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Jules Verne.

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Beschreibung

In one of his best-known books, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne described how a group of men in The Gun Club of Baltimore used a giant cannon to send a spacecraft to the moon. Now, in this sequel, the gun is brought into use again to achieve an equally ambitious aim - to tilt the earth's axis so that the North Pole is displaced to the Tropics. The plotters believe there are limitless resources of coal at the North Pole and their cunning plan will allow them to exploit these resources to become rich. In spite of its disregard for anything approaching scientific plausibility, this enjoyable book has a modern resonance in a world in which conserving energy is increasingly important, and the dangers of climate change - one huge consequence if the Gun Club's plot succeeds - are daily in the forefront of the news.

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The Earth Turned Upside Down

Jules Verne

Translated by Sophie Lewis

Contents

Title Page

Foreword by Ian Fells

The Earth Turned Upside Down

I In Which The ‘North Polar Exploitation Society’ Sends Out A Communiqué To Both East And West

II In Which The Reader Meets The English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish And Russian Delegates

III In Which The Arctic Is Put Up For Auction

IV In Which Old Acquaintances Resurface

V But First, Is There Really Coal At The North Pole?

VI In Which A Telephone Conversation Between Mrs Scorbitt And J-T Maston Is Interrupted

VII In Which President Barbicane Says No More Than It Suits Him To Say

VIII The President Of The Gun Club Said ‘Just Like Jupiter’?

IX In Which We Sense The Approach Of A Deus Ex Machina Made In France

X In Which A Few Anxieties Begin To Surface

XI What Is And What Is No Longer In J-T Maston’s Notebook

XII In Which J-T Maston Persists In His Heroic Silence

XIII At The End Of Which J-T Maston Makes A Truly Epic Reply

XIV Very Brief, But In Which Place ‘X’ Gains A Geographical Value

XV Which Contains Some Genuinely Interesting Details For The Earth’s Inhabitants

XVI In Which The Chorus Of Unhappy People Both Crescendoes And Rinforzandoes

XVII What Happened At Kilimanjaro Over Eight Months Of This Memorable Year

XVIII In Which The People Of The Wamasai Await President Barbicane’s Command For Captain Nicholl To ‘Fire!’

XIX In Which J-T Maston Looks Back Rather Fondly On The Time When The Mob Was Out To Lynch Him

XX Which Concludes This Curious Tale, As True As It Is Unlikely

XXI Very Short But Entirely Reassuring As To The Future Of Our Planet

Biographical note

Acknowledgements

Selected Titles from Hesperus Press

Copyright

FOREWORD

Jules Verne, with his science-based adventure stories, was at the height of his powers and reputation when he wrote Sans dessus dessous, titled, in this translation, The Earth Turned Upside Down, in 1889. He had written about space, air and underwater travel in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days; they were known collectively as Les Voyages Extraordinaires. Here, in The Earth Turned Upside Down, he ventures into what is known, fashionably in 2012, as geoengineering. This latest book is almost frightening in its prescience, following From the Earth to the Moon, in which three members of the Gun Club of Baltimore were fired from a giant cannon, circled the moon and returned to splash down in the sea in an aluminium capsule. (This anticipated the American landing on the moon by almost a hundred years.) In The Earth Turned Upside Down, The Gun Club members, led by Mr J-T Maston, propose to use the same idea of a giant cannon, aided by Newton’s Laws of Motion, to spin the earth in such a way that it would tilt on its axis and the North Pole would be moved to the 67th parallel and enjoy temperate weather; the ice would melt and make accessible extensive coal seams. There was concern in the late nineteenth century that coal reserves might move into short supply; this worry is still with us today with the fear that both world oil and coal supplies have peaked.

Impey Barbicane, president of the Baltimore Gun Club, proposes that The North Polar Exploitation Association be set up for the purpose of auctioning the land between 84 degrees north and the North Pole, comprising an area one tenth that of Europe, to the highest bidder. The lucky winner could thus accrue enormous wealth by exploiting the coal. Of course finance is required and Mr Maston is fortunate in having an admirer, Mrs Evangelina Scorbitt, a wealthy American widow, to provide funds for the venture. And so the Americans beat off the Europeans to buy the North Pole and surrounding 407,000 square miles (at 200 cents per square mile), and the North Polar Exploitation Association readies itself for the great experiment.

