Apparently, the version you have read (the first part, anyway), is the infamous translation of Edward Roth, and
published my McKay.
Here is something excerpted from this website:
http://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/VerneT...rticle%29.html
"Of a very different order of magnitude, however, are the many additions and rewrites evident in the infamous Roth translations of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon (collectively retitled The Baltimore Gun Club) and Hector Servadac (retitled To the Sun? Off on a Comet!). In addition to creating an entire chapter ex nihilo and adding it to the story of Around the Moon—detailing Maston’s (who is renamed “Marston”) journey from Long’s Peak to San Francisco by stage and Pacific Railroad—Roth repeatedly uses Verne’s texts as a launching pad for his own idiosyncratic rants. One example should suffice to give a flavor of Roth’s “amplifications.” Not a word of the following tirade can be found in Verne’s original.
Not only was the railroad completed as far as Cedar Keys, but also the latter town was connected with Tampa by a branch constructed along the low marshy Gulf coast at great trouble and expense. Barbican had made the company a present of his route, strongly recommending it as being higher and healthier, more picturesque and fertile, besides being shorter and less expensive. But Barbican, through a great artillerist, was unfortunately only a Baltimore man, and no mere Baltimore man could by any possibility teach a Boston man, as the President of the Gulf Railroad Company prided himself upon being.
For, outside of Boston, as you must know, everything in the United States is provincial; literature, fashion, society, at best second rate; all the boys and girls in the Union learn their lessons out of Boston newspapers, Boston magazines, and Boston books; the Revolutionary War began and ended within sight of Bunker Hill; the Boston people single handed had licked the British in 1812; aided a little by some other New Englanders, they had put down the great rebellion of ’61; Faneuil Hall, “the cradle of American Liberty,” was the only place where the “Centennial” should be celebrated; her municipal system was unequaled; her fire department was simply perfect; no act of cruel bigotry had ever disgraced her lofty minded and enlightened people; her men were all corresponding members of learned societies, and her women read so much that they all wore eyeglasses; her public schools produced the profoundest of scholars and the most virtuous of citizens. Such, at least, was the Nicene Creed repeated every Sunday by every good Bostonian. The President of the Gulf Railroad happened to be an extra good Bostonian. A Baltimorian to dictate to him? Never! Of course, he had his way; the branch followed the worst possible route because a Baltimorian had pointed out the best possible one. What matter if it cost the company an additional million of dollars and five thousand poor Irish laborers their lives? A grand moral principle had been successfully vindicated. If Boston is not to have her way, the world is not worth living in!" (114)
Don