An interesting Polish mark is also left on Jules Verne’s novel In Search of Castaways (1867). One of the chapters of this book is about the island of Amsterdam, located in the Indian Ocean:
The Isle of Amsterdam was destined to become and remain a French possession. At first it belonged to, by right of the first to settle on it, Camin, a shipowner from Saint-Denis. Then, by some international agreement, the Isle of Amsterdam was ceded to a certain Pole, who began to develop it with the help of Madagascar slaves. Well, the Poles were not far off from the French, and the island, falling into the hands of Otovan, again became French.
Trans. KA
The author does not name this Pole. However, meticulous 'Verne-ologists' have established his identity. The real-life owner of the Isle of Amsterdam was Adam Piotr Mierosławski – a Polish revolutionary and, especially important in the context of our tale, a navigator. Could he be the prototype for Captain Nemo? Particular intrigue was given to this story by the French press of that day, about how on the island of St. Paul, located next to the Isle of Amsterdam, the brother of Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kościuszko was found living in complete solitude. French newspapers dubbed him 'the Polish Robinson Crusoe'. However, modern scholars believe that this isn’t really talking about Kościuszko’s brother, but about his nephew.
But what does Tadeusz Kościuszko have to do with any of this? – you may ask. Well, let’s remember whose portrait, among others, hung on the wall of Captain Nemo’s cabin in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:
Just then my eye was caught by some etchings hanging on the wall, which I hadn’t noticed during my first visit. They were portraits of great men of history who had spent their lives in perpetual devotion to a great human ideal: Thaddeus Kosciusko, the hero whose dying words had been Finis Poloniae;* Markos Botzaris, for modern Greece the reincarnation of Sparta’s King Leonidas; Daniel O’Connell, Ireland’s defender; George Washington, founder of the American Union; Daniele Manin, the Italian patriot; Abraham Lincoln, dead from the bullet of a believer in slavery; and finally, that martyr for the redemption of the black race, John Brown, hanging from his gallows as Victor Hugo’s pencil has so terrifyingly depicted. What was the bond between these heroic souls and the soul of Captain Nemo? (…) Had he figured in the recent political or social upheavals of this century?
The casually tossed out phrase 'The Poles are not far off from the French' even made some of Verne’s biographers muse about if the genius writer had Polish roots. There indeed were such rumors. In the spring of 1876, the Warsaw weekly Kłosy (Ears) stirred up a sensation, and referencing German newspapers, reported that the famous author Jules Verne was a Polish Jew, born in Płock, and that his real last name was Olszewicz, which would explain the origin of his French last name ('verne' in French means 'alder tree', in Polish 'olszyna'). Not long after, the writer even received a letter written in German from his Polish 'relative', a Wilhelm Olszewicz, who lived in Strasbourg.
Jules Verne reacted to these – we’ll admit, completely unfounded – rumors with a fair sense of humor. At a meeting with journalists, he not only didn’t refute them, but also embellished them, inventing on the fly a story about his supposed romance with a beautiful Polish woman from Kraków, who after their breakup, in despair, threw herself into the waters of Lake Geneva.