The quartet is hired to play a number of concerts for the residents during their tour of the islands (Sandwich, Cook, Society) of the South Pacific.

In October, 1896 Sampson Low (London) published the novel as The Floating Island, or The Pearl of the Pacific, translated by W. J. Gordon, with 80 illustrations.

As Arthur B. Evans notes: The equivalent of dozens of pages have been cut from this Verne story because they were viewed as being somehow critical of the Americans or the British.

In one problematic passage—a long anti-missionary diatribe that the translator apparently decided could not be easily cut from Verne’s narrative—a simple but ingenious solution was found: the nationality of the rapacious cleric was simply changed from British to German (II§1.190).

In 2015, Professor Marie-Thérèse Noiset of the University of North Carolina translated the book complete with the previously excised passages.

"[3] Michael Orthofer critiqued the edition at his Complete Review website, writing that the original was "apparently one of the first examples of a novel written in the third-person and the present tense – yet surely these should count as additional reasons to try to recreate that in English..."[4] Professor Arthur Bruce Evans of DePauw University reviewed the Noiset translation favorably, describing her prose as an example of "[t]he fine art of translating—blending textual faithfulness with discursive fluidity..." Evans noted the "regrettable lack of illustrations" in the 2015 edition, as compared to the Verne octavo which held approximately 80 illustrations by Léon Benett.