Around the World in Eighty Days, Chapters Thirty-One to Thirty-Three

In which the detective, Fix, takes seriously in charge Phileas Fogg's interests; Phileas Fogg engages in a direct struggle with ill luck; Phileas Fogg shows himself equal to circumstances; and in which our narrator cannot for the life of him decide on a regional accent for the sea captain, despite him being found in the narrator's own home state.



Onwards across the frozen prairies! We'll just skate -- ha, skate -- past most of the US in the last few of these eighty days. Almost there!

4:20 - "The travelers took their places and wrapped
themselves closely in their traveling cloaks."

8:28 - "Sometimes, also, prairie wolves... vied with the sledge in swiftness."

The prairie wolves mentioned above are not actually wolves at all, but are in fact coyotes. Oddly, I never really thought about coyotes being pack animals, despite being canids. I always pictured them as being solitary hunters, which I can probably blame entirely on Chuck Jones.*

I do apologize for my little confused interjection around 10:31 upon reading "Chicago, already risen from its ruins," which I originally read as being a really unnecessary slam on Chicago. As I figured out halfway through my own sentence, though, it is of course actually a reference to the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, the year before the story takes place. This is the fire that has traditionally been blamed on Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern in her barn, though a newspaper reporter admitted that he made the whole story up. The exact cause of the fire remains unknown.

You may have caught at about 17:26 that Phileas Fogg briefly considers taking a balloon across the Atlantic, but immediately dismisses the idea as impracticable. Despite the fact that the hot-air balloon is indelibly associated with this story, featuring prominently in all adaptations and even appearing on book covers (including the one I'm using right now!), this is the only mention of hot-air balloons in the entire book.

27:47 - "'Pirate!' cried Andrew Speedy."

30:28 - "The crew displayed an incredible zeal."

33:12 - "'I arrest you in the name of the Queen!'"

And now, with Phileas Fogg back on English soil with mere hours to spare but taken into custody, we're barreling to our conclusion. Come back next time for the final installment!


If you would like to read along, my translation by Stephen W. White can be found courtesy of Choptank Press on Google Books. If you prefer one of the other options, the George Towle translation can be found at Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, which is also where I got the illustrations, or the more accurate but rather fusty Henry Frith translation can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!


*I find it hilarious that in the "Diet and hunting" section of that coyote Wikipedia article they note that "Though the coyote is the basis for the character of Wile E. Coyote... [in the cartoons] about the Road Runner, coyotes have not been known as yet to successfully attack greater roadrunners for prey." I mean, they've yet to do it successfully in the cartoons, either. [back]