Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

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Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in the depths of the world’s oceans around 1869, first published in France as a magazine serial in 1869 and as a book in 1870.

SYNOPSIS

Verne combines adventure and learning in a study of freedom, revenge, and scientific discovery beneath the waves.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Born in the seaport town of Nantes, France, Jules Verne reached his thirties before settling into the life of a science fiction writer, the occupation of his choice. He had begun writing in his teens, creating unremarkable plays, articles, and stories. His father groomed him to become a lawyer but regularly read the latest science news to his five children. Meanwhile, his mother showed her fast-paced imagination, which Verne later compared to his own. In his early teens, he ran away and worked for a day on a sailing vessel before his father fetched him home. The fact that young Verne took refuge at sea reflected his deep love for the watery depths, and his interest in the ocean later resurfaced in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, a remarkably prophetic novel. Added to this love was a passionate feeling about current events that would greatly affect the development of character and action in the novel.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Polish-Russian strife

In 1863 the Polish people rose up against the Russian czar who had become their dictator. Poland had experienced a long and troubled relationship with the Russian nation on its borders, and the situation came to a violent head shortly before Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

The political tensions of Verne’s day had their roots about a century earlier in 1772, when Russia, Austria, and Prussia began to divide Poland among themselves in a series of three partitions that slowly but surely consumed the entire country. By 1795 there was no country of “Poland” left.

Foreign powers dominated the land in the 1800s. After defeating the Austro-Russian army in December 1805, Napoleon I of France established the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (Poland’s major city) in 1807; after Napoleon’s eventual defeat in 1814, the Russians turned the Duchy into a constitutional monarchy that was ruled by the Russian czar. In 1830 the Poles successfully threw their Russian overlords out of power, but the Russians were back within the year. Another Polish attempt to regain control in 1863 was even less successful. Led by the czar, the Russians brutally repressed the uprising, disgusting France with their merciless bloodshed. The Russians, moreover, were fed up with Polish attempts to reclaim their nation; among many cruel and bloody measures, they imposed the rule that the Russian tongue, not Polish, was to be the official language of Poland.

Captain Nemo, the troubled sea captain of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, has a dark past that is mysteriously alluded to throughout the novel. Verne reveals, however, that he originally thought of Nemo as a wronged Polish aristocrat:

Remember what the original idea for the book was all about: a Polish aristocrat whose daughters have been raped, whose wife has been hacked to death, whose father has been tortured and murdered, whose friends have died in Siberia and whose nationality is due to vanish from Europe under the tyranny of the Russians.
(Verne in Jules-Verne, p. 88)

Nemo’s pitiless destruction of the many lives aboard a warship at the novel’s close is explained in part by the long history of strife between the Russians and the Poles. Verne, like many in France, objected passionately to the Russians’ brutal punishment of the Poles for the 1863 uprisings. To avoid censorship of his book, Verne agreed not to reveal details about Nemo’s dark past, but he clearly had the suffering of the Poles in mind.

Censorship in France

Verne’s publisher, PierreJules Hetzel, was aghast at the violent retribution that Captain Nemo exacts from others on the warship at the end of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. By way of explanation, Verne in 1867 wrote a letter to Hetzel, drawing out the political ramifications of the Nautilus’s last battle:

Supposing the situation were as I intended it to be, and as my readers will feel it to be; supposing Nemo were a Pole, and the sunk ship a Russian ship, could anyone raise the shadow of an objection? No! A hundred times no!... [D]o not forget what the original, true, logical and watertight idea for the book was all about: a Pole versus Russia. Since we cannot make it explicit, which is in some ways unfortunate, let us leave people to suppose that this may be the case.
(Verne in Jules-Verne, p. 87)

Verne’s determination to lend Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea a contemporary dimension by very specifically recalling the Polish struggle for independence ran headfirst into censorship concerns. His publisher predicted that if the book offended the Russians, it would be banned in France.

