“The year 1866 was marked by a peculiar development, a baffling, bewildering phenomenon that surely nobody has forgotten…”
Jules Verne’s magnificent nautical adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas begins in the year 1866 as something strange occurs on the high seas. Many traders, shipowners, sea captains, skippers, and master mariners begin warning of “an enormous thing” out at sea, described in the press as “a long spindle-shaped object that sometimes gave off a phosphorescent glow and was infinitely larger and faster than a whale.” This mysterious creature from the depths has suddenly emerged, attacking and sinking ships throughout the oceans, causing skilled seamen to quake in their boots. Naturally, this “monster matter” has the tabloids running wild. Is it just a drifting islet? Or an elusive reef? Could it be a war machine? Or the fabled Moby Dick? Or perhaps even the mythical kraken? Following a brief lull in 1866, the attacks suddenly continue again in 1867 –one ship in particular, the Scotia, narrowly manages to survive. When it returns to harbor, engineers are baffled when they find a perfect isosceles triangle punctured into its hull iron. What could this possibly mean?
Our narrator in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is a distinguished scientist, forty-year-old Professor Pierre Aronnax. He has recently returned from a scientific excursion to the Nebraska badlands on an expedition with the Paris Museum of Natural History (he has also published a two-volume work entitled The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths). Professor Aronnax believes the fearsome ocean “monster” might actually be an extremely powerful marine animal, perhaps a narwhal or even a previously unknown creature of significant size who has suddenly decided to surface for unknown reasons.
“Couldn’t the heart of the ocean hide the last-remaining varieties of those titanic species, for which years are centuries and centuries millennia?” (13).
In order to put the public at ease and solve the monster mystery once and for all, Professor Aronnax is invited to join a ship, the Abraham Lincoln, under the leadership of Commander Farragut which is dispatched by the government of the Union from New York (note that this novel takes place directly after the end of the American Civil War). The purpose of the ship’s voyage is to deliberately seek out the monster and destroy it. There is a $2,000 award for who can spot the monster first.
Professor Aronnax is joined by Conseil, his dedicated thirty-year-old Flemish manservant (‘a gallant boy and seasoned specialist in biological classification’), and Ned Land, the “King of Harpooners,” an approximately forty-year-old Canadian harpooner and capable seaman. Their ship, the Abraham Lincoln, sails down to South America, through the Strait of Magellan, around Cape Horn, to about 200 miles off the coast of Japan. But after a lengthy uneventful voyage, the ship decides to turn back and head for Europe, when suddenly Ned spots the fearsome creature in the water: “Ahoy! There’s the thing we’re after, abreast of us to leeward!”
“Astern to starboard, less than a quarter of a mile from the Abraham Lincoln, the sea seemed to be lit up from underneath. This was no phosphorescent phenomenon, that much was unmistakable. Submerged several yards under the surface of the water, the monster gave ff that same intense, bewildering glow that several captains had mentioned in their reports. This magnificent radiance had to come from some force with a great illuminating capacity. The area of its luminescence swept over the sea in an immense slender oval whose middle was a concentrated, blazing core of light, an unbearable glow that gradually faded as it spread out from the center” (38).
Within moments, the frigate is then smashed by the monster and the blow casts both Professor Aronnax and Conseil overboard into the sea. They cling to one another for survival, with one man floating in the waves while the other hangs onto him from inside the water (this is different from the same events which are portrayed in the classic 1954 Disney film of the same name wherein they cling to the ship’s wreckage). But just as the professor loses consciousness, he and Conseil are rescued by Ned Land who has managed to scramble aboard an inexplicably large construction of hard, black steel, perhaps it is an islet of sorts. But the trio soon realizes this “islet” is actually the monster they have been seeking!
“No doubts were possible! This animal, this monster, this natural phenomenon that had puzzled the whole scientific world and boggled the minds of seamen in both hemispheres, was now revealed to be an even more astounding phenomenon –a phenomenon made by human hands” (55).
