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| Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea | |
 Front page of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers |
|
| Author | Jules Verne |
|---|---|
| Original title | Vingt mille lieues sous les mers |
| Translator | Mercier Lewis |
| Illustrator | Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Series | The Extraordinary Voyages #6 |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction, adventure novel |
| Publisher | Pierre-Jules Hetzel |
| Publication date | 1870 |
| Published in English |
1872 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | In Search of the Castaways |
| Followed by | Around the Moon |
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax. The first illustrated edition (not the original edition which had no illustrations) was published by Hetzel and contains a number of illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou.
Contents |
Title
The title refers to the distance travelled under the sea and not to a depth, as 20,000 leagues is over 12 times the radius of the earth. The greatest depth mentioned in the book is 4 leagues. A literal translation of the French title would end in the plural "seas", thus implying the "seven seas" through which the characters of the novel travel. However the regular English translation of the title uses "sea", meaning the ocean in general, as in "going to sea".
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 (twice around the Earth) or roundly 50,000 statute miles.1 In common English usage 1 league equals 3 statute miles.
Plot summary
As the story begins in 1866, 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 in New York City to track down and destroy the menace. Professor Pierre Aronnax is a noted French marine biologist and narrator of the story; as he happens to be in New York at the time and is a recognized expert in his field, he is issued a last-minute invitation to join the expedition, and he accepts. Canadian master harpoonist Ned Land and Aronnax's faithful assistant Conseil are also brought on board.
The expedition sets sail from Long Island aboard a naval ship, 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 construct. They are quickly captured and brought inside the vessel, where they meet its enigmatic creator and commander, Captain Nemo. ("Nemo" means "no man" or "no-body" in Latin)
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. (As further discussed below, the story was written decades before submarines of such size and utility became a reality.) 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 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. The travelers also don diving suits to go on undersea expeditions away from the ship, where they hunt sharks and other marine life with specially designed guns and have a funeral for a crew member who died when an accident occurred inside the Nautilus. When the Nautilus arrives back in the Atlantic Ocean, "poulps" (usually translated as giant squids, although the French "poulpe" means octopus) attacks the vessel and devours a crew member. Shortly afterward, they are tracked and attacked by a mysterious ship. Nemo ignores Arronax's pleas for amnesty for the boat and attacks. Nemo attacks the ship under the waterline, sending it to the bottom of the ocean with all crew aboard as Arronax watches from the saloon. Nemo bows before the pictures of his wife and children and is plunged into deep depression after this encounter, and, "voluntarily or involuntarily" allows the submarine to wander into an encounter with the Moskstraumen, more commonly known as the Maelstrom, 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
Captain Nemo's name is a subtle allusion to Homer's Odyssey, a Greek epic poem. In The Odyssey, Odysseus meets the monstrous cyclops Polyphemus during the course of his wanderings. Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies that his name is "ουτις," which translates as "No-man" or "No-body"). In the Latin translation of the Odyssey, this pseudonym is rendered as "nemo", which in Latin also translates as "No-man" or "No-body". Similarly to Nemo, Odysseus is forced to wander the seas in exile (though only for 10 years) and is tormented by the deaths of his ship's crew (though in The Odyssey, every last crew member save Odysseus himself is ultimately killed).
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. 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. Verne was an investor in Lesseps to build the French sea level crossing in Panama. 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.
The most famous part of the novel, the battle against the school of giant squid, begins when a crewman opens the hatch of the boat and gets caught by one of the monsters. As he is being pulled away by the tentacle that has grabbed him, he yells "Help!" in French. At the beginning of the next chapter, concerning the battle, Aronnax states that: "To convey such sights, one would take the pen of our most famous poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea." The Toilers of the Sea also contains an episode where a worker fights a giant octopus; and there, the octopus symbolizes the Industrial Revolution. It is probable that Verne borrowed the symbol, but used it to allude to the Revolutions of 1848 as well: After all, the first man to stand against "the monster" and the first to be defeated by it is a Frenchman.
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 took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who later invented the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton's submarine was named after the paper nautilus because it had a sail. The world's first operational nuclear powered submarine, the United States Navy's USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was named for Verne's fictional vessel.
Verne can also be credited with glimpsing the military possibilities of submarines, and specifically 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 by Omar Sharif in the 1973 European miniseries The Mysterious Island. Nemo is also depicted as Indian in a silent film version of the story released in 1916 and later in both the graphic novel and the movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Recurring themes in later books
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.
