Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. This book is a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. A party of British adventurers, who had been ballooning, but whose trip had ended by being cast away on a Pacific island, have various setbacks due to both pirates and convicts who had escaped from jails in mainland Australasia. They realise that at times there appears to be some kind of entity that is looking after them.