Other editions of book Godfrey Morgan A Californian Mystery

A tale about life’s adventures and friendship. "Nothing is impossible to an intelligent man!"- T. Artelett Godfrey Morgan and Professor T. Artelett embark on a round-the-world ocean voyage. They cast away on a remote island, as their ship gets wrecked, and there they rescue and befriend Carefinotu, an African slave.,This book has been professionally formatted for e-readers and contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. For more great book club picks, check out : http://amzn.to/1A7cKKl Find all our our books for Kindle here: http://amzn.to/1PooxLl Sign up for the Xist Publishing Newsletter here.

Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery (French: L'École des Robinsons, literally The School for Robinsons), also published as School for Crusoes, is an 1882 adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne.[1] It tells of a young adventurer, Godfrey Morgan, and his deportment instructor, Professor T. Artelett, who embark on a round-the-world ocean voyage. Their ship is wrecked and they are cast away on a remote island, where they rescue and befriend an African slave, Carefinotu.

*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author). *An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience. *This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors. Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery (French: L'École des Robinsons, literally The School for Robinsons), also published as School for Crusoes, is an 1882 adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne. The novel tells of a wealthy young man, Godfrey Morgan who, with his deportment instructor, Professor T. Artelett, embark from San Francisco, California on a round-the-world ocean voyage. They are cast away on an uninhabited Pacific island where they must endure a series of adversities. Later they encounter an African slave, Carefinotu, brought to the island by cannibals. In the end, the trio manage to work together and survive on the island.The novel is a robinsonade—a play on Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.

The scene is in San Francisco, the capital of California, but not at the period when the placer-mining fever was raging—from 1849 to 1852. San Francisco was no longer what it had been then, a caravanserai, a terminus, an inn, where for a night there slept the busy men who were hastening to the gold-fields west of the Sierra Nevada. At the end of some twenty years the old unknown Yerba-Buena had given place to a town unique of its kind, peopled by 100,000 inhabitants, built under the shelter of a couple of hills, away from the shore, but stretching off to the farthest heights in the background—a city in short which has dethroned Lima, Santiago, Valparaiso, and every other rival, and which the Americans have made the queen of the Pacific, the "glory of the western coast!" It was the 15th of May, and the weather was still cold. In California, subject as it is to the direct action of the polar currents, the first weeks of this month are somewhat similar to the last weeks of March in Central Europe. But the cold was hardly noticeable in the thick of the auction crowd. The bell with its incessant clangour had brought together an enormous throng, and quite a summer temperature caused the drops of perspiration to glisten on the foreheads of the spectators which the cold outside would have soon solidified. Do not imagine that all these folks had come to the auction-room with the intention of buying. I might say that all of them had but come to see. Who was going to be mad enough, even if he were rich enough, to purchase an isle of the Pacific, which the government had in some eccentric moment decided to sell? Would the reserve price ever be reached? Could anybody be found to work up the bidding? If not, it would scarcely be the fault of the public crier, who tried his best to tempt buyers by his shoutings and gestures, and the flowery metaphors of his harangue. People laughed at him, but they did not seem much influenced by him.

Jules Verne's cyclopedic fancy this time finds scope for its vagaries in the Californian Eldorado, among the millionaires of absolutely limitless resources, who, the French romancer would have us believe, form a large class of the population around the Golden Gate. Nevertheless, the story is of the Crusoe order, and is concerned with the adventures of the restless young Californian, Godfrey Morgan, and his companion, the dancing-master, Tartlet, upon a strange island where they have been wrecked. The story is one of the most amazing efforts of Verne's genius, and certainly lacks neither interest nor amusement. The illustrations are very numerous and equal the text in force and character.

The narrative begins with the auction by the US Government of fictional Spencer Island, located 460 miles off the California coast (3215 N 145 18 W). The island is uninhabited and there are only two bidders, William W. Kolderup, a very wealthy San Franciscan, and his arch-rival J. R. Taskinar, a resident of Stockton, California. Kolderup wins the auction, buying Spencer Island for four million dollars. J. R. Taskinar mutters, I will be avenged! before retiring to his hotel.