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 - later used as a basis for the movie Master of the World.
Translations
The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Lewis Page Mercier (aka "Mercier Lewis"). Mercier, under orders from British censors and performed or dictated by his editors at Sampson Low, 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. Some of these bowdlerizations may have been done for political reasons, such as Nemo's identity and the nationality of the two warships he sinks, or the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of his cabin which originally included Daniel O'Connell.2 Nonetheless it became the "standard" English translation for more than 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 by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter between 1989 and 1991, published in 1993 by Naval Institute Press in a "completely restored and annotated edition."3 But, it has a new error: in it the French word scaphandrier, which in this book means one of Captain Nemo's divers in kit similar to an old-type heavy standard diving suit but with an independent air supply, is everywhere wrongly translated "frogman".
Film, TV, and theatrical adaptations and variations
- 20,000 lieues sous les mers (1907 film)
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916 film
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1952) - a two-part adaptation for the science fiction television anthology Tales of Tomorrow. (Part One was subtitled The Chase, Part Two was subtitled The Escape)
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954 film) - produced by Walt Disney
- Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) - British film based on characters from the novel, starring Robert Ryan as Nemo.
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1972 film) - Rankin-Bass animated version
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1973) - Australian Famous Classic Tales cartoon.
- The Black Hole (1979). A very free sci-fi variation on the novel. Maximilian Schell's mad captain is obviously a more murderous, and considerably less sympathetic, version of Captain Nemo. Even his hair, mustache, and beard resemble those of James Mason in the 1954 film.
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1985 film) - made-for-television animated film by Burbank Films Australia, starring Tom Burlinson as Ned Land.
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Village Roadshow film) - television movie starring Michael Caine.
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Hallmark film) - television movie starring Ben Cross.
- Crayola Kids Adventures: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 video)
- A version of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus appeared in the 1970s animated series The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo.
- 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.
- 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.
- 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea (2007)
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Radio drama adaption of Jules Verne's novel, aired in the United States in 2001.
References in popular culture
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- An episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, entitled "20,000 Koopas Under the Sea", borrows many elements from the original story (including a submarine named the "Koopilus" and King Koopa referring to himself as "Koopa Nemo").
- 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.
- On the popular children's show Arthur, Arthur's friend Francine names her cat Nemo, later saying because he's in many ways like the Captain.
- 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.
- A SpongeBob SquarePants episode is called "20,000 Patties Under the Sea". It is both a parody of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the traveling song, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall".
- In a 1993 Saturday Night Live sketch (featuring Kelsey Grammer as Captain Nemo) pokes 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.
- 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 Disney movie.
- A ride attraction named "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is featured at the Tokyo DisneySea in Japan opened in 2001.
- The movie The Return of Captain Nemo (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).
- In the novel and movie Sphere, Harry Adams (played by Samuel Jackson) reads (and is very interested in) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
- Japanese animated television series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1989-1991) were inspired by the works of Jules Verne, and use various elements of his works, particularly from 20,000 Leagues: Captain Nemo and the Nautilus. The titular Nadia is revealed to be Nemo's estranged daughter.
- Captain Nemo is one of the main characters in Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neill's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well as in the film.
- In the film Juno, Juno McGuff states, "You should try talking to it. 'Cause, like, supposedly they can hear you even though it's all, like, ten-thousand leagues under the sea."
- In the 2001 Clive Cussler novel Valhalla Rising, reference to a submarine that "inspired" Verne's story is made as one of the central plot points; it differs in having been British, with Verne being accused of being anti-British.
- Nemo and the Nautilus, along with several other plot points, are major elements of Kevin J. Anderson's Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius.
- Lo-fi pop musician The Blow references 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in the song True Affection, the last track on 2006 album Paper Television.
References
- ^ 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 129,160,000 km².
- ^ How Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King brought you Jules Verne
- ^ Jules Verne (author), Walter James Miller (trans), Frederick Paul Walter (trans). Jules Vernes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A Completely Restored and Annotated Edition, Naval Institute Press, 1993. ISBN 1-55750-877-1
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: 20000 Leagues Under the Sea |
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea |
- 20,000 Leagues under the Sea at Project Gutenberg , trans. by Lewis Mercier, 1872
- 20,000 Leagues under the Sea at Project Gutenberg , trans. by James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter, 1993
- Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (full text), trans. with an introduction, notes and appendices by William Butcher, Oxford University Press, 1999: the only annotated full-text edition available online
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 4 January 2009, at 21:31.
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