The Black-Indies

Published originally in 1877 as Les Indes noires, this English translation was No. 5 of The Seaside Library series published by George Munro in New York, also in 1877. The novel has also been published in English over the years using various other titles: The Child of the Cavern; or Strange Doings Underground—Black Diamonds—and The Underground City are three examples. The story takes place primarily in a Scottish coal mine and the reader might naturally assume this novel was a precursor for Verne’s more famous novel about underground adventures, Journey to the Center of the Earth, but in fact the latter was published first, in 1864, thirteen years before The Black-Indies.

Jules Verne has a legitimate claim to the honorific often applied to him: “the father of science fiction.” A meticulous researcher, the depth of his knowledge is on display here as he shows off his rather extensive breadth of acquired knowledge about coal mines in general, and specifically Scottish coal mines.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing. We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison. Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book. While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes. If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too? Not us. That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.