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(51) Bourses de voyage (Travel Scholarships, 1903) (2 volumes) 90K words


The fifty-first Extraordinary Voyage takes us on a tour of the West Indies. This sea adventure is also considered the last of the four Extraordinary Voyages to have boys as the main character (the others being "Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen", "Two Years' Vacation" and "Foundling Mick"), although in this case the boys are seventeen or older.


First read or reread?: This is a reread for me. This one was not among my favorites when I read it as a kid.


What is it about?: The Antilian School is a renowned London school, which hosts only European boys born in the Caribbean. Nine of its students are to be awarded travel grants offered by the school's sponsor, a wealthy Barbados woman. Meanwhile, Harry Markel, a former captain turned pirate, has been captured and transferred to England, but he escapes along with his right-hand man John Carpenter and the rest of his accomplices – known collectively as the "Pirates of the Halifax". The pirates end up seizing the Alert, a three-masted ship waiting in port, after massacring its captain and crew. It is precisely the ship that's just about to embark the scholarship winners, accompanied by their mentor Horatio Patterson, the bursar of the school. Markel's intention is to murder his passengers and use the ship to go back to a life of piracy, but on learning that the students are also going to be awarded a cash prize, he decides to wait and play the role of a honest ship's captain, until the boys are given those awards, so that he can also steal that money.


This was published just two years before Verne's death, and although you could argue that there was a certain decline in the last part of his career, in this novel the decline is much more marked, to the point that I would not recommend Travel Scholarships except to Verne completists. This does not necessarily mean that the remaining books are all going to be disappointing since, for example, Master of the World, which would be published the following year, is generally well-regarded.

But there will be time for that later. For the moment, let's go back to this novel. What's wrong with it is not the premise. The idea would make for a tense adventure. Unfortunately, Verne does not develop the idea in a compelling manner. He concentrates on the description of the West Indies islands that the boys visit as part of their travel program, but he does not do so with his usual charm, ending up with a dull travelogue, and he forgets to develop the plot at the same time. I would have expected some incidents to happen, and some of the characters to start becoming suspicious, but mostly nothing happens until we get to the final part.

Most of the characters are not developed either, with the exception of Mr. Patterson, the adult mentor accompanying the boys, who is an ineffectual comic relief figure, and to a certain extent Tony Renault, the jokester among the boys. Then, when the time comes for the story to reach its climax, the leading role is not taken by any of those characters, but by a new one, just introduced.

All in all, a disappointing addition to the series. Clearly Verne, by then plagued by health problems, was not at his best.


Enjoyment factor: I found this one disappointing. It follows a familiar Verne formula, mixing adventure and geographic descriptions, but the usual life and inspiration is missing. Maybe I have made it sound a bit worse than it is... it's not offensively bad, just bland and kind of boring, which is a pity considering that the premise is full of danger and possibilities for a tense plot.


Next up: A Drama in Livonia