Jules Verne captures the tremendous confidence of the Victorian entrepreneurs. In Great Britain there were Armstrong, Parsons, Swan, and George and Robert Stephenson. They transformed power generation, armaments, lighting and travel. In France, Eiffel built his spectacular tower in Paris and many impressive bridges. In America, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and, independently from Swan, the incandescent electric light bulb; Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and initiated the communication explosion. They were men of enormous imagination and also men of action. They did not go cap-in-hand to governments for grants to support their work; they got on, raised the money by public subscription and made, and lost, fortunes.

Verne had already written Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863), an account of a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, calculators and a worldwide communication network. There was universal enthusiasm for science and technology. The World Fair was held in Paris in 1889 and Jules Verne then turned his hand to the perceived impending world shortage of coal but, more importantly, to making money. In The Earth Turned Upside Down, Impey Barbicane, Captain Nicholl and J-T Maston, the stalwarts of the Baltimore Gun Club, stand to make a great deal of money from their venture. However, their enormous enthusiasm for the project causes them to ride roughshod over the attendant dangers of their experiment in geoengineering: the possibility of huge sea level changes as a result of the effects of the huge explosion of the cannon, primed with the new explosive ‘dyna-mix’, and the resulting destabilizing effect on the world’s climate.

Today, in the twenty-first century, over a hundred years later, we are only just discussing geoengineering possibilities, such as pouring huge amounts of finely divided iron into the South Pacific to stimulate a gigantic algal bloom, which would mop up carbon dioxide and postpone global warming. Or putting thousands of satellites into geostationary orbit to capture the sun’s rays, convert them into electricity and beam the energy down to earth as microwaves. We could tap into heat from the centre of the earth, or collect energy from the great water flows in the sea, such as the Gulf Stream, where five cubic miles of water flow past the tip of Florida every second. But would such a venture change the circulation pattern of water in the Atlantic Ocean and would Great Britain finish up with a climate much the same as St Petersburg? Some of these propositions would have been grist to Verne’s mill.

It is tempting to speculate as to what Jules Verne would turn his hand to today if he were still writing science fiction. The genre has moved on into strange territory, stimulated by the prospect of lucrative film and television rights. His own nineteenth-century books and writings have been made into outstanding films; Round the World in Eighty Days was a great success. But would he have ventured into the world of aliens, wars amongst the stars as H.G. Wells did, or into the dark worlds of magic and evil, with the violent overtones of today’s science fiction? The internet would have excited his imagination with its explosion of information storage and retrieval. But his work was predicated on nineteenth-century hunger for things scientific or technological. He would have ample scope with topics such as dark matter, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, manipulation of the weather machine and new ways of generating electricity (perhaps ‘cold fusion’ would have grabbed his attention). Or would he have projected forward to a time when we can control gravity and harness the unbelievable gravitational fields which surround black holes? A Gravity Amplifier would make space travel more possible; even something approaching a perpetual motion machine could be envisaged. The laws of physics are under threat with suggestions that Einstein might be wrong with his insistence on the immutable speed of light, and what of the Higgs Boson?

Had the proposal to change the tilt of the earth in favour of the North Pole so that it would have a temperate climate succeeded, the investors in the company would have been disappointed. There are no coal seams under the North Pole. However a consequence of the monumental change in the world’s tilt would also have been to make Antarctica a temperate region as well as the Arctic and it is now known that coal and other minerals are present in abundance underneath the South Pole.

The twists and turns of the story as Jules Verne tells it are fascinating; they involve greed, hubris, arrogance, errors in calculation and love. The tale bears a number of morals for our time.

Logic will get you from A to B but imagination will take you everywhere – Albert Einstein.

– Professor Ian Fells, 2012

The Earth Turned Upside Down

I

IN WHICH THE ‘NORTH POLAR EXPLOITATION SOCIETY’ SENDS OUT A COMMUNIQUE TO BOTH EAST AND WEST

‘So, Mr Maston, you claim that women were incapable of ever advancing either the mathematical or the experimental sciences?’

‘I’m afraid that is what I am forced to think, Mrs Scorbitt,’ said J-T Maston. ‘It’s certainly the case that there have been, and even are now, a few astonishing lady mathematicians, particularly in Russia. But, with the type of brains females have, no woman could ever become an Archimedes or still less a Newton.’

‘Oh, Mr Maston! I protest in the name of our sex…’

‘A sex that is all the more delightful, Mrs Scorbitt, by virtue of its unsuitability for metaphysical studies.’