They remain atop the metallic monster all through the night until it starts to dive and Ned begins pounding heavily on the hull until the monster inexplicably pauses its descent and the three survivors are dragged inside the fearsome machine by a group of eight shadowy men. Ned fears that these men might actually be cannibals akin to the “savages” on New Caledonia (notably, this is also a very different account of their survival than what is featured in the 1954 Disney film). One of the men is tall and intense. He imprisons the trio in a small room. The other strange men appear to be wearing caps of otter fur and fishing boots of seal skin. They speak in an unrecognizable language, without responding to attempts at communication in either French, English, German, or even Latin. Shortly thereafter, the mysterious captain of this strange submersible vessel reveals himself: he calls himself Captain “Nemo” (a Latinized nod to the alias used by Odysseus when he is confronted by the one-eyed giant Polephemus in Homer’s Odyssey, a word which literally means “no one”). Captain Nemo has deliberately cut himself off from humanity and has rejected civilization along with all its laws. Now he lives the life of a wandering ascete beneath the ocean waves –partly as a romantic idealist and partly a fatalistic misanthrope. But who is Captain Nemo truly? Is he a heroic figure? What is his background? Why has he rejected civilization? Captain Nemo is an utterly fascinating figure, one of the more elusive characters in the history of French literature. Likened to Oedipus and the Sphinx, Captain Nemo offers the trio the opportunity to remain aboard his ship, the Nautilus, with free roam as prisoners of war but the one rule is that they must be confined to their cabin whenever he deems it necessary:
“Let me assure you, professor, you won’t regret the time you spend abord my vessel. You’re going to voyage through a land of wonders. Stunned amazement will most likely be your habitual state of mind. It will be a long while before you tire of the sights continually in front of your eyes. Once again I’ll be going on a world tour underwater –maybe my last, who knows?—and I’’ review everything I’ve studied in the depths of these seas I’ve crossed so often, and you can be my fellow student. Starting today you’ll enter a new element, you’ll see what no human being has ever seen before –since my men and I don’t count anymore—and thanks to me, you’re about to learn our planet’s ultimate secrets” (82).
Aboard the self-sustaining and cigar-shaped Nautilus (named after one of the earliest viable submarines built in 1800 by Robert Fulton), we learn that Captain Nemo and his crew are entirely cut off from civilization (in self-imposed exile) and that they receive all their survival necessities from the sea –as Captain Nemo says, “the sea provides me with everything I need,” and the crew hunts “like the flocks of old Proteus, Neptune’s shepherd” pulling nets of fish out of the ocean, such as parts of sea turtles, dolphin livers, preserves of sea cucumber, milk from the udders of cetaceans, sugar from the huge fucus plants in the North Sea, and marmalade of sea anemone and so on. They drink water distilled from the sea. Their clothes are woven from masses of filaments anchoring certain sea shells, in the style of the ancients, and dyed from purplura shells and shaded with violet tints extracted from marine slug known as the Mediterranean Sea hare. Their lotions are made from oozing sea plants, mattresses from soft eelgrass, quills from whalebone, inks from a fluid secreted by cuttlefish or squid –“Everything comes from the sea just as someday everything will go back to it!”
“The sea is the be all and end all! It covers seven-tenths of planet earth. Its breath is clean and wholesome. It’s an immense wilderness where a man is never alone because he feels life stirring all around him. The sea is simply the vehicle for a prodigious, uncanny mode of existence; it’s simply movement and love; it’s living infinity, as one of your poets put it… The sea is a huge natural preserve. In a sense our planet started with the sea, and who can say we won’t end with it! Here I find supreme tranquility. The sea doesn’t belong to tyrants. On its surface they can still stake their evil claims, battle each other, devour each other, haul every earthly horror. But thirty feet below sea level, their power ceases, their influence fades, their domination vanishes! Ah, sir, live! Live in the heart of the seas! Here alone doo I find independence! Here I recognize no superiors! Here I’m free!” (86).
While today we live in an age where the existence of submarines is hardly a novelty, I can only imagine the sheer excitement for readers in 19th century France at the prospect of a fully submersible vehicle when Jules Verne first published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas! It must have been an enthralling experience to imagine men diving far beneath the ocean waves, awestruck at the mysteries of the deep seen through the eyes of Nautilus. Indeed in the novel, the Nautilus is a wholly ingenious vessel –“a masterpiece containing masterpieces.” It is powered by electricity from sodium and mercury batteries using coal mined from the ocean floor, and it must surface periodically like a whale to replenish its oxygen pumps before diving again (the maximum dive time is approximately five days). It was designed thanks to Captain Nemo’s engineering studies in London, Paris, and New York with all the pieces ordered from various firms around the world in order to avoid suspicion. It was then built by Nemo and his loyal companions (who are of different nationalities) on an islet in the mid-ocean, before they decided to burn all trace of their existence on the islet and they headed into the sea, never to return to terrestrial existence. Where did the money come from for the construction of such a vessel? We learn that Captain Nemo is immensely wealthy (he could even pay off the French national debt totaling $2 billion if he so desired!) And the Nautilus is designed to be a magnificent vessel for a European aristocrat. It contains an ornate library with 12,000 volumes –including the works of Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame George Sand, and many other great thinkers, academics, and modern scientists. It also houses a lounge and smoking room for inhaling a special nicotine-rich seaweed. Captain Nemo regularly plays the musical works of great classical composers on his organ and he has amassed an impressive collection of artwork. The novel describes a large clam fountain and numerous other treasures housed as if in a museum (in this respect, the 1954 Disney film correctly portrays the elegant interior of The Nautilus as described in the novel).
