The Island Of Doctor Moreau ; A Possibility

By H G Wells

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Mason Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473348981

H G Wells

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English novelist who helped to define modern science fiction. Wells came from humble beginnings with a working-class family. As a teen, he was a draper’s assistant before earning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science. It was there that he expanded his horizons learning different subjects like physics and biology. Wells spent his free time writing stories, which eventually led to his groundbreaking debut, The Time Machine. It was quickly followed by other successful works like The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds.

Book preview

THE ISLAND OF

DOCTOR MOREAU

By

H. G. WELLS

Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

Contents

H. G. Wells

INTRODUCTION.

I. IN THE DINGEY OF THE LADY VAIN.

II. THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE.

III. THE STRANGE FACE.

IV. AT THE SCHOONER'S RAIL.

V. THE MAN WHO HAD NOWHERE TO GO.

VI. THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN.

VII. THE LOCKED DOOR.

VIII. THE CRYING OF THE PUMA.

IX. THE THING IN THE FOREST.

X. THE CRYING OF THE MAN.

XI. THE HUNTING OF THE MAN.

XII. THE SAYERS OF THE LAW.

XIII. A PARLEY.

XIV. DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS.

XV. CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK.

XVI. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.

XVII. A CATASTROPHE.

XVIII. THE FINDING OF MOREAU.

XIX. MONTGOMERY'S BANK HOLIDAY.

XX. ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK.

XXI. THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK.

XXII. THE MAN ALONE.

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England in 1866. He apprenticed as a draper before becoming a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School in West Sussex. Some years later, Wells won a scholarship to the School of Science in London, where he developed a strong interest in biology and evolution, founding and editing the Science Schools Journal. However, he left before graduating to return to teaching, and began to focus increasingly on writing. His first major essay on science, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, appeared in 1891. However, it was in 1895 that Wells seriously established himself as a writer, with the publication of the now iconic novel, The Time Machine.

Wells followed The Time Machine with the equally well-received War of the Worlds (1898), which proved highly popular in the USA, and was serialized in the magazine Cosmopolitan. Around the turn of the century, he also began to write extensively on politics, technology and the future, producing works The Discovery of the Future (1902) and Mankind in the Making (1903). An active socialist, in 1904 Wells joined the Fabian Society, and his 1905 book A Modern Utopia presented a vision of a socialist society founded on reason and compassion. Wells also penned a range of successful comic novels, such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910).

Wells’ 1920 work, The Outline of History, was penned in response to the Russian Revolution, and declared that world would be improved by education, rather than revolution. It made Wells one of the most important political thinkers of the twenties and thirties, and he began to write for a number of journals and newspapers, even travelling to Russia to lecture Lenin and Trotsky on social reform. Appalled by the carnage of World War II, Wells began to work on a project dealing with the perils of nuclear war, but died before completing it. He is now regarded as one of the greatest science-fiction writers of all time, and an important political thinker.

INTRODUCTION.

ON February the First 1887, the  Lady Vain  was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° 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° 3' S. and longitude 101° 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° S. and longitude 105° 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.

(The Story written by Edward Prendick.)

I. IN THE DINGEY 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 dingey 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 dingey,—the number was three. Constans, who was seen by the captain to jump into the gig,{1} 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 beaker 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 our voices were dry and thin, so that we bent towards one another and spared our words. I stood out against it with all my might, was rather for scuttling the boat and perishing together among the sharks that followed us; but when Helmar said that if his proposal was accepted we should have drink, the sailor came round to him.

I would not draw lots however, and in the night the sailor whispered to Helmar again and again, and I sat in the bows with my clasp-knife in my hand, though I doubt if I had the stuff in me to fight; and in the morning I agreed to Helmar's proposal, and we handed halfpence to find the odd man. The lot fell upon the sailor; but he was the strongest of us and would not abide by it, and attacked Helmar with his hands. They grappled together and almost stood up. I crawled along the boat to them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor's leg; but the sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the gunwale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones. I remember laughing at that, and wondering why I laughed. The laugh caught me suddenly like a thing from without.

