Facing the Flag
Encyclopedia
Facing the Flag or For the Flag is an 1896 patriotic novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...

. The book is part of the Voyages Extraordinaires
Voyages Extraordinaires
Les Voyages Extraordinaires was a publishing title affixed to the novels and non-fictional writings of French author and science fiction pioneer Jules Verne...

 (The Extraordinary Voyages) series.

Like The Begum's Millions
The Begum's Millions
The Begum's Fortune , also published as The Begum's Millions, is an 1879 novel by Jules Verne, with some elements which could be described as utopian and others which seem clearly dystopian. It is remarkable as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary and to some degree pessimistic...

, which Verne published in 1879, it has the theme of France and the entire world threatened by a super-weapon (what would now be called a weapon of mass destruction) with the threat finally overcome through the force of French patriotism.

It can be considered one of the first books dealing with problems which were to become paramount half a century after its publication in World War II and the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

: brilliant scientists discovering new weapons of great destructive power, whose full utilization might literally destroy the world; the competition between Superpower
Superpower
A superpower is a state with a dominant position in the international system which has the ability to influence events and its own interests and project power on a worldwide scale to protect those interests...

s to obtain overwhelming stockpiles of such weapons; and, efforts of other nations to join the nuclear
Nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first fission bomb test released the same amount...

 club.

Plot summary

Thomas Roch is a genius French inventor, who came up with the idea of the Fulgurator, a weapon "whose action upon the atmospheric strata was so terrific that any construction, warship or floating battery, within a zone of twelve thousand square yards, would be blown to atoms", so that "the state which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean".

For all of the above, however, there is nothing to show but Roch's own word, backed by no experimental proof whatever, and he demands to have huge sums delivered to him before making any details known and certainly before any tests were made of the weapon's feasibility. While Roch is not an unknown, having had some earlier inventions to his credit, no official could justify spending such sums to buy a pig in a poke
Pig in a poke
The idioms pig in a poke and sell a pup refer to a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but cats and dogs were not...

.

Upon the failure of his negotiations with his own government, Roch "forgets what could never be forgotten" - i.e., France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

 of 1870-71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine
Alsace-Lorraine
The Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine was a territory created by the German Empire in 1871 after it annexed most of Alsace and the Moselle region of Lorraine following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The Alsatian part lay in the Rhine Valley on the west bank of the Rhine River and east...

, a wound still deeply nursed by many French in their mindset of Revanchism
Revanchism
Revanchism is a term used since the 1870s to describe a political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement. Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or...

 - and crosses the border to offer his weapon at Berlin. But he meets no greater success there than in Paris, nor are the British and Americans which he later tries any more amendable.

In the process, Roch increasingly loses his sanity, becoming - as depicted by Verne - more and more bitter, megalomaniac and paranoid - until the US Government finally tucks him away at a luxurious asylum in New Bern, North Carolina
New Bern, North Carolina
New Bern is a city in Craven County, North Carolina with a population of 29,524 as of the 2010 census.. It is located at the confluence of the Trent and the Neuse rivers...

, where he had spent eighteen months at the start of the book and looks likely to spend the rest of his life.

When first introduced to the reader, Roch seems endlessly greedy, asserting that millions would be "a paltry sum" for his invention which was worth "billions". But as becomes clear later, Roch is less after money as such than in search of respect and recognition. The four sets of government officials and military officers which he successively met evidently rubbed Roch the wrong way, their repeated demands of concrete proof making him feel that they were trying to steal his invention, while the pirate Ker Karraje - the story's main villain - would soon prove able to cater to Roch's vanity - and his desire for revenge upon those who humiliated him.

Ker Karraje is a pirate of Malay
Malay Archipelago
The Malay Archipelago refers to the archipelago between mainland Southeastern Asia and Australia. The name was derived from the anachronistic concept of a Malay race....

 origin who started his career closer to his homeland, in the islands of the Western Pacific - with a band which he had collected during a sojourn at one of the Australian gold rushes
Australian gold rushes
The Australian gold rush started in 1851 when prospector Edward Hammond Hargraves claimed the discovery of payable gold near Bathurst, New South Wales, at a site Edward Hargraves called Ophir.Eight months later, gold was found in Victoria...

