James DeMille, "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder" (1888)

De Mille is a Canadian classical historian, teacher, and perhaps most famously, a fiction author who focused particularly on adventure stories. His biography is available at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

This particular story of De Mille's is enjoyable, although sometimes seems a bit heavy compared to contemporary work. Essentially, the plot of A Strange Manuscript... runs thusly: A seagoing ship of educated and leisured men - prone to rather annoying preaching and showy displays of arcane knowledge - discovers a copper cylinder in which is sealed a lengthy manuscript detailing a fantastical story of a man's adventure in a previously undiscovered region of the world that seems to be hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the South Pole. The narrative of the manuscript is occasionally interrupted by the crew of men debating the merits of the story, the veracity of the tale, and the perspective of the storyteller.

The story within the discovered narrative offers an intriguing critique of capitalist society, and the morals such a system is based on. The lost seaman, who is at first adrift with a shipmate, encounters adversities posed by nature - from storms to volcanoes - as well as hostile indigenous peoples who seem bent on eating him and his partner. Only one escapes these pursuers, and ends up in a verdant, productive society hidden within a ring of mountains at the South Pole. The society operates according to values completely contrary to those that seem to operate in the rest of the world, however, idealizing poverty, death, suffering, and servitude as the greatest good for all individuals and society as a whole. Within this world, the paupers, the jailed, those about to be sacrificed are the highest figures, and those to be punished are the wealthy, the selfish, and those who live in the sunlight. Unsurprisingly, our discoverer/narrator struggles to learn about and understand this society, falls in love, confuses his hosts, and seeks to arrange his escape from their overly helpful hands that aim to do him the highest honour of sacrifice and cannibalism.

The entirety of the story can be read and/or downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.