Verne did not call the novel you know as In Search of the Castaways anything of the kind. He called it Les Enfants du capitaine Grant. The Children of Captain Grant.
A sweep of English search data finds effectively nothing under the French title, or its literal translation, and a real audience under the English one, which nobody in France has ever used.
That is the most complete title substitution in this cluster, and it sits alongside a second fact that explains it.
TV Tropes describes this as probably one of the best known and most loved Verne novels, and then adds a parenthesis: outside the English-speaking world.
Which is the whole situation. A novel that is standard reading across Europe, circulating in English under four different names and none of them the authorโs. Elsewhere the French title survives alongside the English one, argued over by editors. Here it has simply been replaced, to the point where the accurate translation now reads as a different book.
Disney did that. The 1962 film, with Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier, carried the title In Search of the Castaways to an audience no English translation of the novel ever reached, and the search data has looked like this ever since.
The pattern this belongs to, and who started it, is traced on my Jules Verne books guide.
Fiction by Renรฉ Rehn
What It Is
serialized 1867 to 1868 ยท Les Enfants du capitaine Grant
A bottle is recovered from a shark. Inside is a document, damaged by seawater, recording a shipwreck.
Enough of it survives to establish that Captain Grant is alive somewhere. Not enough to establish where.
What can be read is a latitude: thirty-seven degrees south. The longitude is gone.
So Lord Glenarvan takes Grantโs two children and his yacht and sets out to search the entire thirty-seventh parallel, all the way around the world, because that is the only fact they have.
And the premise is cleverer than that, which is the thing most summaries miss.
Grant wrote his message in three languages, and the surviving words are fragments of all three. Which means the document can be read more than one way, and across the novel it is reinterpreted repeatedly, each new reading making a different destination look likely.
So this is not a travelogue with a search bolted on. It is a detective novel where the evidence keeps changing meaning, and the geography is the consequence.
Patagonia. Tristan da Cunha. Amsterdam Island. Australia. New Zealand. Tabor Island.
Glenarvan had the Duncan built to take his new wife around the Mediterranean, and he turns it around for a strangerโs children on the strength of a torn piece of paper. That is the whole character in one decision.
Paganel, Who Invented a Type
French geographers exist in fiction because of this novel.
Jacques Paganel is Secretary of the Geographical Society of Paris and a corresponding member of eight more, in Berlin, Bombay, Darmstadt, Leipzig, London, St Petersburg, Vienna and New York. He has wanted to see India his whole life.
He joins the expedition by boarding the wrong ship.
He walked onto the Duncan while the crew were at church, believing it was his steamer to Calcutta, and did not discover his error for a day.
TV Tropes calls this novel the codifier of the absent-minded professor, which is a fair claim: Paganel is the model and almost every version since is a copy.
And his best moment is not comic. During the New Zealand chapters the Mฤori tattoo him extensively, and he is so embarrassed about it that he never goes back to France.
Ayrton, Who Is the Reason the Three Novels Are One Story
In Australia they find a man who says he was the Britanniaโs quartermaster and offers to guide them to the wreck.
He is lying. He was not there when the ship went down. He had been marooned in Australia after trying to seize it and turn pirate, and he now tries the same thing with the Duncan.
It fails, and he is taken prisoner, and then he does something unexpected.
He offers to trade what he genuinely knows about Captain Grant for one condition: that he be left on a desert island rather than handed to the British authorities.
The bargain is accepted. And the island he is left on is the same island where they find Grant.
That is where The Mysterious Island picks him up, years later, having spent them alone.
And It Is the One That Starts the Trilogy
This is the novel most readers meet last and Verne wrote first.
It ties into Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island through a character called Ayrton, who is marooned twice: on the Australian coast and then on Tabor Island, and who turns up on Lincoln Island in the later book.
So the three novels are one continuity, and the dates do not work. The chronology of The Mysterious Island contradicts this novel directly, and readers have been trying to reconcile them for a century and a half.
Where Ayrton reappears, and why the dates cannot be made to fit, is covered on my Mysterious Island page.
Four Overall Titles and Six Volume Subtitles
The title substitution described above is the headline, and underneath it the situation is worse.
In French it is Les Enfants du capitaine Grant.
In English it has appeared as In Search of the Castaways, as The Children of Captain Grant, as A Voyage Round the World and as Captain Grantโs Children.
And two of those were split into volumes with subtitles of their own.
George Routledge and Sons, 1876, issued it as three volumes under A Voyage Round the World, subtitled South America, Australia and New Zealand.
Ward, Lock and Co, the same year, issued it as three volumes under Captain Grantโs Children, subtitled The Mysterious Document, On the Track and Among the Cannibals.
So a secondhand shelf can hold this one novel under ten different pieces of wording, and Among the Cannibals gives no indication whatever of being a third of a book about a Scottish yacht.
No other title in this program is this badly served, and it is the reason the pageโs opening claim stands.
Which Edition
Weak, and the page will not pretend otherwise, but there is one thing to look for and it is not the translatorโs name.
Count the chapters. The French novel has seventy.
The 1874 Lippincott, which is the edition that put In Search of the Castaways into English in the first place, has sixty. The 1911 Charles F. Horne text, which turns up constantly in collected sets and cheap reprints, is a heavily abridged rewrite of somebody elseโs translation and runs to sixty-six. An ARCO edition from 1964 cut the Ward, Lock text down to two volumes. None of them says so on the cover.
So the abridgements are real and they are not childrenโs editions. They are ordinary-looking adult books with a tenth of the novel missing.
Of the old ones, the 1876 Routledge is the one usually named as the best, it is complete at seventy chapters, and its translator is unknown. Which is the whole Verne problem in one line: the best Victorian English text of a substantial novel is an anonymous one, recommended by process of elimination.
And there is now a modern alternative, which this page previously said did not exist. Don Sampleโs translation is unabridged and complete at seventy chapters, and it carries both names: The Children of Captain Grant: A Journey Around the World In Search of The Castaways. It is not a Butcher and there is no restoration project behind it, but it is a named modern translator working from the full text, which is more than this novel has had in English for a hundred and fifty years.
Where to Go Next
The author page is my Jules Verne books guide, the third book of the three has its page in my Mysterious Island guide, and the wider French shelf, ranked, is on the French novels list.