 (where, evidently, he failed to strike gold, and turned to other means of getting rich). His heterogeneous crew of audacious rogues, drawn from "escaped convicts, military and naval deserters, and the scum of Europe", includes Malays like himself, Arabs and "Levantines", Europeans of various nationalities (an Irishman, an Italian
Italian people
The Italian people are an ethnic group that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence , and are distinguished from people...

 and a Greek
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....

 are explicitly mentioned), and even some Australian Aborigines
Australian Aborigines
Australian Aborigines , also called Aboriginal Australians, from the latin ab originem , are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continentthat is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania...

.

Captain Spade and Engineer Serko, Karraje's two principal lieutenants, are described as "intelligent, well educated, resolute men who would most assuredly have succeeded in any career" but "being without conscience or scruples, and determined to get rich at all costs" they turned first to gambling and speculation and finally to outright piracy under Karraje.

After a wild career of robbery and mayhem around the Pacific Islands which made his name known and feared around the world, Karraje suddenly disappeared. Nobody knew that he did not change profession, but rather moved his operations to richer hunting grounds around the east coast of North America. There Karraje and crew live a double life. Karraje goes around openly, under the alias of "Count d'Artigas" - pleasure loving, slightly eccentric but eminently respectable, a regular visitor to the ports of the East Coast onboard his schooner
Schooner
A schooner is a type of sailing vessel characterized by the use of fore-and-aft sails on two or more masts with the forward mast being no taller than the rear masts....

 Ebba which he had ordered, in a completely legal and aboveboard way, from a shipyard in Gothenburg
Gothenburg
Gothenburg is the second-largest city in Sweden and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated on the west coast of Sweden, the city proper has a population of 519,399, with 549,839 in the urban area and total of 937,015 inhabitants in the metropolitan area...

, Sweden.

To outward appearance, Ebba has no other means of propulsion than its sails - but in fact it is pulled by an underwater tug. By these means, Karraje and his crew can pull up to unsuspecting becalmed sailing ships, board and rob them, massacre the crews and scuttle them, adding to the statistics of "unexplained disappearances". (In Verne's time the term Bermuda Triangle
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances....

 did not yet have a wide popular currency, but the geographical location of Karraje's operations seems quite appropriate to this myth).

Karraje is cunning, suave and completely ruthless. He uses the most advanced technologies available at the end of Nineteenth Century, such as the aforementioned submarine
Submarine
A submarine is a watercraft capable of independent operation below the surface of the water. It differs from a submersible, which has more limited underwater capability...

, to aid his career of robbery on the high seas. His heterogeneous crew works smoothly and efficiently, in both their ostensible honest seamanship and their clandestine deadly piracy - which immediately recalls the crew of the Nautilus
Nautilus (Verne)
The Nautilus is the fictional submarine featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island . Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton's real-life submarine Nautilus...

under Captain Nemo
Captain Nemo
Captain Nemo, also known as Prince Dakkar, is a fictional character featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island ....

.

However, unlike Nemo, Karraje is a pure villain
Villain
A villain is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist, the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters...

, motivated by nothing but greed, to satisfy which he is willing to kill ruthlessly and indiscriminatingly - with none of the redeeming qualities and complex ambiguities which made Capain Nemo, in the view of many, the most intriguing of Verne's characters.

Also, in the decades between the publication of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax...

in 1870 and that of the present book, the idea of a submarine in itself has evidently stopped being so fantastic as to deserve attention. Rather, the presence of submarines - in the hands of both the pirates and the Royal Navy
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

 - is taken for granted as a useful narration plot, while Roch and his fearsome super-weapon are given the center stage.

Karraje hears of Roch and his invention, takes it seriously and decides to gain possession of it. Actually, his aim is rather modest, not to gain world mastery, but just to make his hide-out impregnable. He and his men successfully kidnap Roch from his American asylum and bring him to their hide-out, the desolate island of Back Cup in the Bahamas. Here a wide cavern, accessible solely by submarine, has been made into a well-equipped pirate base, with its own electrical power plant, completely unknown to the rest of the world.

