Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Front page of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
Author	Jules Verne
Original title	Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
Translator	Mercier Lewis
Illustrator	Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou
Country	France
Language	French
Series	The Extraordinary Voyages #6
Genre(s)	Science fiction, adventure novel
Publisher	Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Publication date	1870
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
ISBN	N/A
Preceded by	In Search of the Castaways
Followed by	Around the Moon

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1869. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax. The original edition had no illustrations; the first illustrated edition was published by Hetzel with illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou.

Title

The title refers to the distance traveled under the sea and not to a depth, as 20,000 leagues is 2.4 times the circumference (not to mention 6.28 times the diameter) of the earth. The greatest depth mentioned in the book is four leagues. A literal translation of the French title would end in the plural "seas", thus implying the "seven seas" through which the characters of the novel travel. However, the early English translations of the title used "sea", meaning the ocean in general, as in "going to sea".

Plot summary

Professor Pierre Aronnax on board of Abraham Lincoln; the only illustration in Verne's books which is also the author's portrait.

The story opens in the year 1866. Everyone in Europe and America is talking about a mysterious creature that has been sinking ships. Finally, the United States government decides to intervene and commissions the Abraham Lincoln to capture and identify the creature. On board the ship are Pierre Aronnax, a renowned scientist along with his manservant, Conseil, and Ned Land the king of harpooners. The Abraham Lincoln is attacked by the creature. Aronnax, Conseil and Land go overboard. The three men find themselves on top of the mysterious creature, which is actually a submarine vessel. They are taken on board and placed in a cell. The men meet Captain Nemo, the commander of the vessel, known as the Nautilus. He tells them they can stay on board the ship and enjoy freedom as long as they return to the cell if asked. They are never to leave the vessel again. Ned Land says he will not promise that he will not try to escape. Captain Nemo treats the men, especially Aronnax, very well. They are clothed and fed and may wander around the vessel at their leisure. Aronnax is thrilled by Nemo’s vast library. The men spend their time observing sea life through observation windows. Aronnax studies and writes about everything he sees.

The crew of the Nautilus observes an underwater funeral.

During their time on the Nautilus, the men experience exciting adventures. They hunt in underwater forests, visit an island with angry natives, visit the lost city of Atlantis, and fish for giant pearls. However, there are also many distressing events coupled with the erratic behavior of Captain Nemo. One night the men are asked to return to their cell. They are given sleeping pills and awake the next morning very confused. Nemo asks Aronnax to look at a crewman who has been severely injured. The man later dies and they bury him in an underground cemetery, where many other crewmen have been laid to rest. On a voyage to the South Pole, the Nautilus becomes stuck in the ice. Everyone must take turns trying to break a hole in the ice so the vessel can get through. The ship almost runs out of its oxygen supply and the men grow tired and light headed. However, they escape just in time. Another time, the vessel sails through an area heavily populated by giant squid, when a giant squid gets stuck in the propeller of the submarine. The men and the crew must fight off the squid with axes because they cannot be killed with bullets. While fighting, a crewmember is killed by a squid. Nemo is moved to tears. The rising action of the story begins with Nemo’s attack on a warship. Aronnax does not know to which nation the warship belongs, but he is horrified when Captain Nemo sinks it. The men decide they must escape at all costs. One night, while off the coast of Norway, Aronnax, Conseil and Land plan a rash escape. To their dismay they realize they are heading toward a giant whirlpool—one that no ship has ever survived. Amazingly, in only a small dinghy they emerge safely. They awake in the hut of a fisherman. At the conclusion of the story, Aronnax is awaiting his return to France and rewriting his memoirs of his journey under the sea.

Themes and subtext

Nautilus's route through the Pacific

Nautilus's route through the Atlantic

Captain Nemo's name is a subtle allusion to Homer's Odyssey, a Greek epic poem. In The Odyssey, Odysseus meets the monstrous cyclops Polyphemus during the course of his wanderings. Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies that his name is "Utis" (ουτις), which translates as "No-man" or "No-body". In the Latin translation of the Odyssey, this pseudonym is rendered as "Nemo", which in Latin also translates as "No-man" or "No-body". Similarly to Nemo, Odysseus is forced to wander the seas in exile (though only for 10 years) and is tormented by the deaths of his ship's crew.

