The dry season came in the second week of October. That month is the first of Spring in the Southern zone.
The winter was not very rigorous in this nineteenth degree latitude between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. The guests of New Switzerland would soon be able to resume their usual labors.
After eleven years spent upon this land it was none too soon to try to ascertain whether it was a part of one of the continents laved by the Indian Ocean or whether the geographers must include it among the islands of those seas.
Seconde Patrie, sometimes known in English as The Castaways of the Flag and sometimes split into two books, Their Island Home and The Castaways of the Flag, is Verne's sequel to The Swiss Family Robinson. The stranded family having been discovered by the British at the end of Wyss's original book, Verne completes the exploration of the island, follows the adventures of the children (now young adults) who had left for Europe, and adds an invasion of the island. He even names the nameless father of the original: Jean Zermatt.
The book is oddly structured, and I suppose the reason for that is that Verne wished to introduce various robinsonade tropes that do not play a significant role in the original. Robinsonades admit of considerable variation in how generous they are with their stranded people, both in terms of what they are allowed to bring in from the outside and what is provided by their island. Robinson Crusoe is middle of the road; Verne's The Mysterious Island and Andy Weir's The Martian are fairly restricted, in very different ways; but The Swiss Family Robinson is immensely generous. The family is stranded with a ship fully stocked for supplying a new colony, and the island itself, despite some challenges, has a superabundance that is almost surreal. It's part of the charm of the work, in fact, letting it do imagination-capturing things that a stricter robinsonade could not possibly manage. Through his extension, Verne can reflect on what they might have done if they had experienced harsher conditions, or met dangers that they feared but never had to face. It also perhaps helps Verne navigate the style difference, as was the case with his Poe sequel, Le Sphinx des glaces; both Wyss and Poe allow themselves considerably more of the genuinely fantastic than Verne usually does (Verne tries to stick with what is technically possible except when he's doing satire), so he has to arrange things so that he can tie up their loose ends in his own preferred way.
Of all that Verne introduces, the exploration of the island is a nice sequel, and the stranding of the children (now young adults) done reasonably well, but the entire arc of the savage invasion is badly, badly handled, and having checked some aspects of the translation against the French, it's clear that much of the fault lies with Verne. It's done in a very simplistic and unexciting way, with most of the interest lying in nothing more than the reunion of those who left and those who stayed. As sequels go, a mixed bag, and despite the fact that it is designed so that it can be read on its own, its interest really depends on enthusiasm for the original work.