During the kidnapping, however, Karraje orders his men to also take along Gaydon, Roch's attendant "to whom he was used for the past fifteen months". The reader knows - and as is later shown, Karraje is also aware - that Gaydon was actually Simon Hart, a French engineer and explosives expert who had decided "to perform the menial and exacting duties of an insane man's attendant" in the hope of learning Roch's secret and saving it for France, actuated (as Verne puts it) by "a spirit of the purest and noblest patriotism".

Hart bears considerable resemblance to Marcel Bruckmann, the
protagonist in The Begum's Millions
The Begum's Millions
The Begum's Fortune , also published as The Begum's Millions, is an 1879 novel by Jules Verne, with some elements which could be described as utopian and others which seem clearly dystopian. It is remarkable as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary and to some degree pessimistic...

, who penetrates the fearsome stronghold of that book's arch-villain. Both characters are engineers by training, and boundlessly dedicated, resourceful and brave French patriots by inclination. Both act as self-appointed spies belonging to no official agency, but showing considerable skill and ingenuity in that role. (Except for the completely unreasonable risk of regularly keeping a written diary while in the enemy stronghold and putting down in writing all their secrets and plans - a risk which Verne evidently imposed on both protagonists in the interest of providing the reader with a first-person narrative.) Bruckmann is in his mid-twenties, Hart in his mid-forties - which is precisely the amount by which Bruckmann would had aged in the time elapsed between the writing of the two books.

Hart is kept imprisoned at the pirate base, though in quite comfortable conditions. He can only watch in dismay as the pirate chief easily manages what four governments in succession have failed to do: win Roch over. Roch is given "many rolls of dollar bills and banknotes, and handfuls of English, French, American and German gold coins" with which to fill his pockets. Further, Roch is formally informed that the entire secret cavern and all in it are henceforward his property, and egged on to "defend his property" against the world which has so wronged him.

Soon, the inventor is busy constructing his fearsome weapon, happily unaware that he is nothing but a glorified prisoner in the pirate's hands. Chemical ingredients are purchased at his specifications and paid for quite openly at US stores, as are mechanical parts ordered from American foundries completely unaware of their true purpose, and so construction of the Fulgurator moves ahead.

As is proven by practice, a few grams of Roch's explosive suffice to blow a passable tunnel through many metres of tough volcanic rock. Engineer Serko remarks in talking with Hart that several thousands tons might be enough to blow up the entire Earth and render it into a new Asteroid Belt
Asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...

 - which seems to be the first time that such a suggestion was made in science fiction (see asteroids in fiction
Asteroids in fiction
Asteroids and asteroid belts are a staple of science fiction stories. Asteroids play several potential roles in science fiction: as places which human beings might colonize; as resources for extracting minerals; as a hazard encountered by spaceships traveling between two other points; and as a...

) - though no one in the book wants to put that to the test. But Karraje does ring his island with artillery pieces of a kind, which need not be very accurate - since the projectile powered by that enormous explosive, would generate such shock-waves as to destroy everything in an enormous radius around its path. There is no need to hit the enemy ship in order to destroy it.

The paranoid Roch does, however, keep to himself the secret of the detonator or "Deflagrator", a liquid without which the explosive is merely an inert powder. By holding fast to that last secret, Roch unwittingly preserves the life of his ex-keeper Gaydon/Simon Hart. Karraje suspects (wrongly) that Hart knows much more of Roch's secrets than he is willing to let on. It serves the purposes of the pirate chief, a completely ruthless killer, to let Hart live. The pirate engineer Serko, Hart's "colleague", hopes to win him over in prolonged friendly conversations. Hart's reticence is merely interpreted as proving that he has something to hide.

The pirates underestimate Hart, giving him a practically free run of their hide-out, since the only way out is via submarine. But after carefully studying the currents, Hart succeeds in secretly sending out a message in a metal keg, giving the full details of Karraje's operations and his impeding acquisition of the Fulgurator.

