Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is a science fiction adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne. It is considered a classic within its genres and world literature. It was originally serialised from March 1869 to June 1870 in Pierre-Jules Hetzel's French fortnightly periodical, the Magasin d'éducation et de récréation. A deluxe octavo edition, published by Hetzel in November 1871, included 111 illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou.
It was widely acclaimed on its release, and remains so; it is regarded as one of the premier adventure novels and one of Verne's greatest works, along with Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Michael Strogoff. Its depiction of Captain Nemo's submarine, Nautilus, is regarded as ahead of its time, as it accurately describes many features of modern submarines, which in the 1860s were comparatively primitive vessels. Verne was inspired by a model of the French submarine Plongeur, which he saw at the Exposition Universelle in 1867.
Title
The title refers to the distance travelled under the various seas, not the depth: 20,000 metric leagues, nearly twice the circumference of the Earth.Principal characters
- Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French natural scientist who also serves as the narrator.
- Conseil, Aronnax's Flemish servant who is highly devoted to him and knowledgeable in biological classification.
- Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner, described as having "no equal in his dangerous trade".
- Captain Nemo, the designer and captain of ''Nautilus.''
Plot
The expedition leaves Brooklyn aboard the United States Navy frigate Abraham Lincoln, captained by Admiral Farragut. The ship travels south around Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean. After a five-month search ending off Japan, the frigate locates and attacks the monster, which damages the ship's rudder. Aronnax and Land are hurled into the sea, and Conseil jumps in after them. They survive by climbing onto the "monster", which, they are startled to find, is a futuristic submarine. They wait on the deck until morning, when they are captured and introduced to its mysterious constructor and commander, Captain Nemo.
The rest of the novel describes the protagonists' adventures aboard the submarine Nautilus, which was built in secrecy and now roams the seas, beyond the reach of governments. In self-imposed exile, Captain Nemo seems to have a dual motivation—a quest for scientific knowledge and a desire to escape terrestrial civilisation. Nemo explains that his submarine is electrically powered and can conduct advanced marine research; he also tells his new passengers that his secret existence means he cannot let them leave—they must remain on board permanently.
They visit many oceanic regions, some real and others fictional. The travellers view coral formations, sunken vessels from the Battle of Vigo Bay, the Antarctic ice barrier, the transatlantic telegraph cable and the legendary underwater realm of Atlantis. They even travel to the South Pole and are trapped in an upheaval of an iceberg on the way back, caught in a narrow gallery of ice from which they are forced to dig themselves out. The passengers also put on diving suits, hunt sharks and other marine fauna with air guns in the underwater forests of Crespo Island and attend an undersea funeral for a crewman who died during a mysterious collision experienced by Nautilus. When the submarine returns to the Atlantic Ocean, a school of giant squid attack it and kill another crewman.
The later pages suggest Captain Nemo went into undersea exile after his homeland was conquered and his family were slaughtered by a powerful imperialist nation. Following the episode of the devilfish, Nemo largely avoids Aronnax, who begins to side with Ned Land. Ultimately, Nautilus is attacked by a warship from the mysterious nation that has caused Nemo such suffering. Carrying out his quest for revenge, Nemo—whom Aronnax dubs an "archangel of hatred"—rams the ship below its waterline and sends it to the bottom, much to the professor's horror. Afterwards, Nemo kneels before a portrait of his deceased wife and children, then sinks into a deep depression.
Circumstances aboard the submarine change drastically: watches are no longer kept, and the vessel wanders about aimlessly. Ned becomes so reclusive that Conseil fears for his wellbeing. One morning, he announces that they are in sight of land and have a chance to escape. Aronnax is more than ready to leave Captain Nemo, who now horrifies him, yet he is still drawn to the man. Fearing that Nemo's very presence could weaken his resolve, he avoids contact with him. Before their departure, the professor eavesdrops on Nemo and overhears him calling out in anguish, "O almighty God! Enough! Enough!" Aronnax immediately joins his companions as they carry out their escape plans, but as they board the submarine's skiff they realise Nautilus has seemingly blundered into the ocean's deadliest whirlpool, the Moskstraumen. They escape and find refuge on an island off the coast of Norway. The submarine's ultimate fate remained unknown until the events of The Mysterious Island.
Themes and subtext
Captain Nemo's assumed name recalls Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, when Odysseus encounters the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus in the course of his wanderings. Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies that it is Outis 'no one', translated into Latin as "Nemo". Like Captain Nemo, Odysseus wanders the seas in exile and similarly grieves the tragic deaths of his crewmen.The novel repeatedly mentions the U.S. Naval Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, an oceanographer who investigated the winds, seas and currents, collected samples from the depths and charted the world's oceans. Maury was internationally famous, and Verne may have known of his French ancestry.
