20,000 Leagues Under the Sea | Page 6

difficult, and for a State whose every act is persistently watched by
powerful rivals, certainly impossible.
Upon my arrival in New York several persons did me the honour of consulting me on the
phenomenon in question. I had published in France a work in quarto, in two volumes,

entitled Mysteries of the Great Submarine Grounds. This book, highly approved of in the
learned world, gained for me a special reputation in this rather obscure branch of Natural
History. My advice was asked. As long as I could deny the reality of the fact, I confined
myself to a decided negative. But soon, finding myself driven into a corner, I was obliged
to explain myself point by point. I discussed the question in all its forms, politically and
scientifically; and I give here an extract from a carefully-studied article which I published
in the number of the 30th of April. It ran as follows:
"After examining one by one the different theories, rejecting all other suggestions, it
becomes necessary to admit the existence of a marine animal of enormous power.
"The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us. Soundings cannot reach them.
What passes in those remote depths-- what beings live, or can live, twelve or fifteen miles
beneath the surface of the waters--what is the organisation of these animals, we can
scarcely conjecture. However, the solution of the problem submitted to me may modify
the form of the dilemma. Either we do know all the varieties of beings which people our
planet, or we do not. If we do NOT know them all--if Nature has still secrets in the deeps
for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes, or
cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species, of an organisation formed to inhabit the
strata inaccessible to soundings, and which an accident of some sort has brought at long
intervals to the upper level of the ocean.
"If, on the contrary, we DO know all living kinds, we must necessarily seek for the
animal in question amongst those marine beings already classed; and, in that case, I
should be disposed to admit the existence of a gigantic narwhal.
"The common narwhal, or unicorn of the sea, often attains a length of sixty feet. Increase
its size fivefold or tenfold, give it strength proportionate to its size, lengthen its
destructive weapons, and you obtain the animal required. It will have the proportions
determined by the officers of the Shannon, the instrument required by the perforation of
the Scotia, and the power necessary to pierce the hull of the steamer.
"Indeed, the narwhal is armed with a sort of ivory sword, a halberd, according to the
expression of certain naturalists. The principal tusk has the hardness of steel. Some of
these tusks have been found buried in the bodies of whales, which the unicorn always
attacks with success. Others have been drawn out, not without trouble, from the bottoms
of ships, which they had pierced through and through, as a gimlet pierces a barrel. The
Museum of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris possesses one of these defensive weapons,
two yards and a quarter in length, and fifteen inches in diameter at the base.
"Very well! suppose this weapon to be six times stronger and the animal ten times more
powerful; launch it at the rate of twenty miles an hour, and you obtain a shock capable of
producing the catastrophe required. Until further information, therefore, I shall maintain
it to be a sea-unicorn of colossal dimensions, armed not with a halberd, but with a real
spur, as the armoured frigates, or the `rams' of war, whose massiveness and motive power
it would possess at the same time. Thus may this puzzling phenomenon be explained,
unless there be something over and above all that one has ever conjectured, seen,

perceived, or experienced; which is just within the bounds of possibility."
These last words were cowardly on my part; but, up to a certain point, I wished to shelter
my dignity as professor, and not give too much cause for laughter to the Americans, who
laugh well when they do laugh. I reserved for myself a way of escape. In effect, however,
I admitted the existence of the "monster." My article was warmly discussed, which
procured it a high reputation. It rallied round it a certain number of partisans. The
solution it proposed gave, at least, full liberty to the imagination. The human mind
delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best
vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals,
such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed.
The industrial and commercial papers treated the question chiefly from this