The conquest of nature

In Cinq semaines en ballon, the novel that launches the Voyages extraordinaires in 1863, Jules Verne narrates the westward flight across Africa of his scientist-hero Dr Samuel Fergusson in search of the sources of the Nile. Fergusson is accompanied by a manservant called Joe, and by his friend Dick Kennedy. As is the case in so many of Verne's novels, we are confronted with two characters who are exact but inseparable opposites, for as the narrator tells us, ‘l'amitié ne saurait exister entre deux êtres parfaitement identiques’ (5S, p. 14) [‘friendship cannot exist between two perfectly identical beings’]. Where Fergusson is calm, measured and objective, Kennedy is volatile, eccentric and excitable. Fergusson is a man of the air, Kennedy a man of the earth. But the biggest difference between the two is in their attitude towards the environment. While Fergusson has an encyclopaedic knowledge that is the constant mark of his respect for the natural world, Kennedy is a plunderer who wilfully vandalises the terrain he passes through. Shooting almost everything in sight, he eats what he can and happily abandons what is not needed. The concepts of conservation and recycling have no place in his ideological arsenal. As for his arsenal of weapons, detailed early in the novel, we are assured that it is sufficient to cause destruction and havoc among whatever species of animals he will come across. When they fly low over Lake Chad, Kennedy sees the chance of adding a hippopotamus to his already substantial list of trophies. Fergusson attempts to call him to order: ‘il me semble que, sans parler du menu gibier, tu as déjà une antilope, un éléphant et deux lions sur la conscience’ [‘it seems to me that, without mentioning the small game, you already have an antelope, an elephant and two lions on your conscience’]. To this reasoned intervention – not without its echoes of Rabelais's famous ‘sans compter les femmes et petits enfants’ [‘without mentioning the women and little children’] – Kennedy retorts, showing that conscience is the least of his concerns: ‘Qu'est-ce que cela pour un chasseur africain qui voit passer tous les animaux de la création au bout de son fusil?’