The title refers to the distance travelled under the various seas, not the depth: 20,000metric leagues (80,000 km, over 40,000 nautical miles), nearly twice thecircumference of the Earth.[6]
In 1866 ships of various nationalities sight a mysterioussea monster, which is speculated to be a giganticnarwhal. TheUnited States federal government assembles an expedition inNew York City to find and destroy the monster. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a Frenchmarine biologist and the story'snarrator, is in town at the time and receives a last-minute invitation from theU.S. Government to join their expedition to find said monster. A Canadianwhaler and masterharpooner named Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful manservant, Conseil, are also among the participants.
The expedition leaves Brooklyn aboard theUnited States NavyfrigateAbraham Lincoln, captained byAdmiral Farragut. The ship travels south aroundCape Horn into thePacific Ocean. After a five-month search ending offJapan, 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 submarineNautilus, 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 terrestrialcivilisation. Nemo explains that his submarine iselectrically 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 viewcoral formations, sunken vessels from theBattle of Vigo Bay, theAntarctic ice barrier, thetransatlantic telegraph cable and the legendary underwater realm ofAtlantis. They even travel to theSouth 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 ondiving suits, huntsharks and other marinefauna 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 byNautilus. When the submarine returns to theAtlantic Ocean, a school ofgiant squid ("devilfish") attack it and kills another crewman.
The later pages suggest Captain Nemo went into undersea exile after his homeland was conquered and his family were slaughtered by a powerfulimperialist nation. Following the episode of the devilfish, Nemo largely avoids Aronnax, who begins to side with Ned Land. Ultimately,Nautilus is attacked by awarship 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'sskiff they realiseNautilus has seemingly blundered into the ocean's deadliestwhirlpool, theMoskstraumen (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 ofThe Mysterious Island (1875).
Nautilus's route through the PacificNautilus's route through the Atlantic
Captain Nemo's assumed name recallsHomer'sepic poem theOdyssey, whenOdysseus encounters the monstrousCyclopsPolyphemus in the course of his wanderings. Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies that it isOutis (Οὖτις) 'no one', translated intoLatin 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 CommanderMatthew Fontaine Maury, anoceanographer 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, includingJean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, the celebrated explorer whose two sloops of war vanished during acircumnavigational voyage;Jules Dumont d'Urville, a later explorer who found the remains of one of Lapérouse's ships; andFerdinand de Lesseps, builder of theSuez 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 entersTorres Strait and becomes stranded there, as did d'Urville's ship, theAstrolabe; and it passes beneath the Suez Canal via a fictional underwater passage connecting theRed Sea and theMediterranean Sea.
In possibly its most famous episode, the battle with a school ofgiant 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 ofThe Toilers of the Sea." A bestselling novel in Verne's day,The Toilers of the Sea also features a threateningcephalopod: a labourer battles with an octopus, believed by critics to be symbolic of theIndustrial 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 theRevolutions of 1848.
Other symbols and themes pique modern critics.Margaret Drabble argues that Verne's masterwork also anticipated theecology movement and influenced Frenchavant-garde imagery.[8] 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 theOttoman Empire during theCretan Revolt of 1866–1869, proving to Aronnax that he had not severed all relations with terrestrial mankind. In another episode, Nemo rescues an Indianpearl-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".[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 aPolish nobleman, whose family and homeland were slaughtered by Russian forces during the PolishJanuary Uprising of 1863. These specifics were suppressed during the editing stages at the insistence of Verne's publisherPierre-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 theRussian 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 theuprising against Russian and Prussian control in 1794;[11] Kościuszko mourned his country's prior defeat with theLatin 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 ofTipu Sultan, a prominent ruler of theKingdom of Mysore, and participated in theIndian Rebellion of 1857, an ultimately unsuccessful uprising againstCompany 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 theearliest successful submarines, built in 1800 byRobert Fulton, who also invented the first commercially successfulsteamboat. Fulton named his submarine after a marine mollusk, the chamberednautilus. As noted above, Verne also studied a model of the newly developedFrench Navy submarinePlongeur at the 1867Exposition Universelle, which guided him in his development of the novel'sNautilus.[4]
The diving gear used by passengers on theNautilus is presented as a combination of two existing systems: 1) thesurface-supplied[12] hardhat suit, which was fed oxygen from the shore through tubes; 2) a later, self-contained apparatusdesigned 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 demandregulator.[12][13][14] The diver didn't swim but walked upright across the seafloor. This device was called anaérophore (Greek for "air-carrier"). Its air tanks could hold only thirty atmospheres, but Nemo claims that his futuristic adaptation could do far better: "TheNautilus's pumps allow me to store air under considerable pressure ... my diving equipment can supply breathable air for nine or ten hours."
It was first translated into English in 1872 by ReverendLewis 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 Frenchscaphandre — properly "diving suit" — as "cork-jacket", following a long-obsolete usage as "a type oflifejacket"). 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 includingDaniel O'Connell[15] amongst 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 theThomas 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 theNaval Institute Press.[20] Its text took advantage of Walter's unpublished translation, whichProject Gutenberg later made available online.
In 1998 William Butcher issued a new, annotated translation with the titleTwenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, published byOxford 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 titledAmazing Journeys: Five Visionary Classics and published byState University of New York Press (ISBN978-1-4384-3238-0).
In 2017, David Coward issued a new translation published byPenguin Classics (ISBN9780141394930) with the titleTwenty 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.
The science fiction writerTheodore 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 theNautilus 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 firsteco-terrorist or the first figure of ecological radicalism.[21]
^Compère, D. (2006). Jules Verne: bilan d'un anniversaire. Romantisme, (1), 87-97.
^F. P. Walter'sProject 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 fromthe 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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