Since 1852, when Louis Napoleon, or Napoleon III, proclaimed himself the emperor—

he was still in power when Verne was writing his underwater adventure—literature had come under rather strict censorship policies. For example, writers could not speak negatively about the emperor’s politics or about his government, and after a while conservative republicans (like Victor Hugo) were not allowed to publish very much, if at all. Writers were watched closely for any possible political commentary that they might be making, so the concerns of Verne’s publisher were reasonable.

Meanwhile, events elsewhere in Europe contributed to French concern about offending Russia. While Verne was finishing Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, the Prussians were on the move in Denmark and Austria, and many in the French government feared that France would be next on their list. If this turned out to be the case, the French would need the Russians as allies. France subsequently took precautionary steps to court them. Hetzel’s caution was merited, as shown by the events that followed. In fact, the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870, shortly after the initial publication of Verne’s novel.

Submarines

The immediate predecessor of Nemo’s fictional submarine Nautilus is Robert Fulton’s actual submarine of the same name, a twenty-one-foot-long vessel built in 1800. The first underwater vessel had been built almost two centuries earlier, around 1620, by the Dutch inventor Cornelius van Drebbel. The American Revolution saw the first real use of the submarine in military operations, when David Bushnell created a tiny one-man version called the Turtle. In 1776 the Turtle made a failed attempt to sink a British ship in the New York harbor; its effort, however, has gone down in history as the first submarine attack on another vessel of war. The earliest successful attack also occurred in an American struggle; during the Civil War, a Confederate submarine tried to blow up a Union ship in the Charleston harbor. Both vessels sank.

A LESSON IN UNDERWATER BOTANY

A good example of Verne’s encyclopedic explanations in his novel may be found in the underwater trek through “the forest of the island of Crespo”: “A light network of marine plants, of that inexhaustible family of seaweeds, of which more than two thousand kinds are known, grew on the surface of the water. I [the character Aronnax] saw long ribbons of fucus floating, some globular, others tuberous; laurenciae and cladostephi of most delicate foliage, and some rhodomeniae palmatae resembling the fan of a cactus. I observed that the green plants kept nearer the top of the sea, while the red were at a medium depth, leaving to the black or brown hydrophytes the care of forming the gardens and parterres of the remote beds of the ocean” (Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, p. 211).

Closer to home, many local French inventors were working out the complications of building submarines. From Nantes, Verne’s birthplace, came Brutus Villeroi, who described his own attempts to build an underwater vessel in an 1832 scientific journal. A few decades later, in the city of Amiens, Verne met Jacques François Conseil (after whom Verne named one of the characters in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea), who had successfully made a submarine dive in 1858. That same year, the French Ministry of Marine called for bids on building a submarine to be financed by the government. In 1863, a few years before Verne wrote his novel, Le Plongeur, a 140-foot submarine, was completed. Le Plongeur was to carry a crew of twelve men, but it had problems with underwater pressure and buoyancy. A model of Le Plongeur appeared on display at the Paris Exhibition in 1867; Verne consulted the model for his own literary purposes.

Scientific education in France

Verne played an important part in Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s dream of producing science-based literature for the edification of French children. Perhaps because education was largely in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, and many of the claims of science seemed to run counter to theologically based ideas of creation and knowledge, science took a back seat to such disciplines as theology and philosophy in mid-nineteenth-century French schools. Whenever more liberal elements in French politics controlled the government, scientific education was given a boost, but that lasted only while the liberals were in power. The exposure that French schoolchildren had to science therefore varied widely in quality and quantity.

In 1850 the French minister of education passed a law that granted control of primary education solely to the Catholic Church, and France rapidly fell behind other nations in technological developments. Hertzel hired Verne specifically to write for his new French journal (the English translation of which is The Magazine of Education and Recreation). The magazine’s role was, according to Hetzel, “to complement the education offered in the schools and not to replace it” (Evans, p. 14). Verne also contracted to write two volumes of scientific fiction a year, and to write about science, technology, and adventure in such a way that people of all ages, especially children, would learn from it. This aim explains the presence in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea of lists of different sea creatures, encyclopedic explanations of electricity, and histories of nineteenth-century explorers.