The preface of a new English edition of the book has a theory that Nemo's name was in part inspired by Jules Verne visiting Scotland and there coming across Scotland's national motto Nemo me impune lacessit, correctly meaning "No one attacks me with impunity", but reinterpreted by Verne as "Nemo attacks me with impunity".

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.

References are made to three other Frenchmen. Those are Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, a famous explorer who was lost while circumnavigating the globe; Dumont D'Urville, the explorer who found the remains of the ill-fated ship of the Count; and Ferdinand Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal and the nephew of the man who was the sole survivor of De Galaup's expedition. Verne was an investor in Lesseps to build the French sea level crossing in Panama. The Nautilus seems to follow the footsteps of these men: She visits the waters where De Galaup was lost; she sails to Antarctic waters and becomes stranded there, just like D'Urville's ship, the Astrolabe; and she passes through an underwater tunnel from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.

Title page (1871)

The most famous part of the novel, the battle against the school of giant squid, begins when a crewman opens the hatch of the boat and gets caught by one of the monsters. As he is being pulled away by the tentacle that has grabbed him, he yells "Help!" in French. At the beginning of the next chapter, concerning the battle, Aronnax states that: "To convey such sights, one would take the pen of our most famous poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea". The Toilers of the Sea also contains an episode where a worker fights a giant octopus, wherein the octopus symbolizes the Industrial Revolution. It is probable that Verne borrowed the symbol, but used it to allude to the Revolutions of 1848 as well, in that the first man to stand against the "monster" and the first to be defeated by it is a Frenchman.

In several parts of the book, Captain Nemo is depicted as a champion of the world's underdogs and downtrodden. In one passage Captain Nemo is mentioned as providing some help to Greeks rebelling against Ottoman rule during the Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869, proving to Arronax that after all he had not completely severed all relations with mankind outside the Nautilus. In another passage, Nemo takes pity on a poor Indian pearl diver who must do his diving without the sophisticated diving suit available to the submarine's crew, and who is doomed to die young due to the cumulative effect of diving on his lungs; Nemo approaches him underwater and gives him a whole pouch full of pearls, more than he could have gotten in years of his dangerous work.

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 need to surface frequently for fresh air. However, Verne evidently had no idea of the problems of water pressure, depicting his submarine as capable of diving freely even into the deepest of ocean deeps, where in reality it would have been instantly crushed by the weight of water above it, and with humans in diving suits able to emerge and walk along the deep ocean floor where they would have died quickly because of physiological effects of depth pressure and their breathing sets not working because of the pressure (see Diving hazards and precautions).

Model of the 1863 French Navy submarine Plongeur at the Musée de la Marine, Paris.

The Nautilus as imagined by Jules Verne.

Verne took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who later invented the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton's submarine was named after the paper nautilus because it had a sail. Three years before writing his novel, Jules Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspired him for his definition of the Nautilus.^[1] The world's first operational nuclear-powered submarine, the United States Navy's USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was named for Verne's fictional vessel.

Verne can also be credited with glimpsing the military possibilities of submarines, and specifically the danger which they possessed for the naval superiority of the British Navy, composed of surface warships. The fictional sinking of a 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.

The breathing apparatus used by Nautilus divers is depicted as an untethered version of underwater breathing apparatus designed by Benoit Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze in 1865. They designed a diving set with a backpack spherical air tank that supplied air through the first known demand regulator.^[2][3] The diver still walked on the seabed and did not swim.^[2] This set was called an aérophore (Greek for "air-carrier"). Air pressure tanks made with the technology of the time could only hold 30 atmospheres, and the diver had to be surface supplied; the tank was for bailout.^[2] The durations of 6 to 8 hours on a tankful without external supply recorded for the Rouquayrol set in the book are greatly exaggerated.

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 The Mysterious Island, Captain Nemo is a descendant of Tipu Sultan (a Muslim ruler of Mysore who resisted the British Raj), 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 in the original text the mysterious captain was a Polish nobleman, 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). As France was allied with Tsarist Russia, to avoid trouble the target for Nemo's wrath was changed to France's old enemy, the British Empire. It is no wonder that Professor Pierre Aronnax does not 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 (a 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 by Omar Sharif in the 1973 European miniseries The Mysterious Island. Nemo is also depicted as Indian in a silent film version of the story released in 1916 and later in both the graphic novel and the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Recurring themes in later books

Jules Verne wrote a sequel to this book: L'Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874), which concludes the stories begun by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and In Search of the Castaways. It should be noted that, while The Mysterious Island seems to give more information about Nemo (or Prince Dakkar), it is muddied by the presence of several irreconcilable chronological contradictions between the two books and even within The Mysterious Island.

