20,000 Leagues Under the Seas (2nd version) | Page 4

274
20. In Latitude 47? 24' and Longitude 17? 28' 282
21. A Mass Execution 287
22. The Last Words of Captain Nemo 294
23. Conclusion 299

Color Plates
Facing Page
The Bay of Vigo. iii
Ned Land stayed at his post. 28
"I've collected every one of them." 56
We walked with steady steps. 84
The dugout canoes drew nearer. 122
A dreadful battle was joined. 158

Picturesque ruins took shape. 202
"Farewell, O sun!" he called. 244
The poor fellow was done for. 272
An engaving by Guillaumot.

Introduction

"The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us," admits
Professor Aronnax early in this novel. "What goes on in those distant
depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve
or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water? It's almost beyond
conjecture."
Jules Verne (1828-1905) published the French equivalents of these
words in 1869, and little has changed since. 126 years later, a Time
cover story on deep-sea exploration made much the same admission:
"We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans." This
reality begins to explain the dark power and otherworldly fascination of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
Born in the French river town of Nantes, Verne had a lifelong passion
for the sea. First as a Paris stockbroker, later as a celebrated author and
yachtsman, he went on frequent voyages-- to Britain, America, the
Mediterranean. But the specific stimulus for this novel was an 1865 fan
letter from a fellow writer, Madame George Sand. She praised Verne's
two early novels Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and Journey to the
Center of the Earth (1864), then added: "Soon I hope you'll take us into
the ocean depths, your characters traveling in diving equipment
perfected by your science and your imagination." Thus inspired, Verne
created one of literature's great rebels, a freedom fighter who plunged
beneath the waves to wage a unique form of guerilla warfare.

Initially, Verne's narrative was influenced by the 1863 uprising of
Poland against Tsarist Russia. The Poles were quashed with a violence
that appalled not only Verne but all Europe. As originally conceived,
Verne's Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose entire family had
been slaughtered by Russian troops. Nemo builds a fabulous futuristic
submarine, the Nautilus, then conducts an underwater campaign of
vengeance against his imperialist oppressor.
But in the 1860s France had to treat the Tsar as an ally, and Verne's
publisher Pierre Hetzel pronounced the book unprintable. Verne
reworked its political content, devising new nationalities for Nemo and
his great enemy--information revealed only in a later novel, The
Mysterious Island (1875); in the present work Nemo's background
remains a dark secret. In all, the novel had a difficult gestation. Verne
and Hetzel were in constant conflict and the book went through
multiple drafts, struggles reflected in its several working titles over the
period 1865-69: early on, it was variously called Voyage Under the
Waters, Twenty-five Thousand Leagues Under the Waters, Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Waters, and A Thousand Leagues Under
the Oceans.
Verne is often dubbed, in Isaac Asimov's phrase, "the world's first
science-fiction writer." And it's true, many of his sixty-odd books do
anticipate future events and technologies: From the Earth to the Moon
(1865) and Hector Servadac (1877) deal in space travel, while Journey
to the Center
of the Earth features travel to the earth's core. But with Verne the
operative word is "travel," and some of his best-known titles don't
really qualify as sci-fi: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) and
Michael Strogoff (1876) are closer to "travelogs"-- adventure yarns in
far-away places.
These observations partly apply here. The subtitle of the present book
is An Underwater Tour of the World, so in good travelog style, the
Nautilus's exploits supply an episodic story line. Shark attacks, giant
squid, cannibals, hurricanes, whale hunts, and other rip-roaring
adventures erupt almost at random. Yet this loose structure gives the

novel an air of documentary realism. What's more, Verne adds
backbone to the action by developing three recurring motifs: the
deepening mystery of Nemo's past life and future intentions, the
mounting tension between Nemo and hot-tempered harpooner Ned
Land, and Ned's ongoing schemes to escape from the Nautilus. These
unifying threads tighten the narrative and accelerate its momentum.
Other subtleties occur inside each episode, the textures sparkling with
wit, information, and insight. Verne regards the sea from many angles:
in the domain of marine biology, he gives us thumbnail sketches of fish,
seashells, coral, sometimes in great catalogs that swirl past like musical
cascades; in the realm of geology, he studies volcanoes literally inside
and out; in the world of commerce, he celebrates the high-energy
entrepreneurs who lay the Atlantic Cable or dig the Suez Canal. And
Verne's marine engineering