Verne became a huge success in France, producing one bestseller after another for a while. Once France began to adopt a more rigorous program of scientific education, however, his popularity temporarily plummeted. In 1882 a secularization of elementary education was launched under the auspices of Jules Ferry, the French minister of culture since 1879. The intention was to redress France’s lag behind other European nations in scientific knowledge. In keeping with this intention, the movement away from a church-centered education initiated a trend toward a more science-oriented curriculum.

A difference of opinion

In the novel, in his study aboard the Nautilus, Captain Nemo has hung portraits of his role models, men associated with acts of bravery and rebellion the world over. Two of these portraits are of American leaders of the antislavery movement: President Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, leader of the ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. A radical abolitionist, Brown planned to raid a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in what is today West Virginia. Brown then planned to flee to the cover of nearby mountains and encourage slaves to rebel against their masters. Brown never made it past the first stage of his plan. He seized the federal arsenal, then fought the townspeople of Harpers Ferry, taking refuge with some hostages and fellow rebels in the arsenal. He was eventually captured and hanged for treason.

Hetzel encouraged Verne to play up the connection between Nemo and the antislavery movement, but Verne cautioned him in a letter against a too-easy identification of Nemo with abolition: “You tell me the abolition of slavery is the greatest economic event of our times. I agree. But I cannot see what that has to do here.…[I] f Nemo wanted revenge on the slavers, all he had to do was join Grant’s army and that was it” (Verne in Jules-Verne, p. 89). Verne’s intention seems to have been to make Nemo a despiser of tyranny in general, not just a man opposed to the American slave trade, even if it was the “greatest economic event” of his time.

“The Sea Does Not Belong to Despots.”

In 1888 Jules Verne was elected as a radical socialist to the town council of Amiens. Broadly, socialism at the time promised to attend to the issues of workers and to support programs to aid the underprivileged. To some, this may come as a surprise, for Verne is commonly regarded as a “nice, quiet middle-class gentleman,” in the words of Aristide Briand, a friend of Verne’s son who later became the French prime minister (Chesneaux, p. 11). In fact, however, many of the socialist leaders of the time were widely held to be “mere bourgeois idealists” (Cobban, p. 45). Verne had money in his own family and married a wealthy widow; both families were associated with the “pseudo-nobility” in France, people who through their wealth were able to acquire all the trappings of the aristocracy, complete with surnames that alluded to land or property (the prefix “de” often signifies a person’s geographic origins, for example) and could thus signify their social position. Verne owned a yacht on which he sailed whenever he could, had a comfortable home in Amiens, and knew that he would be paid handsomely for his writing. Some historians even question whether the platform upon which Verne was elected to the town council was all that radical; his personal letters and public speeches consistently place him among moderate or even conservative politicians.

Yet this same Verne created the tortured and darkly heroic Captain Nemo, despiser of society at large and would-be champion of the oppressed:

The sea does not belong to despots. On the surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous rights…. But thirty feet beneath this level, their authority ceases, their influence is extinguished, their power disappears. Ah! Monsieur, come and live at the bottom of the sea! Only there can true independence be found. There I recognize no Master. There I am free.
(Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, pp. 162-63)

TYRANNY VS. LIBERTY

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, for all its rich and vibrant natural history, and its detailed background of exploration and scientific discovery, is in many ways a political novel. Despite the fact that Verne himself denied that he had any desire to write a political work, part of his intention in the novel nevertheless seems to have been to explore questions of liberty and authority. This preoccupation emerges clearly in the relationship between Captain Nemo and a trio of unwilling “guests”; even though Nemo is himself a champion of individual liberty, he refuses to extend the benefit to his captives:

“For seven months we have been here on board, and I ask you today, in the name of my companions, and in my own, if your intention is to keep us here always?”
“Monsieur Aronnax, I will answer you today as I did seven months ago: Whoever enters the Nautilus must never leave it.”
“You impose actual slavery on us!”
“Give it what name you please.”
(Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, p. 469)

