Five Weeks in a Balloon

**Across an Unmapped Africa by Hydrogen Balloon**

**The Adventure That Launched Jules Verne**

**Science, Geography, and Peril in a Single Voyage**

**The Instant Success Behind the Extraordinary Voyages**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came Five Weeks in a Balloon: a first book in which Jules Verne's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

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Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa (French: Cinq semaines en ballon) is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1863. It is the first novel in which he perfected the "ingredients" of his later work, skillfully mixing a story line full of adventure and plot twists that keep the reader's interest through passages of technical, geographic, and historic description.[opinion] The book gives readers a glimpse of the exploration of Africa, which was still not completely known to Europeans of the time, with explorers traveling all over the continent in search of its secrets. The unabridged English translation of the novel was done by Frederick Paul Walter and edited by Arthur B. Evans in 2015. Public interest in fanciful tales of African exploration was at its height, and the novel was an instant hit; it made Verne financially independent and led to long-term contracts with Pierre-Jules Hetzel's publishing house, which put out some sixty more books of his over the next four decades.

A scholar and explorer, Dr. Samuel Fergusson, accompanied by his manservant Joe and his friend professional hunter Richard "Dick" Kennedy, sets out to travel across the African continent - still not fully explored - with the help of a balloon filled with hydrogen. He has invented a mechanism that, by eliminating the need to release gas or throw ballast overboard to control his altitude, allows very long trips to be taken. This voyage is meant to link together the voyages of Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke in East Africa with those of Heinrich Barth in the regions of the Sahara and Chad. The trip begins in Zanzibar on the east coast, and passes across Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, Agadez, Timbuktu, Djenné and Ségou to St Louis in modern-day Senegal on the west coast. The book describes the unknown interior of Africa near modern-day Central African Republic as a desert, when it is actually savanna. Map of the trip described in the book from the east to the west coast of Africa.

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**Why Five Weeks in a Balloon Still Matters**

Read today, Five Weeks in a Balloon offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how Five Weeks in a Balloon first opened the path ahead.*