Two Years Holiday or Adrift in the Pacific

Jules Verne's adventure novel opens in March 1860 with a group of schoolboys, aged eight to fourteen, aboard the 100-ton schooner Sleuth at Auckland, New Zealand, ready to leave on a six-week holiday. Most are British; the exceptions are Gordon, the oldest, an American, and the French brothers Briant and Jack. While the crew is ashore, the moorings are loosed in unexplained circumstances, and the ship drifts out to sea, where a storm catches it. After twenty-two days adrift, the boys wash up on an uncharted island, which they call Chairman Island, and must learn to survive there, hunting wild animals among other adventures. Their struggles for survival and leadership foreshadow William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Ovidiu Drugan, owner of the Set Sail Nautic School, picked it among his favourites as a navigation and castaway story.