Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Summary

In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it. With him go his calm Flemish servant Conseil, who loves to classify every living thing, and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land. After months of searching, the frigate finds the monster in the Pacific off Japan; Ned's harpoon rings against metal, the creature rams the ship, and Aronnax, Conseil and Ned are thrown into the sea. They find themselves clinging to the back of a steel submarine boat, the Nautilus. Its commander, who calls himself Captain Nemo, has broken with all nations and lives only by the sea. He will not let his guests go, since they now know his secret, but he treats them as companions in a voyage of discovery. The Nautilus runs on electricity and carries a library, a museum of marine specimens and paintings, and an organ that Nemo plays at night. The prisoners walk on the sea floor in diving dress, hunt in the submarine forest of Crespo Island, see the wreck of La Perouse at Vanikoro, run aground in the Torres Straits, and watch Nemo drive off attacking Papuans with an electrified stair rail. After a drugged sleep during some unseen battle, Aronnax, who is also a physician, is asked to examine a crewman with a crushed skull, who dies and is buried in a coral cemetery. In Part Two Nemo saves an Indian pearl diver from a shark off Ceylon, passes from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean by a secret Arabian Tunnel, gathers Spanish treasure from the galleons sunk in Vigo Bay, and leads Aronnax by night to the ruins of Atlantis. On 21 March 1868 Nemo plants his black flag at the South Pole, but on the way north the Nautilus is trapped under the ice, and the men nearly suffocate before they break free. Giant poulps, or squid, seize a sailor, and Nemo weeps for him. Off Ireland the Captain visits the wreck of the Avenger, a French ship sunk in 1794 rather than surrender, and the next day rams and sinks a warship of an unnamed nation that has fired on him, then kneels sobbing before a portrait of a woman and two children. Ned plans an escape; as the three slip into the dinghy, the Nautilus is drawn into the Maelstrom off Norway, and they wake in a fisherman's hut in the Lofoten Islands, having travelled twenty thousand leagues in under ten months. The fate of Nemo is left unknown. The novel was serialized in Hetzel's Magasin d'education et de recreation from March 1869 to June 1870; the library text is an older anonymous English translation that shortens Verne in places.

Top Lessons

• Wonder as a reason to study

  Aronnax and Conseil meet the sea floor, the coral reefs and the polar ice with careful names and measurements, and their science deepens rather than dulls their delight. Verne makes classification, chemistry and navigation into adventure. The book shows that patient knowledge of creation can be a form of joy.

• Freedom and its limits

  Nemo tells Aronnax that beneath the surface he recognizes no masters and is free, yet he keeps three men prisoner for ten months. Ned Land, who loses the most by captivity, insists that no wonder is worth a man's liberty. The story asks whose freedom matters and whether one man may be a law to himself.

• Mercy and vengeance in one man

  Nemo risks his life to save a pearl diver, weeps over his dead sailors, and sends treasure to people fighting for their country. The same man sinks a warship with all its crew and then sobs before the portrait of his family. Verne lets readers see how grief, nursed into hatred, can twist a generous heart.

• Courage and friendship under pressure

  When the Nautilus is trapped beneath the ice, Conseil and Ned give their last breaths of good air to Aronnax, and the crew works in turns to cut through the ice. Faithfulness among friends is tested most when the danger is slow and suffocating, not sudden.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is a minor strand in an adventure of natural history, but Verne gives it a few exact scenes. Aronnax reveals that he practised as a doctor and resident hospital surgeon before entering the museum, and Nemo calls on him to examine a crewman whose skull has been shattered; the narrator's description of exposed, bruised brain, slow breathing, facial spasms, an intermittent pulse and cooling limbs is a period bedside account of a fatal head wound, and he can only dress it and predict death. Earlier the prisoners are put into a heavy, sudden sleep, evidently by a narcotic in their food, while the Nautilus is engaged in some action they are not allowed to see. Trapped under the Antarctic ice, the men suffer from want of air: Aronnax describes yawning, panting, headache, dizziness and a rattling in the throat among the crew, then his own purple face, blue lips and loss of sense, and his revival when Ned and Conseil give him the last air in a diving apparatus. Nemo's long grief for his lost wife and children and his final cry are drawn with sympathy; any modern reading of him in terms of trauma is the reader's interpretation, not Verne's vocabulary.

• Part I, Chapter XXII, Aegri Somnia

  Aronnax and his companions fall into a sudden, irresistible sleep after a meal, apparently drugged, during an unexplained encounter.

• Part I, Chapter XXIII, The Coral Kingdom

  Aronnax, acknowledging his medical training, examines a crewman with a shattered skull and exposed brain and judges the wound fatal.

• Part II, Chapter XVI, Want of Air

  As the oxygen runs out beneath the ice, Aronnax records headache, dizziness, laboured breathing and the near-collapse of the crew.

• Part II, Chapter XXI, A Hecatomb

  After sinking the warship, Nemo kneels before the portrait of a young woman and two children and breaks into sobs.