‘So according to you, Mr Maston, on seeing an apple fall, no woman could have discovered the laws of gravity, as did the well-known seventeenth-century English scientist.’

‘On seeing an apple fall, Mrs Scorbitt, a woman’s only thought would be…to eat it. Thus following the example of our mother Eve!’

‘Really? So you mean to deny that we have any aptitude for elevated thought…’

‘Any aptitude? Not so, Mrs Scorbitt. And yet, I would point out that, since men have populated the Earth – and women too, as a result – no one has yet discovered a female brain equal to that of Aristotle, or Euclid or Kepler or Laplace, in the field of science.’

‘So that’s your whole argument, that the past must always determine the future?’

‘I’ve no doubt that whatever has not happened in thousands of years will never happen…’

‘Well, I shall have to take up our cause, Mr Maston, and we really are not good…’

‘For anything but being good!’ replied J-T Maston.

This was said with the all the gallantry of a scientist fairly drunk with Xs and Ys. And Mrs Evangelina Scorbitt was quite prepared to make do with it.

‘Indeed Mr Maston!’ She went on, ‘To each his role in life. You have to be the extraordinary mathematician that you are and give yourself over to the problems presented by this immense project which occupies every waking moment for you and your friends. I shall be the “good woman” that is my role, and provide financial assistance…’

‘For which we owe you our eternal gratitude,’ replied J-T Maston.

Mrs Evangelina Scorbitt blushed delicately, for she felt – if not for all scientists, at least for J-T Maston – a truly unusual sympathy. The heart of a woman is not always easy to understand.

The project to which this rich American widow had resolved to donate substantial resources was truly immense. It covered the following Arctic territories:

According to Maltebrun, Reclus, Saint-Martin and the most authoritative geographers, the Arctic territories proper include:

1. Northern Devon, i.e. the ice-covered islands in Baffin Bay and the Lancaster Sound;

2. Northern Georgia, made up of the Banks region and a mass of islands, including the islands of Sabine, Byam-Martin, Griffith, Cornwallis and Bathurst;

3. The Baffin-Parry archipelago, including many sections of the circumpolar continent, among them: Cumberland, Southampton, James-Sommerset, Boothia-Felix, Melville, and others largely unknown.

Taken as a piece, the land encompassed by the 78th parallel extends over 1,400,000 square miles and the seas over 700,000 square miles.

Within this boundary, modern explorers have advanced right up to the edge of latitude 84°, discovering a number of coasts previously hidden behind the lofty chain of ice floes, naming the headlands, promontories, gulfs and bays of these vast lands, which we may call the Scottish Highlands of the Arctic. But beyond that 84th parallel, all is mystery, the unattainable focus of the cartographers’ desire, and none can yet tell if, in that six-degree stretch, it is land or sea that is concealed by the impenetrable towers of ice at the northern Pole.

Now, in the year 1890, the government of the United States proposed, rather surprisingly, that the uncharted circumpolar regions be put up for auction – regions which an American society, recently formed for the purpose of securing the Arctic icecap, were looking to possess.

Some years ago, it is true, the Berlin Conference drew up a law to regulate those Great Powers which sought to appropriate the property of others in the name of colonisation or of the opening-up of new trade routes. Yet the law did not appear to apply in this case, since the polar region was entirely uninhabited. Nevertheless, since you could say that what belongs to nobody belongs equally to everybody, the newly formed society didn’t seek to ‘take’ but to ‘acquire’ the land, in order to head off future objections.

In America, there is no project so audacious – or even plain impossible – that there aren’t people who appreciate its practical aspects and provide funds to set it in motion. This was shown clearly a few years ago when the Baltimore Gun Club attempted to send a projectile to the Moon, in the hope of establishing direct communication with our satellite. It was Americans who provided the large sums to fund this interesting experiment. And two members of the Gun Club who took all the risks.

If a Count Lesseps, for example, should propose one day to dig a deep canal right across Europe and Asia, from the shores of the Atlantic through to the seas of China; if a well-digger should offer to drill down to the strata of silicates that lie in a liquid state above the molten iron, in order to draw heat from the very heart of our Earth’s central fire; if an enterprising electrical engineer should wish to combine all the electric currents that are dispersed across the Earth’s surface, and so create an inexhaustible source of light and heat; if a bold scientist should think of storing up the excess heat of our summers in vast receptacles, to release in the coldest area during the winter; if a hydraulics specialist should attempt to harness the power of the tides to produce either heat or energy; if societies or business partnerships be founded to bring to fruition a hundred projects of this sort – it is Americans who will be there, leading the subscriptions and raising the share capital, and rivers of dollars will flow into the communal coffers, just as the great rivers of North America are absorbed back into the deep oceans.

