Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne (1828–1905), published in 1870 under the title Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. The original edition, published by Hetzel, contains a number of illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Riou. The novel is about the fictional Captain Nemo and his submarine, Nautilus, as seen by one of his passengers, Professor Pierre Aronnax.

Plot summary

The story was written before modern sea-going submarines were a reality. It is narrated by Professor Pierre Aronnax, a noted marine biologist, who is accompanied by his faithful assistant Conseil and by a Canadian harpooner named Ned Land. As the story begins, a mysterious "sea monster", theorized by some to be a giant narwhal, is sighted by ships of several nations; an ocean liner is also damaged by the creature. The United States government finally assembles an expedition to track down and destroy the menace. Since Aronnax happens to be in New York City at the time and is a recognized expert in his field, he is invited at the last minute to go along, and he accepts. Master harpoonist Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful assistant Conseil also brought on board.

The expedition sets sail from Long Island aboard an American warship, the Abraham Lincoln, which travels down around the tip of South America and into the Pacific Ocean. After much fruitless searching, the monster is found, and the ship charges into battle. During the fight, the ship's steering is damaged, and the three protagonists are thrown overboard. They find themselves stranded on the "hide" of the creature, only to discover to their surprise that it is a large metal vessel. They are quickly captured and brought inside the vessel, where they meet its enigmatic creator and commander, Captain Nemo. ("Nemo" means "no one" in Latin, and may have been inspired by a passage in Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus calls himself Ουτις, which is Greek for "nobody")

The rest of the story follows the adventures of the protagonists aboard the submarine, the Nautilus, which was built in secrecy and now roams the seas free of any land-based government. Captain Nemo's motivation is implied to be both a scientific thirst for knowledge, and a desire for revenge on, and self imposed exile from, civilization. Captain Nemo explains that the submarine is electrically powered, and equipped to carry out cutting edge marine biology research; he also tells his new passengers that while he appreciates having an expert such as Aronnax with whom to converse, they can never leave because he is afraid they will betray his existence to the world. Aronnax is enthralled by the vistas he is seeing, but Land constantly plots to escape.

Their travels take them to numerous points in the world's oceans, some of them which were known to Jules Verne from real travelers' descriptions and guesses, while others are completely fictional. Thus, the travelers witness the real corals of the Red Sea, the wrecks of the battle of Vigo Bay, the Antarctic ice shelves, and the fictional submerged Atlantis. Back in the Atlantic Ocean, a group of giant squid (cuttlefish in the usual English translation) attacks the Nautilus, and kills a crew member. Nemo is plunged into deep depression, and allows the submarine to wander into an encounter with the Moskstraumen whirlpool off the coast of Norway. This gives the three prisoners an opportunity to escape; they make it back to land alive, but the fate of Captain Nemo and his crew is not revealed.

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, "Captain Maury" in Verne's book, a real-life oceanographer who explored the winds, seas, currents, and collected samples of the bottom of the seas and charted all of these things, is mentioned a few times in this work by Jules Verne. Jules Verne certainly would have known of Matthew Maury's international fame and perhaps Maury's French ancestry.

References are made to three other Frenchmen whose destinies were linked to each other in real life: Those are Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, a famous explorer who was lost while circumnavigating the globe; Dumont D'Urville, the explorer who found the remains of the ill-fated ship of the Count; and Ferdinand Lesseps, builder of the Suez Channel and the nephew of the man who was the sole survivor of De Galaup's expedition. The Nautilus seems to follow the footsteps of these men: She visits the waters where De Galaup was lost; she sails to Antarctic waters and becomes stranded there, just like D'Urville's ship, the Astrolabe; and she passes through an underwater tunnel from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.

Some of Verne's ideas about the not-yet-existing submarines which were laid out in this book turned out to be prophetic (such as the high speed and secret conduct of today's nuclear attack submarines), and (with diesel submarines) the need to surface frequently for fresh air.

Verne borrowed the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who later invented the first commercially successful steamboat. The word itself is after the chambered nautilus, a kind of mollusk.

Verne can also be credited with glimpsing the military possibilities of submarines, and specificially the danger which they possessed for the naval superiority of the British Navy, composed of surface warships. The fictional sinking of a ship by Nemo's "Nautilus" was to be enacted again and again in reality, in the same waters where Verne predicted it, by German U-boats in both World Wars.

No less significant, though more rarely commented on, is the very bold political vision (indeed, revolutionary for its time) represented by the character of Captain Nemo. As revealed in the later Verne book The Mysterious Island, Captain Nemo is an Indian, who took to the underwater life after the suppression of the 1857 Indian Mutiny in which his close family members were killed by the British.

This change was made on request of Verne's publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (who is known to be responsible for many serious changes in Verne's books) since in the original text the mysterious captain was a Polish nobleman, avenging his family who were killed by Russians. They had been murdered in retaliation for the captain's taking part in the Polish January Uprising (1863). As France was allied with Tsarist Russia, to avoid trouble the target for Nemo's wrath was changed to France's old enemy: the British Empire. It is no wonder that Professor Pierre Aronnax does not suspect Nemo's origins, as these were explained only later, in Verne's next book. What remained in the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko (Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794) with inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!".

The national origin of Captain Nemo was changed during most movie realizations; in nearly all picture-based works following the book he was made into a European. Nemo was represented as an Indian in the 1973 European miniseries The Mysterious Island by Omar Sharif and later in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both in the graphic novel and the movie.

