by Jules Verne
1863 15 January: Cinq semaines en ballon appears. At this time, Hetzel categorically refuses Paris au XXe siècle.
1864 A second contract, Hetzel again keeping five-sixths of the profits. In the newly-founded Magasin d’éducation et de récréation (MÉR), beginning of publication of Aventures du capitaine Hatteras, from which Hetzel removes the Anglo-American duel on an ice-floe and final suicide of the hero, plus perhaps several other chapters. Publication of ‘Edgar Poe et ses œuvres’ and Voyage au centre de la Terre. Cuts back on his stockbroker activities, and moves to Auteuil.
1865 De la Terre à la Lune and Les Enfants du capitaine Grant. The endings of virtually all his famous novels will be altered by the publisher. At this time, visits Italy with Hetzel.
1866 Settles in Le Crotoy (summer home).
1867 Goes with brother Paul to Liverpool, thence on the Great Eastern to the United States. Visits the Paris Universal Exposition.
1868 Has a boat built, the St Michel. Travels with Hetzel to Baden-Baden and to the Riviera. A fourth contract stipulates thirty volumes within ten years; Verne buys shares in Hetzel. Michel is proving difficult. Joins a new musical dining club, the Onze sans Femmes (Eleven Without Women).
1869 Rents a house in Amiens. Two cruises to England. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and Autour de la Lune.
1870 Hetzel sharply criticizes Uncle Robinson. Sails up the Seine to see his mistress in Paris, with whom he is madly in love. In the margin of a manuscript, logs his intimate troubles, apparently with the initial of the person concerned, ‘M’. Outbreak of Franco-Prussian War: Verne is for a while a national guard at Le Crotoy.
1871 Briefly returns to the Stock Exchange. Father dies. A fifth contract stipulates 140,000 words a year.
1872 Becomes member of Académie d’Amiens. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. Makes his ninth and tenth trips to the British Isles.
1873–4 Moves to 44 Boulevard Longueville, Amiens. Le Docteur Ox, L’Île mystérieuse, and Le Chancellor. Begins collaboration with Adolphe d’Ennery on highly remunerative stage adaptations of novels (Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (1874), Michel Strogoff (1880)).
1875 Offenbach’s A Trip to the Moon includes unauthorized borrowing from Verne.
1876–7 Michel Strogoff, Hector Servadac, and Les Indes noires, with the publisher writing some of the chapters. Buys second, then third boat, also called the St Michel. Gives huge fancy-dress ball. Wife critically ill, but recovers. Places Michel in a reformatory. Encouraged by Dumas fils, Verne dreams of membership of the French Academy, but the feedback is not positive.
1878 June–August: sails to Lisbon and Algiers.
1879–80 Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum, Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine, and La Maison à vapeur. Verne sails to Edinburgh then travels to the Hebrides. Settles Michel’s debts while expelling him, to live with an actress.
1881 La Jangada. Sails to Rotterdam and Copenhagen.
1882 Le Rayon vert. Moves to a larger house at 2 Rue Charles-Dubois, Amiens.
1883–4 Kéraban-le-têtu. Michel abducts a minor, Jeanne. Has two children by her within eleven months. Verne leaves with his wife on a grand tour of the Mediterranean, and is received in private audience by Pope Leo XIII.
1885 Mathias Sandorf.
1886 Robur-le-conquérant. Sells the third St Michel. 9 March: his nephew Gaston asks for money to travel to England. Verne refuses, and the mentally-ill nephew fires at him twice, laming him for life. Hetzel dies.
1887 Mother dies.
1888 Elected local councillor on a Republican list. For the next fifteen years attends council meetings, administrates theatre and fairs, opens Municipal Circus (1889), and gives public talks.
1889 Sans dessus dessous and ‘In the Year 2889’ (signed Jules Verne but written by Michel).
1890 Stomach problems.
1892 Le Château des Carpathes. Pays debts for Michel.
1893–4 Sales drop.