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, completely devoid 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 decisively 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 finely worked-out character, is Robur in Robur the Conqueror - a dark and flamboyant outlaw rebel using an aircraft instead of a submarine — later used as a basis for the movie Master of the World.

Translations

The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Lewis Page Mercier (aka "Mercier Lewis"). Mercier, under orders from British censors and performed or dictated by his editors at Sampson Low, cut nearly a quarter of Verne's original text and made hundreds of translation errors, sometimes dramatically changing the meaning of Verne's original intent. Some of these bowdlerizations may have been done for political reasons, such as Nemo's identity and the nationality of the two warships he sinks, or the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of his cabin which originally included Daniel O'Connell.^[4] Nonetheless it became the "standard" English translation for more than a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it — and its mistakes, especially the mistranslation of the title; the French title actually means Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas.

A modern translation was produced in 1966 by Walter James Miller and published by Washington Square Press.^[5] Many of Mercier's changes were addressed in the translator's preface, and most of Verne's text was restored.

Many of the "sins" of Mercier were again corrected in a from-the-ground-up re-examination of the sources and an entirely new translation by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter between 1989 and 1991, published in 1993 by Naval Institute Press in a "completely restored and annotated edition."^[6] But, it has a new error: in it the French word scaphandrier, which in this book means one of Captain Nemo's divers in kit similar to an old-type heavy standard diving suit but with an independent air supply, is everywhere wrongly translated "frogman". F. P. Walter's own translation was published in 2009 with the title Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (ISBN 978-1-904808-28-2)

Adaptations and variations

The Nautilus as envisioned in the 1954 Walt Disney film.

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (20,000 lieues sous les mers) (1907) - The silent short movie by French filmmaker Georges Méliès.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) - The first feature film (also silent) based on the novel.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1952) - A two-part adaptation for the science fiction television anthology Tales of Tomorrow. (Part One was subtitled The Chase, Part Two was subtitled The Escape.)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) - Probably the most well-known film adaptation of the book directed by Richard Fleischer, produced by Walt Disney, and starring Kirk Douglas as Ned Land and James Mason as Captain Nemo.
• Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) - A British film based on characters from the novel, starring Robert Ryan as Captain Nemo.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1972) - An animated film by Rankin-Bass aired in the United States.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1973) - An Australian Famous Classic Tales cartoon.
• Captain Nemo (Капитан Немо) (1975) - A Soviet film adaptation.
• The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo (1975) - A futuristic version of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus appeared in this Canadian animated television series.
• The Black Hole (1979) - A very loose science fiction variation on the novel. Maximilian Schell's mad captain character is a more murderous, and considerably less sympathetic version of Captain Nemo. His hair, moustache and beard resemble those of James Mason from the 1954 film.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1985) - A made-for-television animated film by Burbank Films Australia starring Tom Burlinson as Ned Land.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997, Village Roadshow) - A made-for-television film starring Michael Caine as Captain Nemo.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997, Hallmark) - A made-for-television film starring Ben Cross as Captain Nemo.
• Crayola Kids Adventures: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997) - A children's educational video program inspired from the book.
• The second part of the second season of Around the World with Willy Fog (1983) by Spanish studio BRB Internacional was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990-1991) and Nadia: The Secret of Fuzzy (1992) - A Japanese science fiction anime TV series and film directed by Hideaki Anno, and inspired by the book and exploits of Captain Nemo.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2001) - A radio drama adaption of Jules Verne's eponymous novel aired in the United States.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2002) - A DIC (now owned by Cookie Jar) children's animated television film loosely based on the novel.
• A stage play adaptation by Walk the Plank (2003). In this version, the "Nautilese" private language used by the Nautilus's crew was kept, represented by a mixture of Polish and Persian.
• 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007) - A modern update on the classic book starring Lorenzo Lamas as Lt. Aronnaux and Sean Lawlor as the misanthropic Captain Nemo.