Jules Verne’s inspiration for the Nautilus, and indeed for the whole novel, came from his observations of the French submarine known as the Plongeur (or “Diver”) as well as the accompanying demonstrations of electricity at the “Exposition Universelle” world’s fair held in Paris in 1867. Notably, the Plongeur was the first submarine in the world to be propelled by mechanized power, rather than human location. Also, in a letter to his editor, Jules Verne mentioned that the CSS Alabama, a submarine warship secretly constructed in England for the rebel Confederacy during the American Civil War, was also a source of inspiration for the Nautilus.
At any rate, returning to the novel, as the three survivors adjust to their new imprisonment aboard the Nautilus. The temperamental Ned and the amiable Conseil are eager to find an opportunity to escape, while Professor Aronnax is more reluctant (at first). He remains perplexed and intrigued by Captain Nemo and the myriad scientific questions which might be investigated while aboard the Nautilus. When they sit down for a meal together, Professor Aronnax notices that each utensil carries the motto “mobilis in mobile” (“moving within a moving element”) and a capital “N” presumably for Nemo. We follow them on a hunting-diving trip into the underwater Crespo Island forests, as they don waterproof suits, glass helmets, and oxygen tanks designed just like the Nautilus’s tanks, along with Ruhmkorff lights and rifles that fire little glass capsules covered with steel and weighted with a lead bases –again, what a marvel for a 19th century reader! Whether he is diving on the seafloor or gazing out the window into the deep-sea aquarium of wonderment, Professor Aronnax delivers lengthy zoological digressions throughout the novel, detailing all manner of sea creatures from jellyfish and sponges to monstrous sea spiders, as well as sea otters and colorful coral and tall sea forests, and albatrosses over the waves, whales, and numerous other aquatic creatures. In many respects, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a huge compendium of nautical, geographical, political, and biological history. All the while, Captain Nemo seems delighted to be touring Professor Aronnax through his undersea kingdom, showing him famous shipwrecks from yesteryear as they litter the seafloor (Nemo has mined them all for riches) and he regularly engages in dialectic with the good professor about the ethical implications of his lifestyle. At one point, Captain Nemo makes an offhand remark in which he envisions a futuristic humanity living in towns under the sea which can periodically rise to the surface for oxygen each morning just like the Nautilus. His imagination is fascinating.
While aboard the Nautilus, we join Professor Aronnax on many other adventures –including a hunting trip on a tropical island after the vessel briefly runs aground wherein the crew are attacked by “savages” (saved by electrical bolts on the ship, as featured in the 1954 Disney film), a visit to an undersea coral cemetery where Nemo’s dead crewmen are buried and slowly covered over by coral polyps “sealing them up for all eternity.” The ship then travels from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and then onward to the Red Sea and under the isthmus through a previously unknown undersea tunnel called the “Arabian Tunnel” which was discovered by Captain Nemo and which apparently sits below the Suez Canal and ends in the Bay of Pelusium in the Mediterranean (I found this to be a wonderfully imaginative scene, even though no such tunnel exists in reality). In the Greek Isles, they encounter a strange diver named Nicolas from Cape Matapan (nicknamed Il Pesce, or “the fish” because he mostly prefers to dwell in the ocean). In Part II, we encounter giant oysters, pearls, dugongs, narwhales, dolphins, walruses, Portuguese men-of-war, giant lobsters and titanic crabs, as well as a fight between baleen whales and sperm whales, and a dive down 40,000 feet to the ocean depths where there are no fish (here at the abyss, Captain Nemo offers the professor a chance to take a photograph at the very edge of human exploration). We also venture forth on a frightening shark-hunting expedition with harpoons. During the hunt, Ned Land rescues Captain Nemo and they also manage to revive a wounded native who was caught in the fray while shell-diving nearby (Captain Nemo shows a remarkable degree of human compassion for the diver despite his professed rejection of human civilization).