The message does get to the British authorities at the nearby Bahama, who promptly act on it. A British submarine - - secretly arrives at the pirate cavern. Its men make contact with Hart, and take him and Roch on board - but the Sword is discovered, attacked and sunk by the pirate submarine in the kind of direct underwater submarine vs. submarine battle which was to prove very rare in the actual annals of submarine warfare
Submarine warfare
Naval warfare is divided into three operational areas: surface warfare, air warfare and underwater warfare. The latter may be subdivided into submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare as well as mine warfare and mine countermeasures...

.

The unconscious Hart and Roch are extracted from the sunk British sub by pirate divers, while the entire British crew headed by the heroic Lieutenant Devon perish. Hart rather implausibly manages to convince the pirates that he had been kidnapped by the British sailors and had nothing to do with their "visit", and resumes his role as a tolerated prisoner with a free run of the pirate base.

Meanwhile, Roch's weapon is completed and becomes operational - just in time for the book's climax: the arrival off the island of an international naval task force, consisting of five warships dispatched by the world's main five powers. Of these powers, three are certainly France, which is mentioned explicitly; Britain, which is the world's main naval power and in whose territory the secret pirate base is located; and the US, which is directly effected by Karraje's piracy. Germany, Italy and Russia might all be among the contributors of the other two ships. Presumably, the five powers were both cooperating against the common pirate threat and trying to keep an eye on each other and prevent any of their number from getting sole possession of the Fulgurator.

The weapon - operated personally by Roch himself, who has not given away the secret of the Deflagrator - works fully as advertised. Roch has no compunction in using it on British or American ships, and the first cruiser to approach the island is easily destroyed with only a handful of its crew surviving. Undaunted, the next ship approaches the shore, and the moment comes towards which the entire book was leading and from which its title was drawn:

"(...) The inventor has raised the phial [containing the Deflagrator]. The bugles sound louder and more strident. It is the salute to the flag. A flag unfurls to the breeze - the Tricolour
Tricolour
A tricolour is a flag or banner more-or-less equally divided into three bands of differing colours...

, whose blue, white and red sections stand out luminously against the sky .Ah! What is this? Thomas Roch is fascinated at the sight of his national emblem. Slowly he lowers his arm as the flag flutters up to the mast-head. Then he draws back and covers his eyes with his hand. Heavens above! All sentiment of patriotism is not then dead in his ulcerated heart, seeing that it beats at the sight of his country's flag!"

Having at the moment of truth rediscovered his patriotism, Roch refuses to fire on his country's ship, struggles with the pirates who try to seize his phial and the Deflagrator, and finally blows up himself, his weapon, the pirates and the entire island. The single survivor of the cataclysm is Simon Hart, whose unconscious body with the diary at his side is found by the landing French sailors.

Hart is eventually revived, to be amply rewarded for his dedication to his country and bear witness to Thomas Roch's last-minute change of heart and self-sacrifice. French patriotism is the moral and material victor.

Response

  • Following publication of the book, Verne was sued by the chemist Eugène Turpin
    Eugene Turpin
    François Eugène Turpin was a French chemist involved in research of explosive materials. He lived in Colombes.-Biography:...

    , inventor of the explosive Melinite, who recognized himself in the character of Roch and was not amused. Turpin had tried to sell his invention to the French government which in 1885 refused it, though later purchasing it (it was extensively used in the First World War); but Turpin had never gone mad, nor did he ever offer his invention to any but the Government of France, so he had some justified griveance. Verne was successfully defended by Raymond Poincaré
    Raymond Poincaré
    Raymond Poincaré was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France on five separate occasions and as President of France from 1913 to 1920. Poincaré was a conservative leader primarily committed to political and social stability...

    , later president of France. A letter to Verne's brother Paul seems to suggest, however, that after all Turpin was indeed the model for Roch. The character of Roch and his revolutionary powerful explosive might also have been be inspired by the real-life Alfred Nobel
    Alfred Nobel
    Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. He is the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments...

     who invented dynamite
    Dynamite
    Dynamite is an explosive material based on nitroglycerin, initially using diatomaceous earth , or another absorbent substance such as powdered shells, clay, sawdust, or wood pulp. Dynamites using organic materials such as sawdust are less stable and such use has been generally discontinued...

     and later reportedly regretted having introduced such a destructive force into the world (see http://home.netvigator.com/~wbutcher/articles/A%20Chronology%20of%20Jules%20Verne.htm, http://jv.gilead.org.il/FAQ/).