1895 L’Île à hélice, apparently the first novel in the present tense and third person.
1896–7 Face au drapeau and Le Sphinx des glaces. Sued by chemist Turpin, who recognizes himself in Face au drapeau. Successfully defended by Raymond Poincaré, later president of France. Health deteriorates. Brother dies.
1899 Dreyfus Affair: Verne is anti-Dreyfusard.
1900 Moves back to 44 Boulevard Longueville. Sight weakens (cataracts).
1901 Le Village aérien.
1904 Maître du monde.
1905 Falls seriously ill from diabetes. 24 March: dies, and is buried in Amiens.
1905–14 On Verne’s death, L’Invasion de la mer and Le Phare du bout du monde are in the course of publication. Michel takes responsibility for the remaining manuscripts, and publishes Le Volcan d’or (1906), L’Agence Thompson and Co. (1907), La Chasse au météore (1908), Le Pilote du Danube (1908), Les Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’ (1909), Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910), Hier et Demain (short stories, including ‘L’Éternel Adam’) (1910), and L’Étonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1914). Michel wrote considerable sections of these works.
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1. A Shifting Reef
2. Pros and Cons
3. As Monsieur Pleases
4. Ned Land
5. At Random
6. Full Steam Ahead
7. An Unknown Species of Whale
8. Mobilis in Mobili
9. Ned Land’s Fits of Anger
10. The Man of the Sea
11. The Nautilus
12. All by Electricity
13. A Few Figures
14. The Black River
15. A Letter of Invitation
16. An Excursion over the Plains
17. An Underwater Forest
18. Four Thousand Leagues under the Pacific
19. Vanikoro
20. Torres Strait
21. A Few Days on Land
22. Captain Nemo’s Lightning
23. Ægri Somnia
24. The Coral Kingdom
PART TWO
1. The Indian Ocean
2. A New Invitation from Captain Nemo
3. A Pearl Worth Ten Million
4. The Red Sea
5. Arabian Tunnel
6. The Greek Islands
7. The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours
8. Vigo Bay
9. A Lost World
10. Underwater Coalmines
11. The Sargasso Sea
12. Baleen and Sperm Whales
13. The Ice-Cap
14. The South Pole
15. Accident or Incident?
16. Not Enough Air
17. From Cape Horn to the Amazon
18. Squid
19. The Gulf Stream
20. 47° 24´ N, 17° 28´ W
21. A Massacre
22. Captain Nemo’s Last Words
23. Conclusion
Part One
1
A Shifting Reef
The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplained and inexplicable occurrence that doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Without mentioning the rumours which agitated the denizens of the ports and whipped up the public’s imagination on every continent, seafaring men felt particularly alarmed. The businessmen, ship-owners, sea-captains, skippers, and master-mariners of Europe and America, the naval officers from every country, and finally the various national governments on both continents — all became extremely worried about this matter.
For some time already, sea-going ships had been encountering an ‘enormous thing’: a long spindle-shaped object, sometimes phosphorescent, but infinitely larger and quicker than a whale.
The facts concerning this apparition, as noted in the respective logbooks, agreed quite closely as to the structure of the said object or creature, its extraordinary speed, its surprising ability to get from place to place, and the peculiar vitality it seemed to possess. If it was a ce
tacean, then it surpassed the size of every whale classified by science until then. Neither Cuvier, nor Lacépède, nor M. Duméril, nor M. de Quatrefages* would have accepted that such a monster existed, unless they had seen it — really seen it, that is, with their own scientific eyes.
Taking the average of the observations made at the various junctures — rejecting both the timid evaluations assigning the object a length of 200 feet and the exaggerated opinions making it three miles long and a mile wide — it could be declared that this phenomenal being greatly exceeded any dimensions the ichthyologists had acknowledged until then — if indeed it existed at all.
But it did exist, there was now no denying it; and given the inclination of the human mind to seek the fantastic, it is easy to understand the worldwide sensation this supernatural apparition created. As for dismissing it as a myth, such a position was no longer tenable.