Not far from the boiling waters off the coast of Santorini we encounter a variety of ancient Greek ruins. This leads to one of my favorite sections in the book wherein Captain Nemo leads Professor Aronnax on an evening dive to the mythical city of Atlantis which lies in the shadow of an underwater volcano!
“In fact, right under my eyes was a town in ruins, demolished, overwhelmed, laid low, its roofs caved in, its temples pulled down, its arches dislocated, its columns lying on the ground; in these ruins you could still detect the sort of proportions of a sort of Tuscan architecture; farther away, the remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here, the caked heights of an acropolis along with the fluid forms of a Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf, as if some bygone port had formerly harbored merchant vessels and triple-tiered war galleys on the shores of some lost ocean; still farther away, long rows of collapsing walls, empty boulevards, a whole Pompeii buried under the waters, which Captain Nemo had resurrected beneath my eyes!” (343).
Of course, diligent readers of Plato’s Timaeus-Critias would recognize the myth of Atlantis as merely a story conjured up to prove a point about the demise of the city, not a result of war, but rather akin to the nature of the city itself. Yet literalist readers have long been fascinated by the myth of Atlantis.
At any rate, the Nautilus travels to the Atlantic Ocean and down to Antarctica through the “ice barrier” and crosses under the ice before the crew surfaces again and hikes to the south pole where the “golden orb” of the sun is cut in two equal parts by the horizon. Here, Captain Nemo plants a black flag bearing the letter “N” and he claims the whole territory in his name. But after leaving the region, the Nautilus is struck by ice and becomes entrapped in a very dangerous situation. The crew straps on their diving suits and begins to chip away at the ice using boiling water while the ship slowly runs out of air (Professor Aronnax begins to suffocate) but they narrowly manage to escape and surface where the crew is able to breathe fresh clean air again.
From here, as the Nautilus heads for South America, Nemo grows increasingly gloomy and he retires to his room. The crescendo of the novel arrives when the Nautilus is attacked by a pack of giant squid, or “devilfish” as Professor Aronnax calls them.
“It was a squid of colossal dimensions, easily twenty-five feet long. It was moving backward with tremendous speed, going the same way as the Nautilus. Its enormous staring eyes were tinted sea green. Its eight arms –or feet, to be exact—were rooted in its head, which has earned these creatures the name cephalopod… What a freak of nature! A bird beak on a mollusk!” (457).
One of the “devilfish” jams the propeller of the Nautilus so the crew resorts to fighting the squid in close-quarters hand-to-hand combat in a highly dramatic sequence (the Nautilus surfaces and fights the squid after opening the hatch). I have faithfully copied some of the text of this intense battle below:
“Instantly one of those long arms glided like a snake into the opening and twenty others were quivering above. With a swipe of the ax, Captain Nemo chopped off this fearsome tentacle, which slid writhing down the steps… Just as we were crowding each other to reach the platform, two more arms whipped through the air, swooped on the seaman stationed in front of Captain Nemo, and carried the fellow away with irresistible force… What a picture! Clutched by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, the unfortunate man was swinging in the air at the mercy of that enormous appendage. Gasping and gagging, he yelled ‘Help! Help!’ These words, spoken in French, left me absolutely stunned! So I had a countryman on board, maybe several! I’ll hear his harrowing plea the rest of my life!… Captain Nemo rushed at the devilfish and with a swipe of the ax hewed one more of its arms. His chief officer battled furiously with other monsters crawling up the Nautilus’s sides. The crew joined the fight, hacking away with their axes. The Canadian, Conseil, and I buried our weapons in the masses of flesh. A strong musky odor filled the air. It was horrible… For a second I thought the poor man entwined by the devilfish would be torn loose from its powerful suction. Seven of its eight arms had been chopped off. Brandishing its victims like a feather, one last tentacle was writhing in the air. But just as Captain Nemo and his chief officer rushed at it, the creature shot off a spout of black liquid located in its abdomen. It blinded us. By the time that cloud dispersed, the squid had vanished, and so had my poor countryman!… How furiously we pitched into those monsters! We couldn’t control ourselves. Ten or twelve devilfish were overrunning the Nautilus’s platform and sides. We piled helter-skelter into the thick of that vipers’ tangle, which tossed around on the platform amid waves of blood and sepia ink. These vicious tentacles seemed to keep growing back like the many heads of Hydra” (460).
