Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
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Ships are being rammed by something enormous, and Professor Aronnax sails with the expedition sent to find it. The monster is a submarine, its commander is Captain Nemo, and the three men pulled from the water are not prisoners exactly — they are simply never going to be allowed to leave.
About the book
Serialised from 1869, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea begins with reports of a vast luminous object ramming ships, and an American frigate sent to hunt it. Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land go overboard in the encounter and are taken aboard the thing itself: the Nautilus, an electric submarine built in secret by a man who calls himself Captain Nemo and has renounced the land entirely. What follows is a voyage of some twenty thousand leagues through every ocean — coral forests, a wreck field, the Antarctic ice, a giant squid — narrated by a naturalist who cannot believe his luck and is nonetheless a prisoner. Nemo’s grievance is never quite explained, and Verne’s publisher made him cut the politics; what remains is a man of enormous learning conducting a private war from beneath the sea.
Characters
Captain Nemo — Commander
Builder and master of the Nautilus, cultivated, generous and at war with a nation he never names.
Pierre Aronnax — Narrator
A French professor of natural history, a prisoner aboard the most interesting ship in the world.
Conseil — Servant
Aronnax’s imperturbable assistant, who classifies every creature he sees and never states an opinion.
Ned Land — Harpooner
A Canadian harpooner who wants a steak and an exit, and plans escape from the first day aboard.
The Nautilus — The submarine
Electric, self-sufficient and armed with its own ram, as much a character as anyone aboard her.
Commander Farragut — Frigate captain
Captain of the Abraham Lincoln, who hunts the supposed monster across two oceans.
About the author
Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, sent to Paris to study law and lost to the theatre instead. His publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel gave him the frame of his career — the Voyages Extraordinaires, fifty-four novels intended to describe the whole known world — and Verne wrote them out of periodicals, scientific papers and an index of notes said to have run to twenty thousand cards. He is one of the most translated authors who has ever lived, and the machines he furnished his stories with, the submarine and the moon shot in particular, arrived close enough to the description to make his reputation as a prophet.