Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

The book was slow for me. There wasn't a lot that happened in the story, and it was incredibly science forward. I found it interesting, but at times it did see to drag on with explanation/descriptions of scientific topics.

Was a bit disappointed that I didn't like this more! The ideas were very cool, but the sense of adventure was dampened by how much the events meandered from one thing to another. Several things that I found most interesting (Captain Nemo's past, battles with sea monsters, etc) were glazed over in favor of lists of species and long descriptions of events unrelated to the actual plot.

Still a lot of inspiration in here for adventure/exploration stories, though!

As I pen this account of our underwater expedition, I know how unbelievable it must sound. I am the chronicler of things which seem to be impossible but are true and incontestably real. It was not a dream! I saw and felt it all!

3.5 stars! Oddly enough, even though I'm not terribly enthusiastic about this novel (I liked it just fine, but not much more),

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea does make me enthusiastic about Verne as an author. I just love how he writes science fiction with such a sense of wonder, for both technology and the natural world. And I love how thoroughly researched and imaginative his novels seem to be: truly an accomplishment for the time in which he was writing. He is an excellent example of what hard science fiction should strive for.

First, though, some thoughts on this translation by David Coward. I was disappointed that Frank Wynne, who translated the exquisite

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, had not also translated this novel. Perhaps it’s simply that I wasn’t as captivated by the subject matter, or perhaps Verne is simply writing in a slightly different tone, but Coward’s translation felt a little more stiff and opaque than Wynne’s. I never felt the immediacy, the drama, the sense of atmosphere that I felt when reading Wynne; the prose felt more workmanlike than beautiful; I wasn’t able to lose myself in the novel. It’s unfortunate that I can’t know whether I simply didn’t click with Coward or whether I just didn’t click with Verne this time around.

(Also, it irritates me that Coward/Penguin went with the title “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” rather than the actual literal translation of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under

the Seas”. A minor change, but in my mind an important one. Not only does using the original plural more clearly indicate that Verne is referencing distance traveled, not depth, but it better conveys that Verne is focused less on merely being underwater and more on exploring the seas of the world.)

On to the novel itself.

Twenty Thousand Leagues has all the same flaws as

Journey to the Centre—and more—while, unfortunately, I wasn’t as interested in the subject matter.

The characterization isn’t bad, if a little one-note. The Professor likes science; Conseil likes classifying things and loyally serving the Professor; Ned Land likes hunting and really wants to get off the

Nautilus; Captain Nemo is a mysterious megalomaniac. This really didn’t bother me since Verne is writing an adventure novel, not a character study, and the characters were entertaining enough to carry the story along. Verne tries to inject some complexity into Captain Nemo, but the character remains so shrouded in mystery that he mainly comes off as mercurial and impenetrable.

My main criticism is of the plot. The novel starts out strong, with the Professor joining an expedition to track down the mysterious creature sinking ships all over the globe, but once aboard the

Nautilus, the plot more or less evaporates. Our heroes have no real goal: they occasionally mention wanting to escape or uncover more about the mysterious Captain, but they rarely take any proactive action to those ends. Instead, the story is highly episodic. Even the episodes themselves rarely have any defined structure or driving tension, but are more about the characters marveling at some new wonder or discovery, sometimes punctuated by brief (albeit exciting) brushes with danger. Often these involve exploring the underwater realms in their diving suits, and unfortunately, I don't think Verne really captures the feeling of being underwater (unlike in

Journey to the Centre, in which he captures very well the feeling of spelunking). I imagine this is largely because he has no way of knowing what it would be like: for Verne, there's no pressure, no visual or auditory distortions caused by water, no inconveniences caused by the suits, no challenges in moving about. Then, when we finally reach the end, the conclusion is sudden and not altogether satisfying: like

Journey to the Centre,

they more or less fail to accomplish their goal (in this case, to uncover the secrets of Nemo and the

Nautilus)

, and, bafflingly, Verne again makes our narrator lose consciousness during perhaps the

most climactic moment, so the climax takes place “off screen”!

The other big issue I have is with the sheer amount of information Verne relays. In the same way that

Journey to the Centre is about geology and dinosaurs and the history of the Earth,

Twenty Thousand Leagues is about marine life and the geography of the world’s oceans; I just happen to find the latter much less interesting. Verne displays an almost encyclopedic knowledge of marine life (literally, it sometimes feels like reading an encyclopedia), with extensive discussions of how various flora and fauna are classified and which are present in which of the seas they visit. He’s also meticulous in specifying latitudes and longitudes, the various islands and coastlines they pass, and any notable explorers who sailed the same waters. Even the nature and “geography” of the sea currents are carefully explained. I often enjoyed these scientific digressions, but equally often they seemed to go on and on and

on and bog down the story.