Only if Nemo is to be regarded as an evil or insane person can this impassioned speech, and others like it throughout the novel, be regarded as running counter to Verne’s own purposes. But Nemo is in many ways a heroic man, and his support of individual rights and freedoms speaks to a time in which people all over the world were struggling for independence. A solitary and an independent human being, Nemo represents the strong current of anarchism and resistance to all forms of government. The principle tenets of his philosophy included the guaranteed freedom of each individual, suspicion of monetary standards, and the sanctity of private property. The extent to which Verne himself supported such ideas remains uncertain.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea takes place between July 1866 and June 2, 1868. A “monster” is sighted time and again in various waters all over the earth: “a long object, spindle-shaped, at times phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale” (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, p. 91). The maritime and scientific communities are intrigued and the popular community entranced by these mysterious sightings. Suggestions concerning its nature range from a floating island to a huge sea monster to … a submarine. The last possibility is dismissed as impossible; skeptics insist that no one man or government could have built such a thing unnoticed. Public opinion instead holds that a horrible sea monster is on the loose. An American ship, the Abraham Lincoln, is dispatched to hunt down the creature in the interests of safe sea-trade. Pierre Aronnax, an assistant professor of natural history at the Museum of Paris, and his servant Conseil are invited along.

The Abraham Lincoln sets out from New York on July 3 and explores the Atlantic Ocean, making its way eventually around Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and into the Pacific Ocean. By October the American vessel has not spotted the monster and the crew feels discouraged. But on November 5, 1867, some two hundred miles from Japan, the Abraham Lincoln’s Canadian harpoonist, Ned Land, catches sight of the creature, and the chase begins. The pursuit ends abruptly, when a collision pitches Land, Aronnax, and Conseil into the sea; they soon discover that the monster they have been chasing is in fact a metal ship of some kind.

The novel now follows the exploits of the “monster,” a submarine named Nautilus, and her mysterious captain, Nemo. Silent, driven, and at times cruel, the cultivated and politically radical Nemo is on a terrible mission. He imprisons Aronnax, Land, and Conseil within the ship. They are not told Nemo’s purpose but they do learn much of the natural history and geography of the lands past which they voyage. The seas teem with unknown wonders, and the professor takes some comfort in the new knowledge he is gaining. Still, the drive to be free prevails, and the three captives plot their escape.

The three men do escape the confines of the submarine, but not according to their plan. Instead, they watch the outcome of Nemo’s journey in fascinated horror. His submarine succeeds in sinking a mysterious ship that attacks it, but then gets drawn into a deadly maelstrom (whirlpool). When Professor Aronnax and his friends regain their senses, they find themselves on a Norwegian island without Captain Nemo, his ship, or his crew. While Nemo disappears from the vicinity of Professor Aronnax readers meet ds re gain later in another of Verne’s novels.

Father of “science fiction”?

Jules Verne has very often been referred to as the inventor of the literary genre of science fiction, but at least one critic points out that this is not strictly true. If science fiction operates essentially in the realm of the fantastic, then Verne is not really a science fiction writer, for most of the scientific gadgets, machines, and methods of which he writes were feasible in his day. He should perhaps be referred to more accurately as the father of “scientific fiction” (Evans, p. 2). Others suggest that Verne is not really an inventor of new machines or a maker of scientific breakthroughs, but an adept engineer who cleverly works with what already exists, improving upon, rather than creating. He is, in fact, rather careful not to go too far beyond the realm of what has been proven or at least speculated upon responsibly, reining in his imagination in favor of representing scientific truths. H. G. Wells, another man often credited as the father of science fiction, said of Verne that “The interest he invoked was a practical one; he wrote and believed and told that this thing or that could be done, which was not at that time done. He helped his readers imagine it done and to realize what fun, excitement or mischief might ensue” (Wells in Costello, pp. 185-86).