At one point, Ned Land is captured and is very nearly eaten alive but he is rescued by Captain Nemo who repays Ned for the earlier shark-hunting rescue. After losing the French crewman and following about a quarter of an hour hacking off countless limbs of the “devilfish,” the mutilated monsters finally retreat beneath the waves. But Captain Nemo continues to grow despondent while writing his personal summary of his undersea research which can hopefully endure in the event of his own death –even though his rule is that “Those who board the Nautilus are never to leave it.”
From here, the Nautilus makes its way up the North American coastline and the crew spots the newly laid transatlantic undersea cable extending between the United States and Europe. But things turn dark when the Nautilus surfaces and it is unexpectedly attacked by an unfriendly warship and Captain Nemo responds in kind, attacking the warship and echoing the fanaticism of Captain Ahab (Professor Aronnax calls him a “terrible avenger, a perfect archangel of hatred”). Captain Nemo rams the Nautilus into the opposing ship, which sends it sinking into the sea. Now we see the full power of Nemo’s wrath. This is how he achieves his true vengeance on society –attacking various ships on the high seas. As he does so, Captain Nemo declares: “I am the law, and I am the judge! I am the oppressed, and there is the oppressor! Through him I have lost all that I loved, cherished, and venerated—country, wife, children, father, and mother. I saw all perish! All that I hate is there! Say no more!” Afterward Captain Nemo stretches himself out before a portrait of a woman and two young children, he kneels, and then bursts into deep sobs. We learn that he carries a particular vendetta against civilization because his homeland (which is unnamed) was once attacked and conquered by an imperialist nation which killed his entire family. This renders Captain Nemo a slightly more sympathetic, perhaps even noble, character.
However, Professor Aronnax is utterly disturbed by Captain Nemo’s efforts to destroy passing ships so he at last agrees with Ned Land and Conseil that they must escape the Nautilus and sooner rather than later. The trio decide to flee one evening as they hear Nemo playing the organ in the dark and he shouts “O almighty God! Enough! Enough!” They steal the Nautilus’s skiff just as a maelstrom in the ocean emerges in a spot called the “ocean’s navel” –a gigantic whirlpool which quickly swallows up the Nautilus, sending it disappearing beneath the water, while Professor Aronnax, Ned Land, and Conseil escape in the skiff and ultimately land in the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway, having narrowly survived this extraordinary ordeal. The good professor wonders if he will ever learn Nemo’s true history, or if the Nautilus had managed to survive the terrifying whirlpool –“If this is the case and Captain Nemo is still dwelling in the ocean – his adopted country—may the hatred be appeased in his fierce heart!” Professor Aronnax closes his narration with a personal reflection, noting only two men can answer a question that was posed in Ecclesiastes “Who can fathom the soundless depths?” The answer being only himself and Captain Nemo.
“…he’s a superman, that Captain Nemo, and we’ll never regret that we knew him” (440) -Conseil.
In many ways, Captain Nemo represents everything a professorial marine scientist like Professor Aronnax aspires to be—a wandering ascete who explores the depths of the ocean, and who rejects humanity in pursuit of his own discoveries. But despite the initial impressions of this strange man, Captain Nemo is not entirely a misanthrope –he still shows love and affection for his fellow human beings at a few specific moments in the novel. Should we regard him as a misunderstood genius or a maniacal villain? A freedom fighter or terrorist? Is he intending to destroy or save modern civilization? Is he merely a messenger or is he a warrior? Either way, Captain Nemo is a tortured soul whose mysterious past only adds to his allure. In the early manuscripts of the book, Jules Verne intended to depict Captain Nemo as a Polish nobleman whose family was slaughtered by the Russians during the January 1863 uprising, however Verne’s editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel made several significant revisions (as he did to many of Verne’s novels) and since France was an ally of the Russian Empire at the time, Hetzel sought to avoid alienating foreign allies and potential readers abroad. After the publication of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne later continued the saga of Captain Nemo in The Mysterious Island, a novel published several years later and which was also a crossover sequel to his earlier story In Search of the Castaways. As a great lover of Jules Verne myself, and in particular Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (which remains one of my favorite novels of all-time), I look forward to reading this sequel in the future.
Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Seawolf Press, Orinda, CA, 2018 (based on the original 1870-1875 illustrated editions). Translated by F.P. Walter.