Jules Verne may have been one of the first authors to popularize tales of extraordinary travel, but he wasn’t the first to explore the idea. Indeed, it seems likely that so long as humans have been able to dream, they have perused distant horizons and chased wild possibilities. Consider, for instance, The Odyssey, in which the title character gets by with a little help from the gods, with encounters of mythic proportions. For the present, consider a short sampling of other fantastical journeys:
The History of the Societies and Government of the Moon, Cyrano de Bergerac (1657)
Yes, that Cyrano de Bergerac, the Cyrano immortalized in Rostand’s play. The true Cyrano de Bergerac was just as fantastic as his fictional counterpart, proving time and again to be a real-life swashbuckler with a literary flair (among many other literary contributions, Cyrano wrote a sort of companion novel about the sun’s society). In Society and Government of the Moon, Cyrano utilized space travel and an active imagination to present a utopian society informed as much by Cyrano’s own whims as by the time’s philosophy. Consider, for instance, the fact that large noses are lauded in the Utopian moon society: “…we have observed, that a great Nose is the mark of a Witty, Courteous, Affable, Generous and Liberal man.” Anyone sporting an insufficient schnoz would be gelded in order to prevent further such specimens; Cyrano seems to have been a bit wishful, here.
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)
The famed account of Lemuel Gulliver is both a biting satire (characteristic of Swift’s work) and a truly fantastic romp. Phileas Fogg may have traveled around the world, but Gulliver managed to visit regions not to be found on any map or even in the minds of man. Gulliver’s voyage takes him from (among other stops) the nation of the famously tiny Lilliputians, to an island suspended in the sky, to a land inhabited by cultivated horses and the crude Yahoos. Each society is strange but also somehow familiar, and by the tale’s end, Gulliver has forsaken the ways of his old life to pattern himself after the intellectual equines.
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Rudolph Erich Raspe (1785)
Much like Phileas Fogg, Raspe’s Munchausen is a world-wide traveler. Yet Munchausen is another of the more fanciful adventurers: while Fogg is bound by practicality (every mode of transportation used in the book was available at the time), Munchausen defies all logic and law by traveling in the most fantastic of manners to America to Turkey to Africa, even to the moon (first by climbing a bean sprout, then via ship lifted through the air). Bidding adieu to logic, Munchausen also travels by fish and eagle, and is propelled out of a cannon. The tale is often known through Terry Gilliam’s successful and highly imaginative 1988 film version.
“The Great Balloon Hoax,” Edgar Allan Poe (1844)
On April 13, 1844, an article in the New York Sun announced that the manned airship Victoria had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a feat up to that point unaccomplished. The article detailed the particulars of the balloon itself and included segments from a journal kept by one of the fliers. Its extraordinary tale reportedly brought crowds clamoring for copies of the paper, and scores of people bought into a tale that was, in fact, a hoax. Edgar Allan Poe had penned and submitted the fake article, a thoroughly-researched working of his singular fancy. The affair was later designated “The Great Balloon Hoax,” and it would not be until 1919 that an airship managed to cross the Atlantic, from Europe to the U.S. (All right, so this one’s a bit of a cheat; it isn’t the most extraordinary of voyages, perhaps, but as it’s Poe’s bicentennial, we can throw him a nod.)
-Kristi