Nemo

In Latin, the word “nemo” means “no man” or “no one.” By this cryptic name, Verne apparently intended for the reader to understand more deeply the extent to which the captain of the Nautilus has cut himself off from all human society, choosing to sink beneath the waves with his library, his art, and his anger.

The mysterious captain reappears in Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1875), telling a story that completely contradicts what we learn of him in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and from Verne’s letters to Hetzel. In the later novel, Nemo holds himself out as an Indian prince whose family was slaughtered by the British during the Indian Mutiny (also known as the Sepoy Rebellion) of 1857-1859. The rebellion occurred when officers of the East India Company, a British trading monopoly that took political control of India in 1757, ordered Indian soldiers to break certain religious taboos in the interests of battle. The Indians refused and discontent spread rapidly. The British suppressed the rebellion by mid-1858, with political control of the region passing into the hands of the British Crown (Queen Victoria) rather than the East India Company. The Indian Mutiny left both the rebels and the victors feeling bitter, and increased the tension between the two sides.

The hero of The Mysterious Island, Cyrus Smith, informs Nemo that Professor Aronnax has written a novel about him, entitled Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Nemo anticipates the way in which Aronnax would have characterized him: “As a great public enemy, no doubt…. Yes, a rebel, banished perhaps from humanity!” (Martin, p. 100). In The Mysterious Island, all the mystery and horror of Nemo’s past is explained away—here, he is portrayed as a colonizer, and a defender of a well-run society. What remains constant is his hatred for political oppression: “Scientist and artist though he was, he remained Indian at heart, Indian in his desire for vengeance, Indian in the hope he nourished of being able one day to assert his country’s right to independence and to throw out the foreigners” (Chesneaux, p. 117).

Sources

For his oceanic adventure story, Verne drew on his own lifelong attraction to navigation. In his young adulthood, Verne made three significant voyages, one to Scotland, another to Norway and Denmark, and a third, in 1867, to the United States aboard the Great Eastern, a ship that appears in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The Great Eastern achieved renown as the ship that laid the transatlantic cable that connected North America with Europe.

AUTHOR, AUTHOR

Arumor regarding the identity of the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea has endured for years. Some critics have suggested that the tale of submarine adventure was not really the work of Jules Verne, but of the Communist insurrectionist Louise Michel, a French woman who sold the manuscript to Verne for the measly sum of 100 francs because she was broke. The idea that Verne bought the novel is highly suspect, however. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea was given to Verne’s publisher in 1868, and mentioned in correspondence earlier still, but the story surrounding Michel claims that she handed over her work sometime later than that.

When he was a boy, Verne read all the seafaring adventure stories that abounded during the period, including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot, and Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate. Some thirty years later, armed with the money that he earned from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and other novels, Verne bought himself a sumptuous yacht and sailed as far as Ireland, Italy, and the Baltic region. Literary predecessors of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea include several French books on submarine voyages, including an 1864 oceanographie work entitled Les Mystères de l’Ocean (Mysteries of the Ocean) and Voyages sous les Flots (Voyage under the Waves), written in 1868 by Aristide Roger (the pen name of Jules Rengade).

Verne was a tireless researcher of marine life as well as underwater craft, and he became familiar with twenty-five different failed experiments with submersibles. He also turned to his brother Paul, a naval officer who supplied him with a wealth of information and advice. Farther from home were the scientists whom he met at the residence of the renowned world traveler Jacques Arago. Perhaps some of these discussions contributed to his remarkably accurate predictions in the novel: the invention of scuba gear and the feat of sailing under the South Pole, for example.

Abridged versions surface

Verne was an immensely popular writer, not only at home, but also in England and America, where his books were translated into English. His 1871 illustrated version of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea was subject to rather extensive cutting when the novel was reprinted in France in 1928. The extensive scientific discussions that were central to Verne’s and Hetzel’s conception of the novel were eliminated, and the resulting book was more purely an adventure novel for children than an edifying work on science and discovery. English translations of Aronnax’s adventures were also radically truncated; it was not until 1976 that the full version appeared in English.