Burbank's daughter Dy and caretaker Zermah are both kidnapped by a man claiming to be Texar and are purportedly taken to a place in the Everglades called Carneral Island.

En route, and after enlisting the help of the United States Navy, they find a separate group searching for Texar in response to crimes that apparently happened in the same time as the ones at Camdless Bay but in a distant location.

Nord Contre Sud, the original French title of the book, was first published in its fully illustrated edition in November, 1887, by J. Hetzel et Cie, Paris.

The first fully illustrated edition in English was North against South published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, London, December 1887.

[4] [In Jules Verne's] story of "Texar"... a very thin streak of narrative is padded to almost unwieldy proportions by a quantity of remarkably inaccurate information about the rebellion.