Waterfalls on the Madeira River
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Tad Davis
Nov 15, 2025, 12:07:46 PM (4 days ago) Nov 15
to Jules Verne Forum
I’m working on Martin Paz, and I have a question about the climax. The people on the forum have been exceptionally helpful to me in the past, so here I go again.
The climax takes place at a waterfall on the Madeira River. Verne describes it as a terrifying, and unavoidably fatal, drop of a hundred feet onto the rocks below. The whole water system (including the Amazon, into which the Madeira empties) is riddled with dangerous rapids, but nothing that matches this description—as far as I can tell from what I’ve been able to track down on the Internet. I don’t have access to whatever sources Verne himself may have used for this.
This is my first stab at explaining this.
“Verne’s narrative has the search party crossing the Andes and entering the vast rainforest on the plains between Peru and Brazil. A large network of rivers passes through this area. The Madre de Dios River begins on the eastern slope of the Andes and eventually joins the Madeira River, which in turn flows into the Amazon. The rapids on the Madeira near the town of Pôrto Velho in Brazil historically blocked navigation and led to the construction of a railway; the logic of the narrative would put the climax of the story near here. Two people in a flimsy canoe set adrift at this point might very well have perished. But neither these rapids nor any of the other waterfalls in the surrounding basin match the details of the terrifying description in Verne. In this, it may resemble the exaggerated description of the Maelstrom’s destructive power in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas."
So the question is—is this a fair analysis? Or am I missing something important?
Tad Davis
The climax takes place at a waterfall on the Madeira River. Verne describes it as a terrifying, and unavoidably fatal, drop of a hundred feet onto the rocks below. The whole water system (including the Amazon, into which the Madeira empties) is riddled with dangerous rapids, but nothing that matches this description—as far as I can tell from what I’ve been able to track down on the Internet. I don’t have access to whatever sources Verne himself may have used for this.
This is my first stab at explaining this.
“Verne’s narrative has the search party crossing the Andes and entering the vast rainforest on the plains between Peru and Brazil. A large network of rivers passes through this area. The Madre de Dios River begins on the eastern slope of the Andes and eventually joins the Madeira River, which in turn flows into the Amazon. The rapids on the Madeira near the town of Pôrto Velho in Brazil historically blocked navigation and led to the construction of a railway; the logic of the narrative would put the climax of the story near here. Two people in a flimsy canoe set adrift at this point might very well have perished. But neither these rapids nor any of the other waterfalls in the surrounding basin match the details of the terrifying description in Verne. In this, it may resemble the exaggerated description of the Maelstrom’s destructive power in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas."
So the question is—is this a fair analysis? Or am I missing something important?
Tad Davis
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