The novel alludes to other Frenchmen, including Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, the celebrated explorer whose two sloops of war vanished during a circumnavigational voyage; Jules Dumont d'Urville, a later explorer who found the remains of one of Lapérouse's ships; and Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal and nephew of the sole survivor of Lapérouse's ill-fated expedition. Nautilus follows in the footsteps of these men: it visits the waters where Lapérouse's vessels disappeared; it enters Torres Strait and becomes stranded there, as did d'Urville's ship, the Astrolabe; and it passes beneath the Suez Canal via a fictional underwater passage connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
In possibly its most famous episode, the battle with a school of giant squid, one of the monsters captures a crew-member. Reflecting on the battle in the next chapter, Aronnax writes: "To convey such sights, it would take the pen of our most renowned poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea." A bestselling novel in Verne's day, The Toilers of the Sea also features a threatening cephalopod: a labourer battles with an octopus, believed by critics to be symbolic of the Industrial Revolution. Certainly, Verne was influenced by Hugo's novel, and, in creating this variation on its octopus encounter, he may have intended the symbol to also take in the Revolutions of 1848.
Other symbols and themes pique modern critics. Margaret Drabble argues that Verne's masterwork also anticipated the ecology movement and influenced French avant-garde imagery. As for additional motifs, Captain Nemo repeatedly champions the world's persecuted and downtrodden. While in Mediterranean waters, he provides financial support to rebels resisting rule by the Ottoman Empire during the Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869, proving to Aronnax that he had not severed all relations with terrestrial mankind. In another episode, Nemo rescues an Indian pearl-hunter from a shark attack, then gives him a pouch full of pearls, more than the man could have gathered after years of his hazardous work. When asked why he would help a "representative of that race from which he'd fled under the seas", Nemo responds that the diver, as an "East Indian", "lives in the land of the oppressed".
Indeed, the novel has an under-the-counter political vision, hinted at in the character and background of Captain Nemo himself. In the book's final form, Nemo says to professor Aronnax, "That Indian, sir, is an inhabitant of an oppressed country; and I am still, and shall be, to my last breath, one of them!" In the novel's initial drafts, the mysterious captain was a Polish nobleman, whose family and homeland were slaughtered by Russian forces during the Polish January Uprising of 1863. These specifics were suppressed during the editing stages at the insistence of Verne's publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, believed responsible by today's scholars for many modifications of Verne's original manuscripts. At the time France was a putative ally of the Russian Empire, hence Hetzel demanded Verne to suppress the identity of Nemo's enemy war, not only to avoid political complications but also to avert lower sales should the novel appear in Russian translation. Hence Professor Aronnax never discovers Nemo's origins.
Even so, a trace remains of the novel's initial concept, a detail that may have eluded Hetzel: its allusion to an unsuccessful rebellion under a Polish hero, Tadeusz Kościuszko, leader of the uprising against Russian and Prussian control in 1794; Kościuszko mourned his country's prior defeat with the Latin exclamation "Finis Poloniae!".
Five years later, and again at Hetzel's insistence, Captain Nemo was revived and revamped for another Verne novel, The Mysterious Island. The novel changes the captain's nationality from Polish to Indian; in the book's final chapters, Nemo reveals that he is an Indian prince named Dakkar who was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, a prominent ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, and participated in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, an ultimately unsuccessful uprising against Company rule in India. After the rebellion, which led to the death of his family, Nemo fled beneath the seas, then made a final reappearance in the later novel's concluding pages.
File:LePlongeurModel.jpg|thumb|Model of the 1863 French Navy submarine Plongeur at the Musée de la Marine, Paris
File:Nautilus Neuville.JPG|thumb|Illustration of the Nautilus by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou
Verne took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who also invented the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton named his submarine after a marine mollusk, the chambered nautilus. As noted above, Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which guided him in his development of the novel's Nautilus.
The diving gear used by passengers on the Nautilus is presented as a combination of two existing systems: 1) the surface-supplied hardhat suit, which was fed oxygen from the shore through tubes; 2) a later, self-contained apparatus designed by Benoit Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze in 1865. Their invention featured tanks fastened to the back, which supplied air to a facial mask via the first-known demand regulator. The diver didn't swim but walked upright across the seafloor. This device was called an aérophore. Its air tanks could hold only thirty atmospheres, but Nemo claims that his futuristic adaptation could do far better: "The Nautiluss pumps allow me to store air under considerable pressure... my diving equipment can supply breathable air for nine or ten hours."