by H. G. Wells
* This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle — C.E.P.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Callao: The principal port of Peru.
2. schooner: A fore-and-aft rigged ship with two or more masts, the foremast being smaller than the other masts.
3. Arica: A port in northern Chile.
CHAPTER I
IN THE DINGHY OF THE ‘LADY VAIN’
1. Medusa case: The French frigate Medusa ran aground off the coast of North Africa in July 1816. Although over 100 passengers took to sea on a raft, only fifteen survived.
2. dinghy: A small boat attached to a larger boat or ship.
3. gig: A dinghy or ship’s boat.
4. bowsprit: A spar running out from a ship’s bow to which the forestays are fastened.
5. a small breaker of water: A small keg. In some editions, including the 1924 Atlantic Edition, the word appears as ‘beaker’. However, a beaker of water could not have lasted between three men for four days.
6. the thing we all had in mind: Wells’s inspiration for this near cannibal act was probably provided by a well-publicized recent court case that would have been fresh in the minds of many of his readers. In the case of Regina v. Dudley and Stephens (1884), a court ruled that the actions of two British sailors who had resorted to cannibalism in order to survive at sea were not justified.
7. thwarts: The seats or benches of a rowing boat.
CHAPTER II
THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE
1. queer marks on the gunwale: ‘Queer marks’ was ‘spots of blood’ in the first edition. The gunwale is the upper edge of a ship’s side (formerly used to support guns).
2. Ipecacuanha… she certainly acts according: The root of this Brazilian plant was used to induce vomiting. This is why Montgomery alludes to seasickness.
3. radula of the snail: The moveable toothed or rasping structure in the mouth of a snail or mollusc, used for scraping off and drawing in food particles.
4. Caplatzi… What a shop that was: Caplatzi’s sold scientific apparatus in Chenies Street, close to the Gower Street site of University College, London (where Montgomery studied medicine).
5. scuttle: A small circular hole in a ship’s side.
6. duck things: Sailors’ clothes made from linen or cotton.
CHAPTER III
THE STRANGE FACE
1. companion: A ladder giving access from deck to deck.
2. combing of the hatchway: The combing is the raised border around an opening in a ship’s deck, which functions to prevent water spilling into the hold.
3. mizzen: The mast aft of the mainmast.
4. spankers: Fore-and-aft sails set on the rear mast of a small ship.
5. taffrail: The rail at the stern of a ship.
6. shrouds: A set of ropes, usually in pairs, leading from the head of the mast and serving to relieve the latter of lateral strain; they form part of the standing rigging of a ship.
7. hazed: Harassed or bullied.
8. the law and the prophets: Referring to the prophetic books of the Old Testament. The phrase is from Matthew 7:12.
CHAPTER V
THE LANDING ON THE ISLAND
1. whole bilin’ of ’em: The whole boiling, or whole lot of them.
2. standing lugs: Four-cornered ‘lugsails’ spread or hoisted.
CHAPTER VI
THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN
1. fastened my painter to the tiller: Fastened my tow-rope to the bar attached to the rudder.
2. piggin: A small pail or cylindrical vessel, usually made of wood.
3. Royal College of Science… some research in biology under Huxley: Wells attended lectures by T. H. Huxley during the first year of his biology degree at the Normal School of Science (1884–7). The college was renamed the Royal College of Science in 1891. As a research student under Huxley (1825–95), Prendick has studied biology to a higher level than Wells had done.
CHAPTER VII
THE LOCKED DOOR
1. silly season: The months of the summer parliamentary recess, when newspapers make up for the lack of serious news with articles on trivial topics.
2. halitus: A vapour, an exhalation.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CRYING OF THE PUMA
1. crib of Horace: A translation, normally used by schoolboys. Prendick has already stated that he cannot read Latin and Greek without difficulty.
CHAPTER IX
THE THING IN THE FOREST
1. epiphyte: A plant that grows on another but is not parasitic.
CHAPTER X
THE CRYING OF THE MAN
1. bogle: A phantom or creature of one’s own imagining. Cf. Prendick’s thoughts during his pursuit by the Leopard Man, when he considers the possibility that his pursuer was ‘a mere creation of my disordered imagination’ (p. 45).
CHAPTER XI
THE HUNTING OF THE MAN
1. Comus rout: Prendick compares the Beast People to sailors transformed into animals by Comus, the son of Circe, as in John Milton’s masque of 1634. Wells was almost certainly familiar with Sir Edwin Landseer’s painting The Rout of Comus (1843), which depicts Milton’s enchanter surrounded by writhing animal-headed monsters.
