The Island of Doctor Moreau. Герберт Уэллс
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу The Island of Doctor Moreau - Герберт Уэллс страница 3

Название: The Island of Doctor Moreau

Автор: Герберт Уэллс

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Классическая проза

Серия:

isbn: 9780008190064

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ inspired in part by the work of Charles Darwin, there was also much intellectual debate about the possibility of human devolution – a slide backwards into brutishness rather than towards perfection – which was fast becoming a subject of particular interest to H. G. Wells. His first novel, The Time Machine, had imagined a future in which mankind had split into two separate but equally despicable species. Now, in a wry nod to his own position as an observer of human degeneration, Wells imbued The Island’s helpless narrator, Edward Prendick, with certain autobiographical details. Upon meeting Dr Moreau, Prendick announces that he ‘had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley’.

      The great problem for both Prendick and Wells, however, is that human devolution, once seen for what it is, cannot be unseen. Prendick returns to so-called civilisation in ‘well-nigh insupportable’ horror at his fellow men, whom he can no longer view as anything other than animals in temporary disguise. ‘It seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature,’ Prendick mourns, ‘but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone.’

      Paradise Lost

      For all the dystopian horror of his most famous novels, Wells was, in his predictions for mankind’s future, an optimist – initially, at least. He felt at heart that humanity was on the brink of something wonderful. His 1901 work Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought set out a vision of the future in which warfare was obsolete, nations having synthesised into large peaceful blocs that treated one another with ‘intelligent sympathy’. He predicted that, by the end of the twentieth century, this social revolution would have forever assured ‘the final peace of the world’.

      The First World War shook his belief, although Wells remained convinced that the reality of all-out warfare might yet sober mankind into long-term peace. In his Outline of History (1920), he defined human history as ‘more and more a race between education and catastrophe’, but predicted that progress would prevail, be it ‘clumsily or smoothly’.

      By the outbreak of the Second World War – which he had predicted with eerie accuracy in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come – Wells was less optimistic. It is apt that his final work, composed in 1945 and foreseeing the collapse and destruction of humanity, was entitled Mind at the End of Its Tether. He felt he had given ample warnings that had gone unheeded. Indeed, reflecting in 1941 on predictions he had made that had come horribly true, Wells suggested that his epitaph should simply read: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’ When the end came, in 1946, his ashes were scattered at sea.

       INTRODUCTION

      On February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1 degree S. and longitude 107 degrees W.

      On January the Fifth, 1888—that is eleven months and four days after—my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5 degrees 3’ S. and longitude 101 degrees W. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain. His case was discussed among psychologists at the time as a curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical and mental stress. The following narrative was found among his papers by the undersigned, his nephew and heir, but unaccompanied by any definite request for publication.

      The only island known to exist in the region in which my uncle was picked up is Noble’s Isle, a small volcanic islet and uninhabited. It was visited in 1891 by H. M. S. Scorpion. A party of sailors then landed, but found nothing living thereon except certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats. So that this narrative is without confirmation in its most essential particular. With that understood, there seems no harm in putting this strange story before the public in accordance, as I believe, with my uncle’s intentions. There is at least this much in its behalf: my uncle passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5 degrees S. and longitude 105 degrees E., and reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of eleven months. In some way he must have lived during the interval. And it seems that a schooner called the Ipecacuanha with a drunken captain, John Davies, did start from Africa with a puma and certain other animals aboard in January, 1887, that the vessel was well known at several ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally disappeared from those seas (with a considerable amount of copra aboard), sailing to its unknown fate from Bayna in December, 1887, a date that tallies entirely with my uncle’s story.

      CHARLES EDWARD PRENDICK.

       CHAPTER 1

       In the Dinghy of the Lady Vain

      I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain. As everyone knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The longboat, with seven of the crew, was picked up eighteen days after by H. M. gunboat Myrtle, and the story of their terrible privations has become quite as well known as the far more horrible “Medusa” case. But I have to add to the published story of the Lady Vain another, possibly as horrible and far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were in the dinghy perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best of evidence for this assertion: I was one of the four men.

      But in the first place I must state that there never were four men in the dinghy,—the number was three. Constans, who was “seen by the captain to jump into the gig,”fn1 luckily for us and unluckily for himself did not reach us. He came down out of the tangle of ropes under the stays of the smashed bowsprit, some small rope caught his heel as he let go, and he hung for a moment head downward, and then fell and struck a block or spar floating in the water. We pulled towards him, but he never came up.

      I say luckily for us he did not reach us, and I might almost say luckily for himself; for we had only a small breaker of water and some soddened ship’s biscuits with us, so sudden had been the alarm, so unprepared the ship for any disaster. We thought the people on the launch would be better provisioned (though it seems they were not), and we tried to hail them. They could not have heard us, and the next morning when the drizzle cleared,—which was not until past midday,—we could see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us, because of the pitching of the boat. The two other men who had escaped so far with me were a man named Helmar, a passenger like myself, and a seaman whose name I don’t know,—a short sturdy man, with a stammer.

      We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After the second day the sea subsided slowly to a glassy calm. It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has not, luckily for himself, anything in his memory to imagine with. After the first day we said little to one another, and lay in our places in the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes that grew larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining upon our companions. The sun became pitiless. The water ended on the fourth day, and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with our eyes; but it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to the thing we had all been thinking. I remember СКАЧАТЬ