References in popular culture

• An episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, entitled "20,000 Koopas Under the Sea", borrows many elements from the original story (including a submarine named the "Koopilus" and King Koopa referring to himself as "Koopa Nemo").
• In a 1989 episode "20,000 Leaks Under the City" of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series is heavily based on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, including a battle with a giant squid. This story takes place in New York City of the 1980s where a flood caused by Krang using a Super Pump has occurred ^[7].
• On the popular children's show Arthur, Arthur's friend Francine names her cat Nemo, later explaining that he resembles the Captain.
• In the 1990 movie Back to the Future Part III, Jules Verne and his book are used as a common interest that unites Doc Brown and Clara Clayton in 1885. After they wed, they name their two sons Jules and Verne.
• A SpongeBob SquarePants episode is called "20,000 Patties Under the Sea". It is a parody of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and of the traveling song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall".
• In the 2006 "The Evil Beneath" segment of "The Evil Beneath/Carl Wheezer, Boy Genius" season 3 double episode from the Nicktoons children's CG animated series The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius references are made to similar characters and environments: Dr. Sydney Orville Moist, a paranoid dance-crazy genius scientist (parodying Captain Nemo) who lives in a hidden underwater headquarters (stationary Nautilus) at the bottom of fictional Bahama Quadrangle, takes revenge against humanity by transforming unsuspecting tourists like Jimmy, Carl and Sheen into zombie-like algae men (the Nautilus crew).^[8]
• In a 1994 Saturday Night Live sketch (featuring Kelsey Grammer as Captain Nemo) pokes fun at the misconception of leagues being a measure of depth instead of a measure of distance. Nemo tries repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, to convince his crew of this.
• One of the inaugural rides at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom was called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage and was based on the Disney movie.
• The movie The Return of Captain Nemo (intended to be the start of a series) was made, set after World War II, where the Nautilus is found sunk, and in it Captain Nemo in suspended animation; he revives and gets ashore and has difficulty proving his identity, and the Nautilus is re-fitted with modern technology (sonar etc.).
• In the novel and movie Sphere, Harry Adams (played by Samuel L. Jackson) reads (and is very interested in) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
• Japanese animated television series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1989–1991) were inspired by the works of Jules Verne, and use various elements of his works, particularly from 20,000 Leagues: Captain Nemo and the Nautilus. The titular Nadia is revealed to be Nemo's estranged daughter.
• Captain Nemo is one of the main characters in Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neill's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as in the film.
• In the film Juno, Juno McGuff states, "You should try talking to it. 'Cause, like, supposedly they can hear you even though it's all, like, ten-thousand leagues under the sea, dude".
• In the 2001 Clive Cussler novel Valhalla Rising, reference to a submarine that "inspired" Verne's story is made as one of the central plot points; it differs in having been British, with Verne being accused of being anti-British.
• Nemo and the Nautilus, along with several other plot points, are major elements of Kevin J. Anderson's Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius.
• Lo-fi pop musician The Blow references 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in the song True Affection, the last track on 2006 album Paper Television.
• The early-2000s novel series called the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica depicts Captain Nemo in a "world within a world". In this version, Nemo is the captain of the sentient ship Yellow Dragon (stated to be the in-universe origin of the Nautilus) and therefore a promine
• Mentioned in the novel Into the Wild as one of Chris McCandless' inspirations, before his trek into the Alaskan interior.
• The Nautilus is said to be based on a civil war era ship in the novel, Leviathan by David Lynn Golemon.
• An episode of the English dubbed TV series of Digimon is entitled "20,000 Digi-Leagues Under the Sea" (though the actual episode synopsis is completely unrelated).
• In the 1968 Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine at the beginning the narrator says "Once upon a time or maybe twice there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland, 80,000 leauges under the sea it lay or lie I'm not quite sure".
• A parody exists in the 2010 Chick-fil-A calendar "Great Works of Cow Literature" in September where the novel is referred to as 20,000 Bales Under the Sea.
• German band Alphaville, who are best known for their songs Big in Japan and Forever Young, wrote a song called "Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers", which appeared as a B-side to a single they released in 1986.

See also

• Leyden bullet (Leyden ball)

References

External links

• 20,000 Leagues under the Sea at Project Gutenberg, trans. by Lewis Mercier, 1872
• 20,000 Leagues under the Sea at Project Gutenberg, trans. by James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter, 1993
• Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, full text of the Oxford University Press edition and translation by Verne scholar, William Butcher (with an introduction, notes and appendices)
• Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, presented by the KIDOONS Network
• (French) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, audio version
• Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea - a parallel translation in English and Russian