So it was of some concern to the general public when the surprise news broke that the Arctic was to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. What’s more, there was no opportunity for the public to invest because the capital had already been raised. The actual use to be made of the Arctic was not to be revealed until it was in the possession of the new purchasers.

Exploiting the Arctic at all seemed a mad idea, on the basis of what was known about that barren area. And yet, no project could have been more serious.

Indeed, a letter was sent to the newspapers of all continents, to the European, African, Oceanian and Asiatic gazettes as well as to the American papers. It ended by calling for a survey of all the advantages and disadvantages on behalf of all interested parties. The New York Herald was first with this scoop. In the 7th November edition, Gordon Bennett’s subscribers found the following announcement which then flew rapidly around the worlds of academia and commerce, to a mixed reception.

A Notice to all inhabitants of the Earth:

The regions of the North Pole, located within latitude 84° North, have not yet been exploited, since they have not yet been properly explored.

In fact, the furthest latitudes reached by explorers of different nationalities are the following:

82°45’, reached by the Englishman William Parry in July 1847, on the 28th meridian West, North of Spitzberg;

83°20’28, reached by Albert Markham of Sir George Nares’ English expedition of May 1876, at the 50th meridian West, North of Grinnell Land;

83°35’, reached by Lockwood and Brainard, of Lieutenant Greely’s American expedition in May 1882, on the 42nd meridian West, North of Nares Land.

We are therefore justified in treating the region that extends from the 84th parallel up to the Pole, for a distance of six degrees, as a territory jointly held in trust by the nations of the Earth, and available to be converted into private property, after a fair public sale.

According to the principles of the law, no property should be without an owner. Consequently, in accordance with these principles, the United States of America has resolved to supervise the reassignment of this region.

A society has been established in Baltimore, under the corporate title of the North Polar Exploitation Association, as the official representative of the United States. This society proposes to acquire the above-mentioned territory, under the appropriate legal conditions, along with absolute proprietorial rights over the continents, islands, islets, rocks, seas, lakes, rivers, streams and all other waterways in general, of which the Arctic is currently composed, whether or not they be covered with perpetual ice-floes, and whether or not they are freed of this ice during the summer season.

It is expressly stated that this proprietorial right may not be annulled, even in the event of modifications – whatever their nature – occurring in the geographical or meteorological state of the Earth.

This Notice being brought to the attention of the inhabitants of both Old and New Worlds, all states are invited to take part in the auction, and the property will then be awarded to the highest final bidder.

The auction will be held on the 3rd December this year in the Auction Rooms in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States of America.

All further enquiries to William S. Forster, acting agent for the North Polar Exploitation Association, 93 High Street, Baltimore.

While the substance of this announcement might seem a piece of madness, it laid out its terms in clarity and directness. In any case, as a testimony of its seriousness, the American government had already granted the Arctic territories to the new society, in anticipation of an eventual owner buying it at auction.

But public opinion was divided. Some saw in it a typical example of American humbug, one which would break all previous records for self-promotion. Others thought that the proposition ought to be taken seriously. These pointed out that the new society was making no demands on the public’s pockets, hoping instead to acquire these northern regions solely with its own funds. It was not looking to grab the dollars, banknotes, or gold and silver of any gullible members of the public to fill its coffers. It was merely asking to be allowed to purchase the circumpolar property with its own resources.

To lawyers, it seemed that the society need only plead the right of first occupant, then simply take possession of the land whose sale it was now encouraging. But there lay the problem, for, up to that day, no human had set foot on the Polar territories. Therefore, if the United States should try to sell this land, the buyer would require a watertight legal contract, so that nobody could later challenge the transaction. It would be unfair to blame either party for this. They were proceeding prudently and, when it comes to making commitments in an affair of this kind, one cannot take too many legal precautions.

