Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
[citation needed] 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[citation needed]
Country	France
Language	French
Series	The Extraordinary Voyages #6
Genre(s)	Science fiction, adventure novel
Publisher	Pierre-Jules Hetzel[citation needed]
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 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax. The first illustrated edition (not the original edition which had no illustrations) was published by Hetzel and contains a number of 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 over 15 times the radius 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".

The word leagues in the English title is a literal translation of lieues, but refers to French leagues. The French league had been a variable unit but in the metric era was standardized as 4 km. Thus the title distance is equivalent to 80,000 km (twice around the Earth) or roundly 50,000 statute miles.^[1] In common English usage 1 league equals 3 statute miles.

Plot summary

As the story begins in 1866, 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 in New York City to track down and destroy the menace. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a noted French marine biologist and narrator of the story, who happens to be in New York at the time and is a recognized expert in his field, is issued a last-minute invitation to join the expedition, and he accepts. Canadian master harpoonist Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful assistant Conseil are also brought on board.

Title page (1871)

The expedition sets sail from Brooklyn aboard a naval ship called the Abraham Lincoln, which travels down around the tip of South America and into the Pacific Ocean. After much fruitless searching, the monster is found, 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 a large metal construct. They are quickly captured and brought inside the vessel, where they meet its enigmatic creator and commander, Captain Nemo (a name meaning "no one" in Latin).

The rest 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 government. (As further discussed below, the story was written decades before submarines of such size and utility became a reality.) 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 whom to converse, they can never leave because he is afraid they will betray his existence to the world. Aronnax is enthralled by the undersea vistas he is seeing, but Land constantly plots to escape.

Nautilus's route through the Pacific

Nautilus's route through the Atlantic

Their travels take them to numerous points in the world's oceans, some of which were known to Jules Verne from real travelers' descriptions and guesses, while others are completely 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. The travelers also don diving suits to go on undersea expeditions away from the ship, where they hunt sharks and other marine life with specially designed guns and have a funeral for a crew member who died when an accident occurred inside the Nautilus. When the Nautilus returns to the Atlantic Ocean, a "poulpe" (usually translated as a giant squid, although the French "poulpe" means "octopus") attacks the vessel and devours a crew member. Shortly afterward, they are tracked and attacked by a mysterious ship. Nemo ignores Arronax's pleas for amnesty for the boat and attacks. Nemo attacks the ship under the waterline, sending it to the bottom of the ocean with all crew aboard as Arronax watches from the salon. Nemo bows before the pictures of his wife and children and is plunged into deep depression after this encounter, and "voluntarily or involuntarily" allows the submarine to wander into an encounter with the Moskstraumen, more commonly known as the "Maelstrom", a 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.

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 "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 nationall 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 Channel 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.

The crew of the Nautilus observes an underwater funeral.

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.

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.^[2] 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.^[3][4] The diver still walked on the seabed and did not swim.^[3] 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.^[3] 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.^[5] Nonetheless it became the "standard" English translation for more than a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it — and its mistakes.

A modern translation was produced in 1966 by Walter James Miller and published by Washington Square Press.^[6] 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."^[7] 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".

Film, television and theatrical adaptations and variations

The Nautilus as envisioned in the Walt Disney film.

• 20,000 lieues sous les mers (1907 film)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916 film)
• 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 film) - produced by Walt Disney
• Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) - British film based on characters from the novel, starring Robert Ryan as Nemo.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1972 film) - Rankin-Bass animated version
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1973) - Australian Famous Classic Tales cartoon.
• Captain Nemo (Капитан Немо) (1975) — Soviet adaptation of the novel.
• The Black Hole (1979). A very free sci-fi variation on the novel. Maximilian Schell's mad captain is obviously a more murderous, and considerably less sympathetic, version of Captain Nemo. His hair, moustache, and beard resemble those of James Mason in the 1954 film.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1985 film) - made-for-television animated film by Burbank Films Australia, starring Tom Burlinson as Ned Land.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Village Roadshow film) - television movie starring Michael Caine.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Hallmark film) - television movie starring Ben Cross.
• Crayola Kids Adventures: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 video)
• A version of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus appeared in the 1970s animated series The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo.
• 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.
• A stage play adaptation by Walk the Plank (theatre company). In this version, the "Nautilese" private language used by the Nautilus's crew was kept, represented by a mixture of Polish and Persian.
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1989) An animated TV series from Japan directed by Hideaki Anno inspired by the book and the exploits of Captain Nemo.
• 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Radio drama adaption of Jules Verne's novel, aired in the United States in 2001.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo (2009) - Disney's loose remake of the 1954 film, serving as an origin story for Captain Nemo as he builds the Nautilus.

References in popular culture

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• 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 ^[8].
• 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 respectively.
• 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 a 1993 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".
• 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.

See also

• Leyden bullet (Leyden ball)

References

1. ^ The equivalence 1 league = 4 km is given explicitly at one point in the book (lieues de quatre kilomètres) and confirmed by several distances that are given in both leagues and miles (milles). These miles are nautical miles, which in turn is confirmed by a passage giving the Earth's total land area as 37,657,000 square "miles" or 129,160,000 km².
2. ^ Notice at the Musée de la Marine, Rochefort
3. ^ ^{a b c} Davis, RH (1955). Deep Diving and Submarine Operations (6th ed.). Tolworth, Surbiton, Surrey: Siebe Gorman & Company Ltd. p. 693. 
4. ^ Acott, C. (1999). "A brief history of diving and decompression illness.". South Pacific Underwater Medicine Society journal 29 (2). ISSN 0813-1988. OCLC 16986801. http://archive.rubicon-foundation.org/6004. Retrieved 2009-03-17. 
5. ^ How Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King brought you Jules Verne
6. ^ 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.
7. ^ 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. ISBN 1-55750-877-1
8. ^ Ninjaturtles - 20,000 Leaks Under the City

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: 20000 Leagues Under the Sea

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

• 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