the two books and even within The Mysterious Island itself. Verne returned to the theme of an outlaw submarine captain in his much later Facing the Flag (1896). This novel's chief villain, Ker Karraje, is simply an unscrupulous pirate acting purely for personal gain, completely devoid of the saving graces that gave Captain Nemo some nobility of character. Like Nemo, Ker Karraje plays "host" to unwilling French guests — but unlike Nemo, who manages to elude all pursuers — Karraje's criminal career is decisively thwarted by the combination of an international task force and the resistance of his French captives. Though also widely published and translated, Facing the Flag never achieved the lasting popularity of Twenty Thousand Leagues. Closer in approach to the original Nemo — though offering less detail and complexity of characterization — is the rebel aeronaut Robur in Robur the Conqueror and its sequel Master of the World. Instead of the sea, Robur's medium is the sky: In these two novels he develops a pioneering helicopter and later a seaplane on wheels. English translations The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Lewis Page Mercier. Mercier cut nearly a quarter of Verne's French text and committed hundreds of translating errors, sometimes drastically distorting Verne's original (including uniformly mistranslating the French scaphandre — properly "diving suit" — as "cork-jacket", following a long-obsolete usage as "a type of lifejacket"). Some of these distortions may have been perpetrated for political reasons, such as Mercier's omitting the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of Nemo's stateroom, a collection originally including Daniel O'Connell among other international figures. Nevertheless, Mercier's text became the standard English translation, and some later "re-translations" continued to recycle its mistakes, including mistranslating the title as "... under the Sea", rather than "... under the Seas". In 1962, Anthony Bonner published a fresh, essentially complete translation of the novel with Bantam Classics. This edition also included a special introduction written by the sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, comparing Captain Nemo to Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick. A significant modern revision of Mercier's translation appeared in 1966, prepared by Walter James Miller and published by Washington Square Press. Miller addressed many of Mercier's errors in the volume's preface and restored a number of his deletions in the text. In 1993, Miller collaborated with his fellow Vernian Frederick Paul Walter to produce "The Completely Restored and Annotated Edition", published