Francois Raynal’s account of his 20 months as a castaway on the Auckland Islands was a best-seller in 1875. It’s been proposed that Jules Verne used it as the inspiration for his novel Two Years’ Vacation, about a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island in the South Pacific. When it came to overcoming adversity, Raynal’s story had it all, and his passion shines forth regularly as he honours his fellow crewmates, describes their hunger and their hopes, and their final desperate bid for safety in a craft of their own making.
This is a companion volume to Thomas Musgrave's Castaway on the Auckland Isles, also available from Lakeview Publishing.
"Next day my plan was fully sketched out. To build a boat we must provide ourselves with a sufficient store of tools (for, as I have said we possessed but a hammer, a half-worn axe, an auger, and an old and almost useless adze); but to fabricate new tools a forge was necessary. It was then with the erection of a forge — that is to say, of a furnace, an anvil, and a pair of bellows — that I must in the first place busy myself. The bellows was the most complicated instrument, and by far the most difficult to manufacture: I began with it."
280 pages, profusely illustrated, A5 sized paperback