The reason was that on 20 July 1866 the steamship the Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burmah Steam Navigation Company, had encountered this thing, moving five miles east of the Australian coastline.* At first Captain Baker thought he was facing an unknown reef; and he was even getting ready to calculate its precise position, when two columns of water,* projected from the baffling object, shot 150 feet into the air, whistling. Hence, unless the reef was subject to the intermittent jet of a geyser, the Governor Higginson was well and truly dealing with some hitherto unknown aquatic mammal, whose blowholes were blowing columns of water mixed with air and vapour.
A similar phenomenon was observed in the Pacific on 23 July of the same year by the Cristóbal Colon of the West India and Pacific Steamship Company.* This extraordinary cetacean was thus able to move from place to place at surprising speed, for within three days the Governor Higginson and Cristóbal Colon had observed it on two charted spots at more than 700 leagues’ distance.
A fortnight later and 2,000 leagues away, the Helvetia of the French Line and the Shannon of the Royal Mail,* sailing on opposite tacks of the Atlantic between the United States and Europe, signalled to each other their sightings of the monster at 42° 15´ N and 60° 35´ W of the Greenwich meridian. From these simultaneous observations, it was claimed that the mammal could be evaluated as at least 350 British feet long,1 since the Shannon and the Helvetia were both smaller, although measuring 100 metres from stem to stern. Now the biggest whales, the culammak and the umgullick* frequenting the waters around the Aleutians, have never exceeded 56 metres — if indeed they have ever reached that.
These reports arriving hot on the heels of one another, fresh observations made on board the transatlantic liner the Pereire, a collision between the monster and the Etna of the Inman Line, an official memorandum drawn up by officers of the French frigate the Normandie, a very solemn statement by Commodore Fitzjames’s senior staff on board the Lord Clyde* — all this greatly thrilled public opinion. In countries of a light-hearted mentality the phenomenon was joked about; in the serious, practical countries of Britain, America, and Germany, it became a matter for grave concern.
The monster came into fashion in all the big cities: it was sung about in the cafés, made fun of in the newspapers, acted out in the theatres. The canards had a golden opportunity to lay whoppers of every hue. Each gigantic imaginary creature resurfaced in the newspapers, admittedly short of good copy, from the white whale, that awe-inspiring ‘Moby Dick’ of the polar regions, to the enormous kraken,* whose tentacles can strangle a 500 ton ship and drag it down into the depths. The formally attested reports of olden times were even reproduced, the views of Aristotle and Pliny conceding the existence of such monsters, the Norwegian tales of Bishop Pontoppidan, and the account of Paul Egede.* So, lastly, were the reports of Captain Harrington, whose good faith could not be questioned when in 1857 he declared that, while on board the Castilian, he had seen that enormous serpent which until then had frequented the seas only in the pages of the old Constitutionnel.*
There soon broke out in the learned societies and scientific journals an interminable argument between the credulous and the incredulous. The ‘monster question’ inflamed people’s minds. Those journalists who professed science battled with those who professed wit, spilling oceans of ink during this memorable campaign; some of them even two or three drops of blood, for from the sea serpent they moved on to the most offensive personal remarks.
For six months the war raged back and forth. The weighty articles of the Geographical Institute of Brazil, the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, the British Association, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the discussions in the Indian Archipelago, Abbe Moigno’s Cosmos, Petermanns Mitteilungen,* and the scientific sections of the quality press in France and abroad — all were driven back with untiring repartee by the popular press. These facetious journalists, punning on a saying of Linnaeus’s quoted by the monster’s opponents, argued that ‘nature does not proceed by the lips of bounders’,* and so adjured their contemporaries not to give the lie to nature by admitting the existence of krakens, sea serpents, Moby Dicks, or other lucubrations of crazed sailors. The last straw was an article written for a much-feared satirical newspaper by its most popular writer, who pushed his spurs in like Hippolytus* and delivered a fatal blow to the monster, putting it out of its misery amidst universal laughter. Wit had proved mightier than science.