All that said,

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is still a solidly enjoyable romp. Verne includes just about everything one could wish for in an undersea adventure novel—

including shark attacks, a battle with giant squid, underwater volcanoes, sunken ships, giant pearls, the lost city of Atlantis, shipwrecked treasure chests overflowing with gold, whale hunting, phosphorescent creatures, a maelstrom, even a visit to the intercontinental telegraph cable!

—and the result is just delightful. He also dedicates a fair bit of time to explaining the speculative science of how the

Nautilus operates, the various pieces of technology they use, and how Captain Nemo remains self-sufficient with only resources obtained from the sea (it often has a bit of a “survivalist” feel), which is great fun. Verne clearly loves his subject matter and often remarks on how certain species are endangered due to overhunting. And it’s all told with a sense of awestruck wonder and excitement that is contagious, often with a generous dash of humor.

One last thing: I read this immediately after

Moby-Dick, and I find the similarities between the two incredibly amusing. Both are about sailing and told in first person; both have a solid beginning and abrupt ending with a middle that does very little to move the plot along; both feature characters solidly established but not terribly complex and with little or no arc; both are very interested in the classification and anatomy of marine life, especially whales; both have conservationist streaks; both feature a megalomaniac captain; both end

in disaster for their vessels

. Verne even references Moby-Dick! (Suffice to say that

Moby-Dick is better literature, but I enjoyed

Twenty Thousand Leagues much more.)

Some favorite passages:

The human mind is naturally drawn to grandiose notions of supernatural beings, and the sea is the ideal medium for them, the only environment where such giant creatures – compared with which terrestrial animals such as elephants or rhinoceroses are mere midgets – can exist and prosper.

‘Of course I love it! The sea is everything! It covers seven-tenths of the world’s surface. Its breath is pure and salubrious. It is a vast desert where man is never alone because he feels the constant beat of life all around him. The sea is merely the medium which supports the most fantastic, prodigious forms of existence. It is nothing other than motion and love, it is infinity in action, as one of your poets put it. […] It was in the sea that the globe can be said to have begun, and who can say that it will not also end there, where it began? In it all is ultimate peace. The sea does not belong to tyrants. They may still exert their iniquitous rights on its surface, fight, exterminate each other and practise all the horrors they bring from the land. But thirty feet beneath its waves, their power ends, their influence fades and their power vanishes. I tell you, sir, live in the bosom of the seas. Only there will you find independence! Here I acknowledge no master. Here I am free!’

The area of the globe covered by water is estimated to be 3,832,558 square myriametres, that is 38 billion hectares. This mass of water amounts to 2,250 million cubic miles and would form a sphere with a diameter of 60 leagues weighing 3 quintillion tons.

‘Have you got all that, Ned?’ asked the learned Conseil. ‘No, Conseil, none of it,’ replied the harpooner, ‘but carry on all the same, you make it all sound so interesting.’

For two hours, an entire aquatic army escorted the Nautilus.

The sea-bed was strewn with polyps and echinoderms. Various kinds of isis; cornularia which live apart in clumps; tufts of virgin oculina (once known as ivory bush coral), bristling with mushroom-shaped coral fungi; anemones anchored by muscular discs – all featured in beds studded with blue siphonophore adorned in their annuli of sky-blue tentacles; constellations of starfish in the sand; asterophyton verrucosum, which looked like the finest lace embroidered by the hands of naiads and hung in festoons which swayed in the eddies initiated by our passing.

Then we crossed a meadow of seaweeds, pelagic plants which grew in wild profusion and which the surging water had not yet uprooted. These close-textured lawns, so soft to walk on, stood comparison with the most sumptuous carpets made by the hand of man. All this verdant growth extended under our feet, but it did not neglect our heads. A delicate raft of marine plants, classified in the exuberant family of algae of which over 2,000 species are known, mingled on the surface of the water. I saw long, floating ribbons of sea-wrack, some globular, others tabulate; laurentiae; delicately fringed cladostephi and rhodymenia palmata, which looked like cactus fans.

Fauna and flora are so closely conjoined in the realm beneath the waves!