I lay across one of the thwarts for I know not how long, thinking that if I had the strength I would drink sea-water and madden myself to die quickly. And even as I lay there I saw, with no more interest than if it had been a picture, a sail come up towards me over the sky-line. My mind must have been wandering, and yet I remember all that happened, quite distinctly. I remember how my head swayed with the seas, and the horizon with the sail above it danced up and down; but I also remember as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and that I thought what a jest it was that they should come too late by such a little to catch me in my body.

For an endless period, as it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart watching the schooner (she was a little ship, schooner-rigged fore and aft) come up out of the sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a widening compass, for she was sailing dead into the wind. It never entered my head to attempt to attract attention, and I do not remember anything distinctly after the sight of her side until I found myself in a little cabin aft. There's a dim half-memory of being lifted up to the gangway, and of a big round countenance covered with freckles and surrounded with red hair staring at me over the bulwarks. I also had a disconnected impression of a dark face, with extraordinary eyes, close to mine; but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again. I fancy I recollect some stuff being poured in between my teeth; and that is all.

{1}  Daily News, March 17, 1887.

II. THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE.

THE cabin in which I found myself was small and rather untidy. A youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist. For a minute we stared at each other without speaking. He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression. Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large animal. At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his question,—How do you feel now?

I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I had got there. He must have seen the question in my face, for my voice was inaccessible to me.

"You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat was the  Lady Vain, and there were spots of blood on the gunwale."

At the same time my eye caught my hand, so thin that it looked like a dirty skin-purse full of loose bones, and all the business of the boat came back to me.

Have some of this, said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced.

It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.

"You were in

Reviews for The Island Of Doctor Moreau ; A Possibility

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A horrific story that must have terrified many readers in 1896; even now it is unsettling in parts. It shows how the author was ahead of his time in his presentation of scientific and moral issues. A good read.

[bnielsen_30 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

En stillehavsø, 1887.Edward Prendick er ombord på skibet "Lady Vain", der forliser den 1. februar på ca 1 grader sydlig bredde og 107 grader vestlig længde. Ca 11 måneder senere bliver han fundet på 5,3 grader sydlig bredde og 101 grader vestlig længde i en lille båd. Han beretter om omholdet på en lille ukendt ø, hvor en doktor ved navn Moreau har gjort eksperimenter med dyr.???

[theboylatham_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Six out of ten,

A shipwreck in the South Seas, a palm-tree paradise where a mad doctor conducts vile experiments, animals that become human and then "beastly" in ways they never were before.

[buffalogr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A powerful novel in it's day (1896) and still great fantasy/sci-fi...even if the science is a bit dated, it's still fun. On an island in the Pacific Ocean, the evil Moreau conducts grizzly experiments while the able assistant drinks himself into oblivion and the newcomer watches this queer drama. This would make a great movie---wait, there have been five made of this plot/theme. I'll go find one and watch it.

[hlselz · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Creepy story of an island where tests are being done on animals.

[la2bkk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a fan of most of Wells true science fiction works, as opposed to his socialist commentaries, I believe this is his finest effort. The basic story line is a true classic, and the work flows seamlessly throughout. Wells style is descriptive yet not burdened with excess imagery. He paints a vivid picture of the sometimes gruesome adventures of the protagonist and builds suspense throughout. A must read.

[kronos999_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Trailblazing for its time, the lack of climax detracts from this eerie story which plods along describing the horrors of Dr. Moreau's experiments in turning beasts to men. I found it pretty dull. Perhaps I have just been spoiled by too many action flicks, but I greatly preferred his novel 'War of the Worlds'.

[ambrosia4 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A little too grizzly for my tastes...the narrator of the story does nothing to garner my sympathies and all in all it was not a book that made me want to keep turning the pages...

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very well written but just not my kind of story. Too creepy! I had to watch some silly TV for a while after finishing to prevent myself from having nightmares!

[voise15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Genuinely scary and unsettling short story - a satire on themes of creation, evolution and class - what makes us human? Excellent edition (Penguin Classics) with in depth biography, further reading, textual notes and alternative expositions of the text by Margaret Atwood.

