The book 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 and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Its depiction of Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, is regarded as ahead of its time, since it accurately describes many features of modern submarines, which in the 1860s were comparatively primitive vessels.
The title refers to the distance travelled under the various seas: 20,000 metric leagues (80,000km, over 40,000 nautical miles), nearly twice the circumference of the Earth.[6]
Principal characters
Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French natural scientist and the narrator of the story.
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".[7]
In 1866, ships of various nationalities sight a mysterious sea monster, which is speculated to be a gigantic narwhal. The U.S. government assembles an expedition in New York City to find and destroy the monster. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and the story's narrator, is in town at the time and receives a last-minute invitation to join the expedition. Canadianwhaler and master harpooner Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful manservant Conseil are also among the participants.
The expedition leaves Brooklyn aboard the United States Navy frigate Abraham Lincoln, then 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 into the water after them. They survive by climbing onto the "monster", which, they are startled to find, is a futuristic submarine. They wait on the deck of the vessel until morning, when they are captured and introduced to the submarine's mysterious constructor and commander, Captain Nemo.
The rest of the novel describes the protagonists' adventures aboard the Nautilus, which was built in secrecy and now roams the seas beyond the reach of land-based governments. In self-imposed exile, Captain Nemo seems to have a dual motivation — a quest for scientific knowledge and a desire to escape terrestrial civilization. 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 factual and others fictitious. The travelers 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 crew member who died during a mysterious collision experienced by the Nautilus. When the submarine returns to the Atlantic Ocean, a school of giant squid ("devilfish") attacks the vessel and kills another crewman.
The novel's later pages suggest that Captain Nemo went into undersea exile after his homeland was conquered and his family slaughtered by a powerful imperialist nation. Following the episode of the devilfish, Nemo largely avoids Aronnax, who begins to side with Ned Land. Ultimately, the 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 her waterline and sends her to the bottom, much to the professor's horror. Afterward, 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 the harpooner's life. One morning, he announces that they are in sight of land and have a chance to escape. Professor 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 the captain. 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 realize that the Nautilus has seemingly blundered into the ocean's deadliest whirlpool, the Moskenstraumen (more commonly known as the "Maelstrom"). 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
Nautilus's route through the PacificNautilus's route through the Atlantic
Captain Nemo's assumed name recalls Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus encounters the monstrous CyclopsPolyphemus in the course of his wanderings. Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies that it is Outis (Οὖτις) 'no one', translated into Latin as "Nemo". Like Captain Nemo, Odysseus wanders the seas in exile (though only for ten years) 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 Lapérouse, the celebrated explorer whose two sloops of war vanished during a voyage of global circumnavigation; 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. The Nautilus follows in the footsteps of these men: she visits the waters where Lapérouse's vessels disappeared; she enters Torres Strait and becomes stranded there, as did d'Urville's ship, the Astrolabe; and she passes beneath the Suez Canal via a fictitious underwater tunnel joining the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.
In possibly the novel's most famous episode, the above-described 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 laborer battles with an octopus, believed by critics to be symbolic of the Industrial Revolution. Certainly, Verne was influenced by Hugo's novel, and, in penning 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, for instance, argues that Verne's masterwork also anticipated the ecology movement and influenced French avant-garde imagery.[8] As for additional motifs in the novel, Captain Nemo repeatedly champions the world's persecuted and downtrodden. While in Mediterranean waters, the captain provides financial support to rebels resisting Ottoman rule during the Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869, proving to Professor Aronnax that he had not severed all relations with terrestrial mankind. In another episode, Nemo rescues an Indianpearl diver from a shark attack, then gives the fellow 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".[9]
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!"[10] 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 that Verne suppress the identity of Nemo's enemy, 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;[11] Kościuszko mourned his country's prior defeat with the Latin exclamation "Finis Poloniae!" ("Poland is no more!").
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.
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.[4]
The diving gear used by passengers on the Nautilus is presented as a combination of two existing systems: 1) the surface-supplied[12] 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.[12][13][14] The diver didn't swim but walked upright across the seafloor. This device was called an aérophore (Greek for "air-carrier"). Its air tanks could hold only thirty atmospheres, but Nemo claims that his futuristic adaptation could do far better: "The Nautilus's pumps allow me to store air under considerable pressure ... my diving equipment can supply breathable air for nine or ten hours."