I noticed that all these creations of the vegetable kingdom clung to the ground by means of the flimsiest footings. Having no roots and not caring what solid body – sand, shell, urchin or pebble – supported them, all they required was something to rest on, not something to draw on for life. These plants are self-propagating, and the root of their whole existence is the water which sustains and feeds them. Most did not have leaves but instead put out blade-shaped lamellas in fanciful variations and in a palette of colours restricted to pink, carmine, green, olive, fawn and brown.

It was an invitation to us not only to contemplate the works of the Creator from inside the fourth element but also to try to unravel the most intractable mysteries of the ocean.

‘Which means that it took how long,’ he asked, ‘to raise these walls?’ ‘One hundred and ninety-two thousand years, Conseil, which lengthens a biblical day dramatically. Actually, the formation of coal, which is the mineralization of forests drowned by floods, took considerably longer. But I would add that biblical “days” are really epochs and not intervals between two sunrises for, according to the Bible itself, the sun does not date from the first day of the creation.’

After a few minutes, the parts of the flesh exposed to the embers were charred all over. Inside was light white crumb, like soft crust bread, which tasted rather like artichoke.

It is well known, as naturalists have pointed out, that right-handedness is a law of nature. The stars and their satellites in their transits and orbits move from right to left. Man uses his right hand more than his left, and as a result all his instruments and artefacts such as staircases, locks, watch movements and so forth are designed to operate from right to left. Most of the time, nature obeys this law for the way shells grow. With rare exceptions, they are all right-handed, and when by chance their whorl is left-turning, then collectors will pay a fortune for them.

We were like snails: we grew accustomed to being snug in our shell. I can confirm that it is all too easy to turn into a snail!

‘Professor, what exactly is a pearl?’ ‘Well Ned,’ I began, ‘for poets, it is a tear shed by the ocean. For Orientals, it is a crystallized dewdrop; for ladies, it is an oblong-shaped jewel, with a hyaline lustre, made of mother-of-pearl, which they wear on their fingers, around their necks or in their ears; for the chemist, it is a mixture of phosphate and carbonate of lime with a small quantity of gelatine; and lastly, for the naturalist, it is merely a defective secretion from the organ which produces mother-of-pearl in certain bivalves.’ ‘Branch of molluscs,’ said Conseil, ‘class of acephalans, order of testacaeans.’

Are you getting tired of our voyage under the seas? Is the never-endingly varied spectacle of marvels of the ocean beginning to pall on you?

Sponges grew there in all shapes and sizes, pediculate, foliaceous, globular, digitate … They fully lived up to the names (basket, chalice, cat’s tail, bulrush, elkhorn, lion’s paw, peacock tail, Neptune’s glove) that have been given to them by fishermen, who have a more poetic imagination than naturalists do.

The Mediterranean, the peerless Big Blue, called the Great Sea by the Hebrews and simply The Sea by the Greeks, the Mare Nostrum of the Romans, fringed by orange groves, aloes, cactus and sea-pine, perfumed by the scent of myrtle, framed by rugged mountains, permanently steeped in pure, limpid air and constantly fashioned by the great subterranean fire, is a battlefield where Neptune and Pluto still fight for mastery of the world.

In our rapid passage through those deep waters, I saw countless sunken wrecks lying on the sea-bed, some already furred by coral, others covered by no more than a veneer of rust, anchors, cannon, cannon balls, chains and rails, propeller-blades, parts of machinery, broken cylinders, battered boilers, not to mention entire ships’ hulls just hanging in the water, some upright, others capsized. Of all these ships, some had been sunk as a result of a collision, others because they had struck a granite reef. I saw boats which had gone down like stones, masts intact, rigging stiff in the water. But they all looked as though they were at anchor in an immense sunken harbour waiting for the moment when they would get under way again.

Fish rose in shoals from under our feet like birds startled in tall grass. The rocky mountain side was fissured with impenetrable caves, deep grottos and bottomless pits, from which I heard fearsome stirrings. My heart almost stopped whenever I saw an enormous feeler barring my path or some terrible claw snapping shut inside a shadowy cavern! Thousands of small lights gleamed in the dark. They were the eyes of giant crustaceans lurking in their dens, huge lobsters standing to attention like halberdiers, waving their claws to an accompaniment of dry, metallic rattles, massive crabs primed like cannon on their carriages, and terrifying octopi writhing like living bushes with serpents for branches.

Here were picturesque ruins which bore the mark, not of the Creator, but of human hands, vast heaps of stones which resembled the vague outlines of castles and temples draped in robes of flowering zoophytes over which, instead of ivy, a vegetable cloak of green and brown marine plants had grown.

