Science Fiction de Mille, James: A Strange Manuscript, v1, 23 July 2013

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James De Mille (23 August 1833 – 28 January 1880) was a professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and an early Canadian popular writer who published numerous works of popular fiction from the late 1860s through the 1870s. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, son of the merchant and shipowner, Nathan De Mille. He attended Horton Academy in Wolfville and spent one year at Acadia University. He then travelled with his brother Elisha Budd to Europe, spending half a year in England, France and Italy. On his return to North America, he attended Brown University, from which he obtained a Master of Arts degree during 1854. He married Anne Pryor, daughter of the president of Acadia University, John Pryor, and was there appointed professor of classics. He served there until 1865 when he accepted a new appointment at Dalhousie as professor of English and rhetoric. He continued to write and teach at Dalhousie until his early death at the age of 47.

His most popular work with contemporaries, and the work for which he is most known today, is A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, which was serialized posthumously in Harper's Weekly, and published in book form by Harper and Brothers of New York City in 1889. It's about a seaman, Adam Moore, who had become separated in a lifeboat from his ship near Desolation Island. He drifts in a strong southern current and eventually discovers a previously unknown civilization within a large, deep basin near the south pole. In this land of six months light and six months darkness, Jurassic and Cretaceous life still exist, and the large reptiles are feared by the inhabitants; this is probably the first novel with such a setting, and perhaps influenced Edgar Rice Burrough's much later novels. The story can also be considered a Swiftian satire in which the Antarctic dwellers have carried too far the normally admirable features of altruism. (chiefly from Wikipedia)

Sources were Project Gutenberg and the 1910 Toronto book edition.

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