Politics

  • The book was written and published when France was in the throes of the Dreyfus Affair
    Dreyfus Affair
    The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...

    , Frenchmen were deeply divided over whether or not the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus
    Alfred Dreyfus
    Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...

     was guilty of treason and espionage on behalf of the hated Germany (and over more fundamental issues bound up with the Dreyfus case). Verne is known to have initially supported the right-wing anti-Dreyfusards. The question whether or not Verne was an anti-semite is hotly debated; Walter A. McDougall stated that "there is no overt evidence of anti-Semitism on Verne's part", while Herbert R. Lottman claimed that "Verne refused entreaties to moderate his passionate anti-Semitism" and that his Off on a Comet
    Off On A Comet
    Off on a Comet is an 1877 science fiction novel by Jules Verne.-Plot summary:The story starts with a comet that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. Some forty people of various nations and ages are condemned to a two-year-long journey on the comet. They form a...

    contains "unflattering Shylock
    Shylock
    Shylock is a fictional character in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.-In the play:In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is a Jewish moneylender who lends money to his Christian rival, Antonio, setting the security at a pound of Antonio's flesh...

    -style stereotypes." Be that as it may, Verne certainly was a nationalist caught up in the mindset of revanchism
    Revanchism
    Revanchism is a term used since the 1870s to describe a political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement. Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or...

    , to whom the idea of a French army officer - Jewish or not - spying for Germany would be the highest of anathemas; and initially he - like most French people - believed implicitly in Dreyfus's guilt. Yet in 1899 Verne came to support a judicial review of the Dreyfus case. While Roch cannot be said to represent Dreyfus in any concrete way, the theme of an apparent traitor who in the end proves to be a self-sacrificing patriot may be connected to the change of heart which Verne (and many readers) underwent about Dreyfus.

Legacy

  • Some critics consider Roch as the earliest archetype of the "mad scientist
    Mad scientist
    A mad scientist is a stock character of popular fiction, specifically science fiction. The mad scientist may be villainous or antagonistic, benign or neutral, and whether insane, eccentric, or simply bumbling, mad scientists often work with fictional technology in order to forward their schemes, if...

    " whose warped genius endangers the world, and which occurs in much of Twentieth Century thriller fiction, but the claim is weakened by the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

    's Professor Moriarty
    Professor Moriarty
    Professor James Moriarty is a fictional character and the archenemy of the detective Sherlock Holmes in the fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Moriarty is a criminal mastermind, described by Holmes as the "Napoleon of Crime". Doyle lifted the phrase from a real Scotland Yard inspector who was...

     who made his appearance across the Channel at virtually the same time as Verne's scientist. Several of the villains which James Bond
    James Bond
    James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...

     confronted seem to be the direct or indirect literary descendants of Ker Karaje with his well-equipped island hide-out.

  • Karel Zeman
    Karel Zeman
    Karel Zeman was a Czech film director, artist, production designer and animator. Because of his creative use of special effects and animation in his films, he has often been called the "Czech Méliès."-Life:...

    's 1958 film The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
    The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
    The Fabulous World of Jules Verne is a 1958 Czechoslovak adventure film directed by Karel Zeman, based on Jules Verne's 1896 novel Facing the Flag. It has also been released under the novel's title....

    (A Deadly Invention, Vynález zkázy in Czech), made in Czechoslovakia
    Czechoslovakia
    Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

    , was based on Verne's book. Critics consider the film "a historic land-mark of cinematic resourcefulness and imagination", made without the special effects and computer enhanced animation available nowadays. Zeman made considerable use of the lithographic drawings which accompanied the original Verne text.

External links

  • Original French text
  • For the Flag English text version with full page cover and page images from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature
    University of Florida Baldwin Library
    The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature in the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 103,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States from the early 18th century through the...

     and the University of Florida Digital Collections
    University of Florida Digital Collections
    The University of Florida Digital Collections are supported by the University of Florida Digital Library Center in the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The University of Florida Digital Collections comprise a constantly growing collection of digital resources from the...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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