2. blackish scoriae: Volcanic outcrops of aerated rock.
CHAPTER XII
THE SAYERS OF THE LAW
1. Not to go on all-Fours… His is the Hand that heals: The Island of Doctor Moreau received a number of hostile reviews which objected to the obvious parallels between the Beast Folk’s recital of Moreau’s Law and human religious practices, among other things. For the anonymous reviewer writing in the Guardian of 3 June 1896, there is a definite hint of blasphemy in the novel: ‘his [Wells’s] object seems to be to parody the work of the Creator of the human race, and cast contempt upon the dealings of God with His creatures’.
2. like the haha of an English park: A haha is a ditch with a wall on its inner side below ground level, forming a boundary without interrupting the view.
CHAPTER XIII
A PARLEY
1. Hi non sunt homines, sunt animalia qui nos habemus… vivisected: Schoolboy Latin which translates as: ‘These are not men, they are animals which we have vivisected’.
CHAPTER XIV
DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS
1. Hunter’s cockspur… flourished on the bull’s neck: A reference to a pioneering experiment by the Scottish surgeon John Hunter (1728–93). Wells responded furiously to the claim, made by Chambers Mitchell in a review of The Island of Doctor Moreau, that the grafting of tissue between animals of different species was not possible. In a letter to the Editor of the Saturday Review published on 7 November 1896, he wrote that: ‘I was aware at the time that Mr Chambers Mitchell was mistaken in relying upon Oscar Hertwig as his final authority upon this business, that he was making the rash assertion and not I, but for a while I was unable to replace the stigma of ignorance he had given me, for the simple reason that I knew of no published results of the kind I needed.’ Wells then pointed to a report in The British Medical Journal of 31 October 1896 of a successful graft of connective tissue between man and rabbit.
2. Algerian Zouaves: French light infantry recruited from the Kabyle tribes of North Africa.
3. ‘L’Homme qui Rit’: Published in 1869. Victor Hugo’s novel contains a passage which details reported Chinese practices of moulding men in shaped vases, in which the growing child is contained in order to produce a dwarf of a particular shape.
4. Mahomet’s houri in the dark: A reference to the descriptions of Paradise in the Koran. A houri is a black-eyed virgin who awaits every true male believer.
5. the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape: Wells outlines the substance of Doctor Moreau’s explanation in ‘The Limits of Individual Plasticity’, an article published in the Saturday Review 79 (19 January 1895), pp. 89–90. In this article, Wells speculates: ‘a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic… [so
that it] might be taken in hand and so moulded and modified that at best it would retain scarcely anything of its inherent form and disposition’ (p. 89).
6. Kanakas: South Sea islanders.
CHAPTER XV
CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK
1. fumaroles: Vents in or near a volcano, from which hot vapour is emitted.
2. There was no evidence of the inheritance of the acquired human characteristics: The French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) theorized that the characteristics an organism acquires from its environment are transmitted to future generations, although he was unable to prove it. While there is no evidence that Moreau’s creations inherit human characteristics, there is substantial evidence that Prendick acquires the traits of the Beast Folk. Hence he remarks that ‘I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions’ (p. 130).
3. prognathous: Having a projecting jaw.
4. fusees: Large-headed matches.
CHAPTER XVI
HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTED BLOOD
1. Ollendorffian beggar. Heinrich Ollendorf (1803–65) was a German educator and author of foreign-language grammars. Montogomery is mocking the Satyr Man’s awkward English.
2. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity… one long internal struggle: The intermingling of human and animal portrayed in the novel was a further aspect of The Island of Doctor Moreau which invited the censure of critics. An anonymous reviewer in the Review of Reviews considered the ‘hybrid monsters’ of the story ‘loathsome’ on the grounds that: ‘the result in the picture is exactly that which would follow as the result of the engendering of human and animal’ (unsigned review, Review of Reviews, vol. 13, 1896, p. 374).
CHAPTER XXI
THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK
1. Slöjd: The teaching of woodwork in schools. Slöjd is Swedish for handicrafts.
CHAPTER XXII
THE MAN ALONE
1. Apia: The capital of Western Samoa.
2. gid: A fatal disease of sheep and goats, characterized by unsteady gait and loss of balance.
