Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South

Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South
	English first edition cover
Author	Jules Verne
Original title	Nord contre Sud
Illustrator	Léon Benett
Country	France
Language	French
Series	The Extraordinary Voyages #30
Genre	Adventure novel
Publisher	Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Publication date	1887
Published in English	1887
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Preceded by	Robur the Conqueror
Followed by	The Flight to France

Last updated October 28, 2019

Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South (French : Nord contre Sud) is the full title of the English translation of the novel written by the French science-fiction author Jules Verne, and centers on the story of James Burbank, an antislavery northerner living near Jacksonville, Florida, and Texar, a pro-slavery southerner who holds a vendetta against Burbank. Originally published in France in 1887, the book received a tepid reaction upon its release in the United States, partly because of Verne's inexpertise regarding some details of the American Civil War, and has since fallen into obscurity compared to many of Verne's other works.

French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.

Abolitionism in the United States of America was the movement which sought to end slavery in the United States, active both before and during the American Civil War. In the Americas and western Europe, abolitionism was a movement which sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and set slaves free. In the 17th century, enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery on humanistic grounds and English Quakers and some Evangelical denominations condemned slavery as un-Christian. At that time, most slaves were Africans, but thousands of Native Americans were also enslaved. In the 18th century, as many as six million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them on British ships to North America. The colony of Georgia originally abolished slavery within its territory, and thereafter, abolition was part of the message of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s in the Thirteen Colonies.

Plot summary

Texar and Burbank are bitter enemies, Burbank's northern view of slavery as an evil being an unpopular stance with Texar and the rest of the community, deep in the Confederate States of America. On top of this disagreement, though, Texar is angry at Burbank for past legal troubles Burbank has brought upon Texar, and, despite Texar inventing a perfect alibi that allows him to escape conviction, Texar feels the need for vengeance and eventually becomes a prominent and powerful member of the Jacksonville community. Using this newfound power, Texar turns the townsfolk against Burbank and leads a mob that destroys the Burbank plantation, known as Camdless Bay. Burbank's daughter Dy and caretaker Zermah are both kidnapped by a man claiming to be Texar and are purportedly taken to a place in the Everglades called Carneral Island. En route, and after enlisting the help of the United States Navy, they find a separate group searching for Texar in response to crimes that apparently happened in the same time as the ones at Camdless Bay but in a distant location. This opens up the realization that there is one real Texar and one who is not, and the search continues now, not only for Dy and Zermah, but for the answer to this mystery.

The Confederate States of America — commonly referred to as the Confederacy — was an unrecognized republic in North America that existed from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy was originally formed by seven secessionist slave-holding states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—in the Lower South region of the United States, whose economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, particularly cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves. Convinced that the institution of slavery were threatened by the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, the Confederacy declared its secession in rebellion to the United States, with the loyal states becoming known as the Union during the ensuing American Civil War. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens described its ideology as being centrally based "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition".

The Everglades is a natural region of tropical wetlands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large drainage basin within the neotropic ecozone. The ecosystem it forms is not presently found anywhere else on earth. The system begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee. Water leaving the lake in the wet season forms a slow-moving river 60 miles (97 km) wide and over 100 miles (160 km) long, flowing southward across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state. The Everglades experience a wide range of weather patterns, from frequent flooding in the wet season to drought in the dry season. The Seminole Tribe gave the large body of water the name Okeechobee meaning "River of Grass" to describe the sawgrass marshes, part of a complex system of interdependent ecosystems that include cypress swamps, the estuarine mangrove forests of the Ten Thousand Islands, tropical hardwood hammocks, pine rockland, and the marine environment of Florida Bay. Throughout the 20th century, the Everglades suffered significant loss of habitat and environmental degradation.

United States Navy Naval warfare branch of US Armed Forces

The United States Navy (USN) is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most capable navy in the world and it has been estimated that in terms of tonnage of its active battle fleet alone, it is larger than the next 13 navies combined, which includes 11 U.S. allies or partner nations. It has the highest combined battle fleet tonnage and the world's largest aircraft carrier fleet, with eleven in service, and two new carriers under construction. With 336,978 personnel on active duty and 101,583 in the Ready Reserve, the U.S. Navy is the third largest of the U.S. military service branches in terms of personnel. It has 290 deployable combat vessels and more than 3,700 operational aircraft as of June 2019, making it the third-largest air force in the world, after the United States Air Force and the United States Army.

Publication history

Nord Contre Sud, the original French title of the book, was first published in its fully illustrated edition in November, 1887, by J. Hetzel et Cie, Paris.^[1] In the first American (and first English) translation, Nord Contre Sud (North Against South) was relegated to a subtitle and the book's title was made Texar's Vengeance, quickly re-translated as Texar's Revenge. This edition was published by George Munro, New York (1887), a translation by Laura E. Kendall as part of the "Seaside Library".^[2] Since then, however, there have been more minor variations on the title, some editions referring to the title as "The Texar's Revenge", others omitting the title completely in favor of the more simple "North Against South". The most common and generally most accepted American version of the title is the full "Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South". There have also been a handful of editions that have split the book into two volumes, those being "Burbank the Northerner" and "Texar the Southerner", both of which are contained in most editions of the book. Various cheap editions were published in the U.S. for the next 20 years by W. L. Allison, Hurst, and others.

The first fully illustrated edition in English was North against South published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, London, December 1887. This is a different anonymous translation from the one published by George Munro. In 2007 the first fully illustrated edition of North against South in the U.S. was published by the Choptank Press of St. Michaels, Maryland as a Lulu Press book,^[3] a replica re-publication of the Sampson Low first edition.^[4]

Quote

[In Jules Verne's] story of "Texar"... a very thin streak of narrative is padded to almost unwieldy proportions by a quantity of remarkably inaccurate information about the rebellion. If anyone thought the game worth the candle it would be easy to point out the various comical inaccuracies in the historical part of the story... [quoted in T&M^[2]]

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References

↑ Bibliographie Analaytique de Toutes les Oeuvres de Jules Verne. Paris: Société Jules Verne. 1977.
1 2 Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk Jr. (1996). The Jules Verne Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
↑ ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/sherwood/Verne-COLLECTOR-1.htm
↑ Jules Verne (2007). North against South. St. Michaels, MD: Choptank Press. printed by Lulu Press

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[1] Bibliographie Analaytique de Toutes les Oeuvres de Jules Verne. Paris: Société Jules Verne. 1977.

[taves-2] 1 2 Brian Taves and Stephen Michaluk Jr. (1996). The Jules Verne Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

[3] .org/pub/docs/books/sherwood/Verne-COLLECTOR-1.htm

[4] Jules Verne (2007). North against South. St. Michaels, MD: Choptank Press. printed by Lulu Press