Besides, the announcement included a clause guarding against unforeseeable future factors. This clause might give rise to a number of contradictory interpretations, for its precise meaning escaped even the subtlest minds. It was the last phrase, stipulating that ‘this proprietorial right may not be annulled, even in the event that modifications – whatsoever their nature – occur in the geographical or meteorological state of the Earth.’

What could this sentence mean? What eventuality was it intended to anticipate? In what way might the Earth undergo a modification that would affect its geography or meteorology – particularly given the nature of the land put up for auction?

‘Of course,’ said the more astute, ‘there must be something behind it!’

It was therefore a field day for competing interpretations, a fine occasion for some to exercise their perspicacity and others their curiosity.

First, the Philadelphia Ledger published this note: ‘Their calculations have no doubt revealed to the future purchasers of the Arctic regions that a comet with a solid core is due to crash into the Earth and that its impact will produce the geographical and meteorological changes referred to in the clause.’ The sentence clarified nothing. Moreover, serious thinkers dismissed the likelihood of a comet crashing like this. In any case, the American purchasers would never be concerned by such a hypothetical eventuality.

‘Could it be, perhaps,’ the New Orleans Delta wrote, ‘that the new Society imagines the precession of the equinoxes might at some time produce alterations favourable to the development of its property?’

‘And why not, since this movement affects the alignment of the earth’s axis?’ remarked the Hamburger Correspondent.

‘Indeed,’ responded the Revue Scientifique in Paris, ‘did Adhémar not propose, in his volume on The Revolutions of the Sea, that the precession of the equinoxes combined with the centennial shifting of the Earth’s orbit, would be sufficient to cause a long-term modification in the average temperature of different points on the Earth and in the quantities of ice accumulated at its two poles?’

‘That is unconfirmed,’ retorted the Edinburgh Review. ‘And if it happened to be correct, wouldn’t it take 12,000 years for Vega to become our pole star after the event, and therefore for the position of the Arctic territories to undergo climate change?’

‘Well then,’ replied the Dagblad in Copenhagen, ‘in 12,000 years, it will be time to pour in the funds. But until that day, risk a krone on it – never!’

Still, while the Revue Scientifique may have been right about Adhémar, it was actually quite unlikely that the North Polar Exploitation Association had ever relied on such an effect of equinoctial precession.

In fact, no one came up with a plausible meaning for the clause, with its hints of future cosmic alterations.

It might have been possible to find out more by approaching the new society’s governing board and, more particularly, its president. But the president was unknown, as were the secretary and all the members of the board. No one even knew who had sent the letter. It had been brought to the offices of the New York Herald by a certain William S. Forster of Baltimore, a codfish trader for the firm of Ardrinell & Co., of Newfoundland – obviously a straw man. He was as silent on the subject as the goods sold in his shops, and so the most persuasive and inquisitive reporters could extract nothing from him. In short, this North Polar Exploitation Association was so anonymous that no name could be connected with it. Which is indeed the ultimate anonymity.

Nevertheless, while the promoters of the project persisted in keeping their character veiled in mystery, their aim was exactly as stated in the announcement published worldwide.

As it happened, their aim was indeed to acquire sole ownership of the area covered by the Arctic regions, as demarcated by the 84th degree of latitude, which has the North Pole at its centre.

This was because, of the modern explorers, those who had come closest to this inaccessible spot – Parry, Markham, Lockwood and Brainard – had all stopped short of that parallel. In the area they chose to purchase, the North Polar Exploitation Association would impinge on no previous explorations. It was aiming for territory untouched by humankind.

It was a large area. From 84° to 90° is six degrees’ distance, which, at sixty miles per degree, gives a radius of 360 miles and a diameter of 720 miles. So the circumference is 2,260 miles and the surface area about 407,000 square miles. That makes it about a tenth of the continent of Europe – a fair-sized plot.

The communiqué also put forward the idea that these regions, as yet unlabelled by geography, by not belonging to anyone belonged to everyone. The expectation was that the majority of the Great Powers would not dream of complaining about this. But for the states bordering the regions, there might be more at stake. They could consider the land an extension of their northern possessions and so might insist upon proprietorial rights. And anyway, their claims could be all the more justified since the discoveries made so far in the Arctic lands had been due specifically to the bravery of their countrymen. In view of this, the American government, as represented by the new society, advised them to submit their claims and promised to compensate them to the value of the acquisition. Nevertheless, the association’s supporters continued to insist that the property was unallocated and so no one had a right to oppose the auctioning of the North Pole and its surroundings.