Recurring themes in later books

Verne returned to the theme of an outlaw submarine captain in his much later Facing the Flag. That book's main villain, Ker Karraje, is a completely unscrupulous pirate, acting purely and simply for gain, completely devoid of all the saving graces which gave Nemo - for all that he, too, was capable of ruthless killings - some nobility of character.

Like Nemo, Ker Karraje plays "host" to unwilling French guests - but unlike Nemo, who manages to elude all pursuers, Karraje's career of outlawry is decisively ended by the combination of an international task force and the rebellion of his French captives. Though also widely published and translated, it never attained the lasting popularity of "Twenty Thousand Leagues".

More similar to the original Nemo, though with a less finely worked-out character, is Robur in Robur the Conqueror - a dark and flamboyant outlaw rebel using an aircraft instead of a submarine.

Translations

The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Louis Page Mercier (aka "Mercier Lewis"). Mercier cut nearly a quarter of Verne's original text and made hundreds of translation errors, sometimes dramatically changing the meaning of Verne's original intent. Nonetheless it became the "standard" English translation for over a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it - and its mistakes.

Many of the "sins" of Mercier were finally corrected in a from-the-ground-up re-examination of the sources and an entirely new translation (as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas) by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter between 1989 and 1991; but those translators made one new error: "frogman" uniformly and wrongly for a diver in old-type heavy standard diving dress for French scaphandrier. Also, they replaced some placenames anachronistically by post-Verne real-world renamings, for example Sri Lanka for Ceylon.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

• 20,000 lieues sous les mers (1907)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) - produced by Walt Disney, probably the best known version
• Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) - British version with a different story
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1972) - Rankin-Bass production
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1973) Australian Famous Classic Tales cartoon.
• The Return of Captain Nemo (1978 TV movie)
• The Black Hole (1979) Disney sci-fi adaptation.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 TV movie, Michael Caine)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 TV movie, Ben Cross)
• Crayola Kids Adventures: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 video)
• A version of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus appeared in the 1970's animated series The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo.
• A version of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus appeared in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in the first two volumes of the comic book as well as in the film.
• The second part of the second season of Around the World with Willy Fog by Spanish studio BRB Internacional was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
• In Japanese animation Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, various characters and background are based on this book, such as Captain Nemo and the Nautilus.
• A stage play adaptation by Walk the Plank (theatre company). In this version, the "Nautilese" private language used by the Nautilus's crew, was kept, represented by a mixture of Polish and Persian.

Story changes in movie adaptations

• In some, the Nautilus is nuclear powered.
• The 1954 Walt Disney version has a different ending (which is copied in some children's book summarized versions): the Nautilus has a base on a secret island, which at the end is found and attacked while the Nautilus is there.

References in popular culture

• In a 1989 episode "20,000 Leaks Under the City" of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series is heavily based on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, including a battle with a giant squid. However, this story takes place in New York City of the 1980s where a flood has happened.

• In the 1990 movie Back to the Future Part III, Jules Verne and his book are used as a common interest that unites Doc Brown and Clara Clayton in 1885. After they wed, they name their two sons Jules and Verne respectively.

• In a 1993 Saturday Night Live sketch (featuring Kelsey Grammer as Captain Nemo) poked fun at the misconception of leagues being a measure of depth instead of a measure of distance. Nemo tries repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, to convince his crew of this.

Trivia

• The original title did not use the number "20,000" in figures, but rather the words "Vingt mille" or "Twenty-Thousand". Later editions commonly used "20,000".
• The title refers to the distance the Nautilus travels while under the sea and not to its depth. The greatest depth mentioned in the book is 4 leagues. A linear depth of 20,000 leagues would have put the Nautilus through the core of the Earth and well out in space on the other side.
• The word leagues in the English title is a literal translation of lieues, but refers to French leagues. The French league had been a variable unit but in the metric era was standardized as 4 km. Thus the title distance is equivalent to 80,000 km (which would be recognizeable to anyone accustomed to the metric system as twice around the Earth) or roundly 50,000 statute miles.^[1]
• A literal translation of the French title would end in the plural "Seas", thus implying the "Seven Seas" which the characters of the novel travel through; however, the regular English translation of the title uses "Sea", meaning the ocean in general, as in "going to sea".
• Jules Verne wrote a sequel to this book: L'Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874), which concludes the stories begun by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and In Search of the Castaways.
• One of the inaugural rides at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom was called 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Submarine Voyage and was based on the novel.
• A ride attraction named "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is featured at the Tokyo DisneySea in Japan opened in 2001.
• A movie (intended to be the start of a series) was made, set after World War II, where the Nautilus is found sunk, and in it Captain Nemo in suspended animation; he revives and gets ashore and has difficulty proving his identity, and the Nautilus is re-fitted with modern technology (sonar etc).
• A BBC TV wildlife program, "200 Million Years Under the Sea", is about the nautilus mollusc and its evolutionary history.
• In the novel and movie Sphere, Harry Adams (played by Samuel Jackson) was reading and very interested in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

References

1. ^ The equivalence 1 league = 4 km is given explicitly at one point in the book (lieues de quatre kilomètres) and confirmed by several distances that are given in both leagues and miles (milles). These miles are nautical miles, which in turn is confirmed by a passage giving the Earth's total land area as 37,657,000 square "miles" or 12,916,000,000 hectares.

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