English translations
The novel was first translated into English in 1872 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[15] among other international figures. Mercier's text became the standard English translation, and some later retranslations continued to recycle its mistakes, including mistranslating the title as "...under the Sea", rather than "...under the Seas".
A significant modern revision of Mercier's translation appeared in 1966, prepared by Walter James Miller and published by Washington Square Press.[17] Miller addressed many of Mercier's errors in the volume's preface and restored a number of his deletions in the text. In 1976, Miller published "The Annotated Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea"[18] at the suggestion of the Thomas Y. Crowel Company editorial staff.[19] The cover declared it "The only completely restored and annotated edition". In 1993, Miller collaborated with his fellow Vernian Frederick Paul Walter to produce "The Completely Restored and Annotated Edition", published in 1993 by the Naval Institute Press.[20] Its text took advantage of Walter's unpublished translation, which Project Gutenberg later made available online.
In 1998, William Butcher issued a new, annotated translation with the title Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, published by Oxford University Press ( ISBN978-0-19-953927-7). Butcher includes detailed notes, a comprehensive bibliography, appendices and a wide-ranging introduction studying the novel from a literary perspective. In particular, his original research on the two manuscripts studies the radical changes to the plot and to the character of Nemo urged on Verne by Hetzel, his publisher.
In 2010, Frederick Paul Walter issued a fully revised, newly researched translation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater. Complete with an extensive introduction, textual notes, and bibliography, it appeared in an omnibus of five of Walter's Verne translations titled Amazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics and published by State University of New York Press ( ISBN978-1-4384-3238-0).
In 2017, David Coward issued a new translation published by Penguin Classics ( ISBN9780141394930) with the title Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, including a new introduction, notes, and a note on the text, using the 1871 Christian Chelebourg edition of the text as the basis for his translation. Coward also included 42 illustrations, which were published for the first time in the 'Collection Hetzel' in 1901.
Reception
The science fiction writer Theodore L. Thomas criticized the novel in 1961, claiming that "there is not a single bit of valid speculation" in the book and that "none of its predictions has come true". He described its depictions of Nemo's diving gear, underwater activities, and the Nautilus as "pretty bad, behind the times even for 1869 ... In none of these technical situations did Verne take advantage of knowledge readily available to him at the time." The notes to the 1993 translation point out that the errors Thomas notes were in Mercier's translation, not the original.
Despite his criticisms, Thomas conceded: "Put them all together with the magic of Verne's story-telling ability, and something flames up. A story emerges that sweeps incredulity before it".[13]
In 2023, Malaurie Guillaume presented Nemo as the first eco-terrorist or first figure of ecologic radicality.[21]
Nautilus is the fictional submarine belonging to Captain Nemo featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875).
Captain Nemo is a character created by the French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905). Nemo appears in two of Verne's science-fiction books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875). He also makes a brief appearance in a play written by Verne with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery, Journey Through the Impossible (1882).
The Mysterious Island is a novel by Jules Verne, serialised from August 1874 to September 1875 and then published in book form in November 1875. The first edition, published by Hetzel, contains illustrations by Jules Férat. The novel is a crossover sequel to Verne's famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and In Search of the Castaways (1867–68), though its themes are vastly different from those books. An early draft of the novel, rejected by Verne's publisher and wholly reconceived before publication, was titled Shipwrecked Family: Marooned with Uncle Robinson, indicating the influence of the novels Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. Verne developed a similar theme in his novel, Godfrey Morgan.
Pierre-Jules Hetzel was a French editor and publisher celebrated for his extraordinarily lavishly illustrated editions of Jules Verne's novels, highly prized by collectors.
Les Mystères du Nautilus is a walkthrough attraction at Disneyland Paris in France. It is an updated version of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea walkthrough attraction that was at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA in the early 1950s, based upon the film of the same name. This attraction takes guests throughout the various rooms of Captain Nemo's submarine, especially those seen in the film. It opened on 4 July 1994.
