and does not make sense now. Magdalena is a New Mexican widow, she is not in the original at all, and she reads men like Harding faster than any of them read her.
What she does structurally is give the book somebody with no stake in the published version. The others were all there and all have reasons to prefer the story as told. She does not, and a character with nothing invested in the official account is the most useful person you can put in a room.
How does this fit with the other Verne books?
Verne wrote three that connect, and I have now done all three.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Nemo’s book. This one is the island. Eurydice is Ayrton’s confession.
The relationship between this book and Eurydice is closer than a reading order suggests. Eurydice overlays this one. The events of that book happen and run straight into this one, with real overlap between them, a consequence of Verne having written characters who cross between volumes and of my having taken that seriously instead of treating each as standalone.
The Time Machine sits alongside them in the same Victorian Reimagined group, though Wells stands on his own.
The architecture in all four is Victorian and it holds. What was wrong was the population.
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