Les Enfants du capitaine Grant Reading Order

Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1867-68) by Jules Verne is one of the most geographically comprehensive of his Voyages extraordinaires — a voyage around the world along the 37th parallel to find a shipwrecked Scottish captain named Grant, following clues found in a document inside a shark. The novel is structured as an education in global geography: the travellers (Grant's children Mary and Robert, Lord Glenarvan and his wife, and the unforgettable geographer Jacques Paganel) follow the 37th parallel through Patagonia, across the Andes, across Australia, across New Zealand, and eventually to the island of Tabor in the Pacific. Paganel — the absent-minded learned geographer who misread the document and sent them on their long journey in the first place, and who keeps making comic errors of observation and language throughout — is one of the great comic creations in French literature. The novel teaches its reader about South America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, and the indigenous peoples of all of those regions with the same combination of accuracy and enthusiasm that Verne brought to all his geographical fiction. The Captain Grant storyline is resolved in the Pacific; the ship Paganel and the castaways encountered becomes the ship of Cyrus Harding's castaways in L'Île mystérieuse.