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A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, by James de Mille
James de Mille (1846-1880) was a Canadian writer who wrote some thirty novels, most of which were serialised in magazines. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder only appeared posthumously, and initially suffered from the assumption that it was derived from Rider Haggard novels such as She - in fact the book was written well over a decade before it was published and in an ideal world would have been recognised as seminal while de Mille was still alive.
There are two threads to the tale. There are the adventures of a traveller, recorded on the strange manuscript and (one assumes, though it is never explicitly stated) set adrift in the copper cylinder. But alongside that we also follow the conversation of the people who find the cylinder, so are constantly being forced to assess whether or not we believe the traveller's tale
The traveller himself is separated accidentally from his ship after leaving Tasmania - presuming for the moment we accept his tale - and is swept through an underground passage into a collection of Antarctic lands, bordering a fair-sized sea in a kind of parallel to the Mediterranean. He loses his only companion to cannibals (and it should be said that there's a fair few passages about cannibalism and non-European tribal life that definitely reflect the age in which the book was written and would be frowned upon today).
He then finds himself among a people who seem at first sight to be warm and welcoming, but whose lifestyle and ethics turn out to be quite alien to his own. They espouse radical self-denial and poverty, so are generous to a fault to strangers in ways that appeal to our hero's Victorian Christianity. However, it turns out that there is a darker side to all this, in which taking things away from someone - and ultimately taking their life - is seen as a huge blessing and gift. So although our hero finds a woman of similar ideals to himself, and they embark on an intense (but Platonic) relationship, their hosts work out that the best way to be kind to them is to enforce them to live apart, be compulsorily married to other people, and soon after publicly executed and then consumed at a ritual feast.
The internal conflict between his Victorian "it's right to practice self-denial and give things up for others" and his simultaneous "it's wrong to deny happiness and to take life like this" - together with the competing "one is just the logical conclusion of the other" is, I think, particularly well handled so that one's sympathy keeps flipping between the two.
Meanwhile the outer story of the yachtsmen reading the manuscript gives opportunity to reflect on this - of the four people, two are immediately convinced of the truth of the narrative, one is immediately sceptical and sees it as pure invention, and the fourth is undecided. There's a lot of appraisal of the account in scientific or linguistic terms. So this beast is probably an icthyosaur, that one a pterodactyl, the other is related to an ostrich. The language as revealed mostly by proper names is a variant of Hebrew so the people as a whole probably were descended from Shem after the ark had landed. Conversely the account is seen by the sceptic as a satire on modern life similar in intent to Gulliver's Travels and all, and the details thrown in are just pseudo-science to add some colour to the satire. Ultimately the debate between the four yachtsmen has to be echoed by the reader - and although one's sympathy is with those who believe the account at face value, in the end most of us would plump for the satire theory.
As a tale it's another one which can be seen as a jumping-off point for other authors. The continued existence of dinosaurs reappears in The Lost World and Jurassic Park. The terrifying subterranean passage to the lost country reappears in Perelandra and elsewhere. The confrontation between Victorian Christianity and other world views is a perennial topic. And so on.
The book ends very abruptly... early events lead to expect that the inner story will end with the writing and sending off of the manuscript in its cylinder, but we never reach that point. So the motive for sending it is unclear. According to an early section it was intended primarily to reassure the protagonist's father (who apparently lived in Keswick, just up the road from me) that his son was still alive. But by the end of the book the threat of human sacrifice has been lifted, and things look good for the future. So why write the manuscript? Was there to be a further crisis? Or was it an invitation to dad to go join him at the South Pole? Since de Mille died, we shall never know the ending he originally intended... unless it was indeed to be left ambivalent so that the reader has, once again, to make up his or her mind.
In short, a fun read (albeit with the aforementioned opinions on what non-European tribal life was like) and an important one in the development of 19th century fiction, by a Canadian author I'd never heard of before.
Comments
Interesting - I think I've only heard of this in non-fiction terms, like in an illuminati, masons, grand ancient mystery kind of way.
BTW I saw this for the first time on Friday in a used bookshop.
> BTW I saw this for the first time on Friday in a used bookshop.
Ha! Nothing like a good coincidence 😁