[amelish · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pure unadulterated paranoia and gore. Pretty fucking scary.

[steadfastreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't know if H.G. Wells was an atheist or not, but if this was the only writing he had left behind, I would have thought he was.

Slow start, but the last 25% of the book more than makes up for it. A fabulous parody of the Christian creation myth and the myth of Jesus.

EXCELLENT.

[niecierpek · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent book, and very much ahead of its time.

[deathsmistress · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An instant classic. I found H.G Wells' book to be quite entertaining. The "monsters" of the island are grotesque and are fun to read about. Dr. Moreau himself is seen as an unapologetic man who thinks he is doing right by turning beasts into men. A good enjoyable read. I'd recommend it.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like the best of Wells's work, this is a morality piece, an adventure into the heart of what is humanity. However, it isn't always terribly interesting, and a lot of the action hasn't translated well into the present. Still, the conclusion, and the animals' eventual retrogression, makes the story relevant in its own way.

[the_hibernator · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Summary: Mr. Prendrick is stranded on a strange island with two people – the drunken and uncaring Montgomery and the enigmatic, violent Doctor Moreau. As Prendrick begins to discover the mysteries of the island, he feels more and more danger to his life.My thoughts: Wells’ stories are so deep and thoughtful. He explores his unique belief system in a way that is inspiring and energetic. I love his allegory, I love the plot, and I love how much this book made me think.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the most terrifying classics I’ve ever read. Wells builds the tension beautifully as he unveils the island’s true monster.

[themulhern · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first book I'm certain I've read by H.G. Wells. His writing is not exceptional. But when I had done with the book I had much the same feeling as when I have awoken from a very bad dream. It is a hard book to get out of your head, but I'm not really sure what it is about.

[prozacstan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was my first H.G. Wells book. What a brilliant writer!!! He did an excellent job of making me feel as though I was in the story running alongside the main character. I could feel the tension. I downloaded several more of his books for my Kindle!

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The use of vivisection (experimentation on live animals) to create animal-human hybrids and the consequence of this. Not my favourite Wells. Book looks at our ability to create our own destruction and the inevitable degeneration of 'beasts' when not supervised by white men.

[scribblekey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was extremely surprised at how much I liked this book. Other reviews say it better than I do, so I'll just throw in my recommendation.

[trilliams · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What if we're all just man-beasts?

[anitatally · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

weird but well-written

[shanklinmike · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Once again Wells shows his ability to predict things to come. The prose is very good and, although the actual experiments are (at the moment) impossible, the scenario with Moreau as the mad but gifted scientist and Pendrick as the vehicle for the emotions generated gives a great feel to this book. Well worth a read but be prepared to be disturbed!

[benuathanasia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Boring and forgettable.

[ragwaine · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Freaky but not enough happened. Movie was better

[qarae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very quick read, but highly recommended. Considering this novel was originally published in 1896, the forsight of H.G. Wells is absolutely amazing. The fear that Edward feels when he hears the animal screams coming from behind the locked door, the panick of being lost in the woods, all of it is felt first hand thanks to Wells' magnificent writing.

[carl_alves_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Prior to reading this novel, I was very familiar with the story, having watched at least one movie adaptation. The story is a classic one, and I imagine most readers would be familiar with at least the concept prior to reading. The concept of the story is a good one, but the writing style is a bit dry. Some parts of the story are a little confusing to read. Although it was written some time ago, some of the themes, like the ruthless exploitation of science, are timeless. Still, it was hard to get past some of the dialogue and writing, which would transform this from a solid read, to something special.Carl Alves - author of Two For Eternity

[rsplenda477 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

H. G. Wells presents a wonderful science fiction novel that dives straight into what it means to be a human being. We are a highly evolved species, but at our core, we are bloodthirsty animals as well. This is definitely one of the greatest science fiction novels of all-time, and can also serve as a great study about the human condition.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Before I read this short novel, my sense of the story was formed by the 1977 movie which didn't do much for me. The original is an oddly-dated, oddly-relevant exploration of bioethics disguised as an adventure tale.