Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Seas (or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne (1828–1905), published in 1870 under the title Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. The original edition, published by Hetzel, contains a number of illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Riou. The novel is about the fictional Captain Nemo and his submarine, Nautilus, as seen by one of his passengers, Professor Pierre Aronnax.

Plot summary

The story was written before modern sea-going submarines were a reality. It is narrated by Professor Aronnax, a noted marine biologist, who is accompanied by his faithful assistant Conseil and by a Canadian harpooner named Ned Land. As the story begins, a mysterious "sea monster", theorized by some to be a giant narwhal, is sighted by ships of several nations; an ocean liner is also damaged by the creature. The United States government finally assembles an expedition to track down and destroy the menace. Since Aronnax happens to be in New York City at the time and is a recognized expert in his field, he is invited at the last minute to go along, and he accepts. Another person brought on board is master harpoonist Land.

The expedition sets sail aboard an American warship, the Abraham Lincoln, which travels down around the tip of South America and into the Pacific Ocean. After much fruitless searching, the monster is discovered, and the ship charges into battle. During the fight, the ship's steering is damaged, and the three protagonists are thrown overboard. They find themselves stranded on the "hide" of the creature, only to discover to their surprise that it is actually a large metal vehicle. They are quickly captured and brought inside the vehicle, where they meet its enigmatic creator and commander, Captain Nemo. ("Nemo" means "no one" in Latin and is a reference to Homer's Odyssey)

The remainder of the story follows the adventures of the protagonists aboard the submarine, the Nautilus, which was built in secrecy and now roams the seas free of any land-based goverment. Captain Nemo's motivation is implied to be both a scientific thirst for knowledge, and a desire for revenge on, and self imposed exile from, civilization. Captain Nemo explains that the submarine is electrically powered, and equipped to carry out cutting edge marine biology research; he also tells his new passengers that while he appreciates having an expert such as Aronnax with which to converse, they can never leave because he is afraid they will betray his existence to the world. Aronnax is enthralled by the vistas he is viewing, but Land plots constantly to escape.

Their travels take them to numerous points in the world's oceans, some of them which were known to Jules Verne from real travelers' descriptions and guesses, while others are totally fictional. Thus, the travelers witness the real corals of the Red Sea, the wrecks of the battle of Vigo Bay, the Antarctic ice shelves, and the fictional, submerged Atlantis. Back in the Atlantic Ocean, a group of giant squid (cuttlefish in the English translation) attacks the Nautilus, and kills a crew member. Nemo is plunged into deep depression, and allows the submarine to wander into an encounter with the Moskstraumen whirlpool off the coast of Norway. This gives the three prisoners an opportunity to escape; they make it back to land alive, but the fate of Captain Nemo and his crew is not revealed.

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury "Captain Maury" in Verne's book, a real-life oceanographer who explored the winds, seas, currents, and collected samples of the bottom of the seas and charted all of these things is mentioned a few times in this work by Jules Verne. Jules Verne certainly would have known of Matthew Maury's international fame and perhaps Maury's French ancestry.

Some of Verne's ideas about the not-yet-existing submarines which were laid out in this book turned out to be prophetic (such as the high speed and secret conduct of today's nuclear attack submarines), and (with diesel submarines) the necessity to surface frequently for fresh air.

Verne borrowed the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who later invented the first commercially successful steamboat. The word itself is after the chambered nautilus, a kind of Mollusk.

Verne can also be credited with glimpsing the military possibilities of submarines, and specificially the danger which they possessed for the naval superiority of the British Navy, composed of surface warships. The fictional sinking of a British ship by Nemo's "Nautilus" was to be enacted again and again in reality, in the same waters where Verne predicted it, by German U-boats in both World Wars.

No less significant, though more rarely commented on, is the very bold political vision (indeed, revolutionary for its time) represented by the character of Captain Nemo. As revealed in the later Verne book Mysterious Island, Captain Nemo is an Indian, who took to the underwater life after the suppression of the 1857 Indian Mutiny in which his close family members were killed by the British.

This change was made on request of Verne's publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (who is known to be responsible for many serious changes in Verne's books) since the original text had the mysterious captain as an ethnic Pole, avenging his family who were killed by Russians. They had been murdered in retaliation for the captain's taking part in the Polish January Uprising (1863). Given the fact that France was allied with Tsarist Russia, in order to avoid trouble the target for Nemo's wrath was changed to France's old enemy: the British Empire. No wonder that Professor Pierre Aronnax doesn't suspect Nemo's origins, as these were explained only later, in Verne's next book. What remained in the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko (Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794) with inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!".

The national origin of Captain Nemo was changed during most movie realizations; in nearly all picture-based works following the book he was made into a European. Nemo was represented as an Indian in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both in the graphic novel and the movie.

Recurring themes in later books

Verne returned to the theme of an outlaw submarine captain in his much later Facing the Flag. That book's main villain, Ker Karraje, is a completely unscrupulous pirate, acting purely and simply for gain, completley void of all the saving graces which gave Nemo - for all that he, too, was capable of ruthless killings - some nobility of character.

Like Nemo, Ker Karraje plays "host" to unwilling French guests - but unlike Nemo, who manages to elude all pursuers, Karraje's career of outlawry is decively ended by the combination of an international task force and the rebellion of his French captives. Though also widely published and translated, it never attained the lasting popularity of "Twenty Thousand Leagues".

More similar to the original Nemo, though with a less finally worked-out character, is Robur in Robur the Conqueror - a dark and flamboyant outlaw rebel using an aircraft instead of a submarine.

Translations

The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Louis Page Mercier (aka "Mercier Lewis"). Mercier cut nearly a quarter of Verne's original text and introduced hundreds of translation errors, sometimes dramatically changing the meaning of Verne's original intent. Nonetheless it became the "standard" English translation for over a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it - and its mistakes. It was not until a ground-up re-examination of the sources and an entirely new translation by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter between 1989-1991 that many of the "sins" of Mercier were finally corrected.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

20,000 lieues sous les mers (1907)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) - produced by Walt Disney, probably the best known version
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) - British version with a different story
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1972) - Rankin-Bass production
The Return of Captain Nemo (1978 TV movie)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 TV movie, Michael Caine)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 TV movie, Ben Cross)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 video)
A version of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus appeared in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in the first two volumes of the comic book as well as in the film.
The second part of the second season of Around the World with Willy Fog by Spanish studio BRB Internacional was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Trivia

"Twenty Thousand" in the title of the book does not refer to depth but to the distance the Nautilus travels while under the seas over the course of its adventures in this book.
The word leagues in the English title is a literal translation of lieues, whereas twenty thousand lieues marine are 60,000 nautical miles, 111,120 km, or 69,046.7 Miles.
Jules Verne wrote a sequel to this book: L'Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island, 1874). That novel concludes the stories began by both Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea as well as that begun in In Search of the Castaways.
One of the Magic Kingdom's inaugural rides was called Submarine Voyage and was based on the novel.
A ride attraction named 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is featured at the Tokyo DisneySea in Japan opened in 2001.

External links

, trans. Lewis Mercier 1872 (slightly abridged: see translation note above.)
, trans. F. P. Walter, University of Houston, circa 1995
Full text available in multiple formats
Online versions of the book, in French, English, Russian and Dutch.
Literary analysis of the novels of Jules Verne (French text)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - RSS Version of the Text
20K The Ride - An in-depth look at the now closed 20K ride at DisneyWorld.
DisneySub.com - Web site dedicated to Disney Nautilus images and trivia. Lively discussion board for learning more about Walt Disney's submarine creation.

1870 books | Science fiction novels | Submarine fiction | Jules Verne novels