In the first few months of 1867 the question did indeed seem dead and buried, without hope of rising from the ashes, when fresh information reached the general public. There was now in fact a genuine and serious danger to circumvent, rather than simply a scientific question to resolve. The problem took on a different complexion. The monster became an islet, a rock, a reef once more; but a reef that was shifting, elusive, and slippery.
On the night of 5 March 1867 the Moravian of the Montreal Ocean Company was sailing at 27° 30´ N, 72° 15´ W* when her starboard quarter struck a rock unmarked on any chart. She was making 13 knots under the combined effect of the wind and her 400 horsepower. Doubtless, had it not been for the quality of her hull, the Moravian would have sunk from the hole produced by the collision, together with the 237 passengers she was bringing back from Canada.
The accident happened at about 5 a.m., just as dawn was breaking. The officers of the watch rushed to the stern of the vessel. They examined the sea with the closest attention. They saw nothing but a powerful eddy breaking at about three cables’ distance, as if the waters were being violently thrashed. The position was carefully calculated and recorded, and the Moravian continued on her way without visible damage. Had she hit a submerged rock, or else the enormous wreck of some half-sunken ship? There was no way of finding out; but when the hull was inspected in dry dock,* it was realized that part of the keel had been broken.
This collision, extremely serious on its own, would perhaps have been forgotten like so many others, had it not happened again in identical circumstances three weeks later. This time the event had a tremendous impact because of the nationality of the ship involved and the reputation of the company operating the vessel.
The name of the celebrated British ship-owner Cunard* is known to all. In 1840 this far-sighted industrialist set up a postal service from Liverpool to Halifax using three wooden paddle-steamers of 400 horsepower and a burden of 1,162 tons. Eight years later the company added to its fleet four ships of 650 horsepower and 1,820 tons, and two years after that, two further vessels of still greater power and tonnage. In 1853 the Cunard Line, which had just had its mail-carrying monopoly renewed, successively added the Arabia, the Persia, the China, the Scotia, the Java, and the Russia, all amongst the fastest and the largest ships, after the Great Eastern,* ever to have sailed the high seas. In 1867 the company owned twelve vessels, eight being paddle- and four propeller-driven.
If I give these succinct details, it is so that everyone realizes the importance of this shipping line, known worldwide for its intelligent management. No ocean-going company has been run with greater skill; no business crowned with greater
success. During the past twenty-six years, Cunard ships have crossed the Atlantic two thousand times, and not once cancelled a journey, arrived behind schedule, or lost a letter, man, or vessel. This is why, in spite of the strong competition from France, passengers still choose the Cunard Line more than any other, as is apparent from reading the official registers of recent years. Consequently no one will be surprised at the uproar produced by the accident involving one of its finest steamships.
On 13 April 1867, in a fine sea and moderate wind, the Scotia was at 45° 37´ N, 15° 12´ W. Under the thrust of its 1,000 horsepower, it was moving at 13.43 knots. Its paddlewheels were striking the sea with perfect regularity. Its draught was 6.7 metres and its displacement 6,624 cubic metres.
At 4.17 in the afternoon, while the passengers were in the main saloon taking their lunch, a blow, hardly perceptible in fact, was felt on the hull of the Scotia, at the section just behind the port wheel.
The Scotia had not run into something: something had run into it, and a cutting or perforating implement rather than a blunt one. The blow seemed so slight that nobody on board would have worried, but for the shout of the hold-workers, who rushed up on deck shouting:
‘We’re sinking! We’re sinking!’
At first the passengers were terrified — but Captain Anderson* quickly reassured them. In actual fact the danger could not be imminent. The Scotia, divided into seven compartments by watertight bulkheads, was guaranteed to resist any single leak with impunity.
Captain Anderson headed immediately for the hold. He observed that the fifth compartment had flooded; and the speed of the flooding proved that the hole was a large one. Very fortunately, the boilers were not in this compartment, for the fires would have been instantly extinguished.