The scent of a flower is its very soul, and the flowers that grow in the sea – I refer to those splendid hydrophytes – are lacking in that department!

Some of these large bergs were striated with green veins, as if copper sulphate had left wavy lines inside them. Others, looking like vast amethysts, allowed light to shine into them. The first kind reflected the sun’s rays via the myriad facets of their crystal formation. The second sort gleamed like limestone and looked like large marble blocks which could have been used to build an entire city.

Ice is classified by shape or size with an exactness which delighted Conseil: icebergs or mountains of ice; ice-fields, which are level, endless plains; drift ice made of floating ice; and pack ice, which is made up of broken expanses called palchs when circular and streams when long and narrow.

The sea began to congeal everywhere. Blackish patches on its surface indicated the imminent formation of new ice.

Among the zoophytes were ‘men of war’, also known as pelagic physalis, which are more or less swollen, oblong bladders, in mother-of-pearl colours, hoisting a membrane to the wind and allowing their blue tentacles to trail behind them like silken threads – jellyfish delightful to look at but when touched the corrosive liquid they discharge makes them feel like nettles.

But the subject it illustrates was based on legend, and you know how circumspect we must be in dealing with legends involving natural history. In any case, where monsters are involved, the human imagination is only too ready to go to extremes.

Through the open viewing panels in the Great Saloon, I saw large, terrified fish swimming past like ghosts in the fiery water. Some were struck by lightning and died as I watched!

I did not expect to find the electric cable in pristine condition, exactly as it was when it left the factory where it was made. The long serpent was covered with shellfish, bristling with foraminiferous protozoa and stuccoed with a stony encrustation which protected it against the depredations of perforating molluscs. It lay peacefully sheltered from the motions of the sea and at a pressure conducive to the transmission of the electric impulse which travels from America to Europe in thirty-two hundredths of a second.

Something huge and bulky was sinking beneath the waves. So that he would not miss one second of its death throes, the Nautilus was following down into the deep. Ten metres from me I could see the hull which had been split open. Into it water was pouring with a noise like thunder. After the hull the double row of cannon and the bulwarks came into view. The decks were alive with black shadows which writhed and struggled. As the water rose over them, the poor devils climbed into the shrouds, clung to the masts, struggled in the water.

the huge shoals of seahorses looking for all the world like chessboard knights, eels writhing like squibs in a firework display,

He was no longer a man like me. He was a man of the ocean, the spirit of the sea.

Wonderfully written, vivid detail and imagery

I don’t know what I exactly expected from this book, but not exactly this. I think I anticipated more plot and action. And this book is very erudite.

This is not really my thing. But still I’m amazed with the amount of information and knowledge contained in this book. Nowadays, we do not have a problem with access to detailed information on any topic, you can search virtually anything on the internet. But at a time when Verne wrote his book, this amount of information had to be impressive and required some serious research. All these curiosities included in the book were then completely unknown to the readers. I imagine that they had to ignite the imagination back then.

Unfortunately, times have changed and now this accumulation of encyclopedic information is a bit boring. Enumeration of all kinds of fish and marine animals is simply uninteresting for today's reader who is looking for action and plot twists. And I am not an exception.

Nevertheless, the book is a wonderful record of the scientific knowledge on the seas and oceans at the time. And this aspect is especially interesting for me. It's fascinating to catch a glimpse of how people saw the world 150 years ago. What interested them, what they were afraid of and how they imagined the future. And even more interesting is what they did not know then and what we already know now. Like the South Pole, which in Verne’s book looks very like Greenland which is very far from truth. And although the south pole is still studied by scientists, it is not a white patch on the map anymore.

The same with regard to the use of electricity. The light bulb was not invented until around 1880. It was not until 1882 that factories in the United States began producing light bulbs. Verne published his book 10 years before this! The idea of an entire ship (and a submarine!) being electrically powered had to be something fantastic in the Verne era and beyond human imagination.

Another aspect that I noticed reading this book is the perception of the world at the time. Even more valuable that it is not presented from the perspective of today's political correctness or an attempt to point out certain problems but shown in a way that was then quite natural. In the book we have a very well illustrated approach to colonialism and a way of thinking about the ‘savage’. And although today we have a completely different approach to these topics, contact with a report from the past helps us understand how our ancestors thought and how the world changed over years. Therefore, Captain Nemo who would be considered an ecologist and social activist even in more recent standards is an extremely interesting character.

I’m glad I read this book even if it is not my favourite. It's fascinating to see how people imagined the future and what turned out to be true.