During the Civil War a group of Union soldiers, a Confederate and a civilian escape the stockade using a hot-air balloon and end up on a strange Pacific island.

During the US Civil War, Union POWs escape in a balloon and end up stranded on a South Pacific island, inhabited by giant plants and animals. They must use their ingenuity to survive the dangers, and to devise a way to return home. Sequel to '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'.—Stewart M. Clamen <clamen@cs.cmu.edu>

In 1865, during the siege of Richmond, Virginia, Union soldier POWs Captain Harding, Neb and Herbert escape in a balloon during a hurricane with a confederate prisoner, Sergeant Pencroft and civilian journalist, Spilett. The storm takes the balloon to a mysterious island near New Zealand in the South Pacific. Captain Harding proclaims himself leader of the group and they look for food. They discover that they are stranded on an island and soon are attacked by a giant crab that becomes their first meal. In the following days they build themselves shelter and find the island inhabited by other giant animals. One day they find two castaways on the beach: the aristocratic Lady Mary Fairchild and her sexy niece Elena. Later they find a trunk with weapons and a sextant and then they find the hut and journal of a man once marooned on the island by pirates. When pirates later return to the island, the castaways are surprised to be helped by Captain Nemo of the legendary submarine Nautilus. (Nemo -- notorious for his war against slavery -- was supposedly sunk and gone missing eight years earlier.) Finally, when a volcano threatens to obliterate their island, all must plan an escape.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

As the war between the States is coming to an end, an imprisoned Union captain, two other prisoners, a confederate soldier and a civilian newspaperman escape in a hot air balloon. Strong winds carry the across the country and out over the Pacific where they eventually land on what at first appears to be an uninhabited island. They are soon joined by two women, survivors of a pirate attack. While they manage to make a home for themselves, they have to deal with extraordinarily large animals including a giant crab and giant bees. The giant fauna is the result of experiments by Captain Nemo who has lived on the island aboard his crippled submarine, the Nautilus, for eight years. They also have to deal with an active volcano and time is short if they are to leave the island before it explodes.—garykmcd

1865. With the aid of Gideon Spilitt, a war correspondent for the New York Herald, three Union soldiers - Cyrus Harding, Herbert Brown, and Neb Nugent - are able to break out of a Libby, a military Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia, the four men who are able to escape using one of the Confederate's surveillance hot air balloons, they in the process necessarily taking along a Confederate soldier, Pencroft, as he knows how to operate the balloon. Despite Pencroft's knowledge, the balloon nonetheless crash lands in where they believe is somewhere in the South Pacific on a seemingly deserted volcanic island. Still considering themselves at war, Captain Harding, as the senior officer, feels he should take charge. While Brown, a self-admitted coward, and Nugent, a black man, willingly go along with his orders as their superior, Spilitt and Pencroft are more reluctant in their agreement, working cooperatively for their own survival outweighing whatever hesitation they have working under Harding. The five are soon joined on the island by two Brits, Lady Mary Fairchild and her pretty young adult niece Elena, the only two survivors of a shipwreck. While there is a bounty of food and water on the island to survive, they still work toward the goal of trying to get off the island back to civilization. While they learn quickly in their stay that they share the island with a number of supersized menacing animals which provide much wanted animal protein, that is if the animals don't kill them first, they face a looming more dangerous menace preventing them from staying on the island much longer, something well known to the hidden eighth on the island.—Huggo