Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Professor Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land aboard the Nautilus with Captain Nemo, "no one." The leagues are distance traveled, not depth.
The book
Jules Verne serialized Vingt mille lieues sous les mers in 1869–70. The title means distance traveled underwater, 20,000 leagues, about 50,000 miles (twice around the world), not depth. No sea is anywhere near that deep.
The characters
- Professor Pierre Aronnax, French naturalist and narrator
- Conseil, his devoted servant, obsessed with classifying every creature
- Ned Land, a hot-tempered Canadian harpooner who wants only to escape
- Captain Nemo, the mysterious commander. Nemo is Latin for "no one," the same trick Odysseus played on the Cyclops by calling himself "Nobody."
The story
In 1866 ships report a huge sea monster. The US frigate Abraham Lincoln hunts it with Aronnax, Conseil and Ned aboard. In the struggle the three are thrown overboard and land on the "monster," which is a submarine, the Nautilus, named after Fulton's (see Fulton's Nautilus).
Nemo has cut himself off from all nations. He runs the Nautilus on electricity and lives entirely from the sea. His guests are prisoners in luxury: they can never leave. Highlights of the voyage:
- An undersea hunting trip through a forest on the sea floor, in diving suits
- A burial in a coral cemetery for a crewman
- Pearl beds off Ceylon, where Nemo saves an Indian pearl diver from a shark
- Through the secret "Arabian Tunnel" from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean
- Walking among the ruins of Atlantis
- Reaching the South Pole (in 1868, decades before Amundsen), then being trapped under the ice and cutting free with air running out
- Passing the transatlantic telegraph cable on the sea floor
- The fight with the giant squid (poulpes in French), which kills a crewman
- Nemo rams and sinks a warship from the nation that wronged him, and weeps before the portraits of his wife and children
Finally, off Norway, the Nautilus is caught in the Maelstrom, the great whirlpool. The three prisoners escape in the dinghy and wake up on shore. The fate of Nemo and the Nautilus is unknown.
Who was Nemo?
Verne answers that in The Mysterious Island (1874–75). Nemo is Prince Dakkar, an Indian prince, son of a rajah, who fought the British in the 1857 rebellion, lost his family and his country, and vanished under the sea. (Verne had first imagined him as a Pole fighting Russia, but his publisher worried about the Russian market.)
Nemo and Dantès
Like Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, Nemo is a man destroyed by injustice who reinvents himself under a new name, possesses vast hidden wealth and knowledge, and uses it to take revenge. Both are rescued from despair by learning, and both find that revenge does not bring peace. See Monte Cristo and Napoleon.
Key facts
- Twenty Thousand Leagues (1869–70): 20,000 leagues is distance traveled, about 50,000 miles, not depth
- Nemo is Latin for "no one"
- Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land escape the Nautilus in the Maelstrom off Norway
- In The Mysterious Island, Nemo is revealed as Prince Dakkar of India