Mysterious Island is a 1961 science fiction adventure film about prisoners in the American Civil War who escape in a balloon and then find themselves stranded on a remote island populated by giant and tiny animals.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1954 American science fiction adventure film directed by Richard Fleischer, from a screenplay by Earl Felton. Adapted from Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, the film was produced by Walt Disney Productions. It stars Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas, and Peter Lorre. Photographed in Technicolor, the film was one of the first feature-length motion pictures to be filmed in CinemaScope. It was also the first feature-length Disney film to be distributed by Buena Vista Distribution.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1916 American silent film directed by Stuart Paton. The film's storyline is based on the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne. It also incorporates elements from Verne's 1875 novel The Mysterious Island.
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City is a 1969 British film directed by James Hill and starring Robert Ryan, Chuck Connors and Nanette Newman. It features the character Captain Nemo and is inspired by Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. It was written by Pip and Jane Baker.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1997 two-part television miniseries produced by Village Roadshow Pictures, based on the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne. It was written by Brian Nelson and directed by Rod Hardy.
Astrolabe was a converted flûte of the French Navy, famous for her travels with Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1985 Australian made-for-television animated film from Burbank Films Australia. The film is based on Jules Verne's classic 1870 novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and was adapted by Stephen MacLean. It was produced by Tim Brooke-Hunt and featured original music by John Stuart. The copyright in this film is now owned by Pulse Distribution and Entertainment and administered by digital rights management firm NuTech Digital.
Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius is a novel by Kevin J. Anderson, published in 2002 by Pocket Books. It is a secret history and crossover work, the central premise being that many of the things Jules Verne wrote about existed in real life as told to him by the real Captain Nemo.
The Secret of the Nautilus is a 2002 adventure video game, inspired by Jules Verne's 1870 science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. It was developed by Cryo Interactive and released for Microsoft Windows based PCs.
Journey Through the Impossible is an 1882 fantasy play written by Jules Verne, with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery. A stage spectacular in the féerie tradition, the play follows the adventures of a young man who, with the help of a magic potion and a varied assortment of friends and advisers, makes impossible voyages to the center of the Earth, the bottom of the sea, and a distant planet. The play is deeply influenced by Verne's own Voyages Extraordinaires series and includes characters and themes from some of his most famous novels, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon.
Captain Nemo is a 1975 Soviet three-part television miniseries directed by Vasily Levin loosely based on the novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), its 1874 sequel The Mysterious Island, and The Steam House (1880) by Jules Verne.
August Denayrouze (1837–1883) was an inventor of a demand valve for control of breathing air supply, and one of the inventors of a diving suit, along with Benoît Rouquayrol.
Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas has been adapted and referenced in popular culture on numerous occasions.
Daughter of the Deep is a middle grade fantasy-adventure novel by Rick Riordan. It was published on October 26, 2021, by Disney-Hyperion, and entered The New York Times Best Seller list.
References
↑ Canavan, Gerry (2018). The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press. ( ISBN978-1-31-669437-4)
↑ Compère, D. (2006). Jules Verne: bilan d'un anniversaire. Romantisme, (1), 87-97.
↑ F. P. Walter's Project Gutenberg translation of Part 2, Chapter 7, reads: "Accordingly, our speed was 25 miles (that is, twelve four–kilometer leagues) per hour. Needless to say, Ned Land had to give up his escape plans, much to his distress. Swept along at the rate of twelve to thirteen meters per second, he could hardly make use of the skiff."
↑ Jules Verne (author), Walter James Miller (trans.). Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Washington Square Press, 1966. Standard Book Number 671-46557-0; Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-25245.
↑ Jules Verne; Walter James Miller (trans.) (1976). The Annotated Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. ISBN0690011512.
↑ Jules Verne; Walter James Miller (trans.) (1976). The Annotated Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. pp.Acknowledgements. ISBN0690011512.
↑ Jules Verne (author), Walter James Miller (trans.), Frederick Paul Walter (trans.). Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A Completely Restored and Annotated Edition, Naval Institute Press, 1993. ISBN978-1-55750-877-5.
↑ Guillaume, Malaurie (2023-09-07). "Le capitaine Nemo était-il le premier éco-terroriste?". Challenges. Archived from the original on 2023-10-10. Le personnage de Jules Verne est sans doute la première figure de la radicalité écologique en prise avec les conséquences de la disparition du système terre. Car oui, le capitaine Nemo, c'est un leader écologiste radical qui dans les arcanes des abysses marins a inauguré une ZAD. Un protagoniste éclairant à l'heure où les efforts publics sont insuffisants face à la crise écologique, estime Guillaume Malaurie
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