Imaginary Worlds in Literature: The Map of the Mysterious Island

Inspired by the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe in 1719, Jules Verne published The Mysterious Island in 1874. In the middle of the Civil War, a group of confederates escape by balloon from a Confederate camp; caught in a storm, they crash-land on a desert island in the middle of the South Pacific on which, with the help of Captain Nemo, they establish a small self-sufficient community. With great skill, Jules Verne mixes fiction with all the scientific knowledge of his time. The coordinates of the island, named in honour of the American president Abraham Lincoln, locate it precisely in the middle of the South Seas. Everything — the accuracy of the map, and the precision of the cartographic rendering, with its detailed coastline, foliage and relief — helps give flesh and substance to the fiction. At the same time the author, by giving his island the shape of a shark opening wide its jaws, communicates to the reader the threat that this territory holds in store for the people who have just run aground there.