Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

by Jules Verne

  ‘Perhaps it is the same one the Alecton saw,’ said Conseil.

  ‘It can’t be,’ replied the Canadian, ‘since the other one lost its tail and this one still has it.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I replied. ‘The arms and tails of these animals form again by “redintegration”, and in seven years the squid’s tail has undoubtedly had the time to grow back.’

  ‘In any case,’ replied Ned, ‘if it’s not this one, it’s perhaps one of those!’

  Other squid were indeed appearing at the starboard window. I counted seven of them. They formed a procession accompanying the Nautilus, and I could hear the grinding of their beaks on the metal hull. We had plenty on our plate.

  I continued my work. These monsters stayed in our wake with such precision that they seemed motionless, and I could have traced them directly on to the window pane. We were in fact moving at moderate speed.

  Suddenly the Nautilus stopped. The jolt made its whole framework tremble.

  ‘Have we hit something?’ I asked.

  ‘If we have,’ replied the Canadian, ‘then we’ve moved off again.’

  The Nautilus was undoubtedly floating freely, but was no longer advancing. Its propeller blades were not cutting the waves. A minute passed before Captain Nemo, followed by his first officer, came into the salon.

  I had not seen him for some time. He looked sombre. Without speaking, perhaps not even seeing us, he approached the panel, looked at the squid, and said a few words to the first officer. His first officer went out.

  Soon the panels closed again. The ceiling lit up. I approached the captain.

  ‘A curious collection of squid,’ I said, in the detached tone a visitor would use at the window of an aquarium.

  ‘True,’ he replied, ‘and we are going to fight them hand to hand.’

  I looked at the captain. I thought I had misheard.

  ‘Hand to hand?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes, monsieur. The propeller has stopped. I think that the corneous mandibles of one of the squid have got caught in the blades, preventing us from moving.’

  ‘And what are you going to do?’

  ‘Surface, and massacre all the vermin.’

  ‘A difficult task.’

  ‘Electric bullets are indeed powerless against this soft flesh, for they do not find enough resistance to explode. But we will attack them with axes.’

  ‘And with harpoons, monsieur,’ said the Canadian, ‘if you will accept my help.’

  ‘I accept, Master Land.’

  ‘We’re right behind you,’ I said as Captain Nemo headed for the central staircase.

  About ten men armed with boarding axes were standing ready for an attack. Conseil and I picked up two as well. Land seized a harpoon.

  The Nautilus had meanwhile surfaced. One of the sailors, standing on the top steps, was loosening the bolts of the hatch. But the bolts were hardly free, when the hatch suddenly shot open, clearly yanked up by the suckers on the arm of a squid.

  Immediately one of those long arms slid like a snake into the opening as twenty others waved above. With a single axe blow, Captain Nemo severed the formidable tentacle, which then slid down the stairs, writhing.

  While we were all rushing in a group up towards the platform, two other arms, lashing through the air, landed on the sailor in front of Captain Nemo — and carried him off with irresistible force.

  Captain Nemo exclaimed and rushed outside. We followed him with utmost speed.

  What a scene! The poor man, seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, was being waved back and forth in the air at the whim of the enormous trunk. He was groaning as he suffocated, and he shouted: ‘À moi! À moi!’ These words in French flabbergasted me. So I had a compatriot on board, perhaps several! I will hear his heart-breaking appeal in my head until the end of my days.

  The unfortunate man was lost. Who could possibly have wrested him from that powerful embrace? However, Captain Nemo rushed at the squid, and with a single axe blow chopped off another arm. His first officer was angrily fighting other monsters crawling over the sides of the Nautilus. The crew were attacking them with their axes. The Canadian, Conseil, and I were plunging our weapons into the fleshy masses. A strong smell of musk filled the atmosphere. It was horrible.

  For a moment I thought that the poor man enlaced by the squid could be saved from its powerful suction. Seven arms out of eight had been severed. The last one, brandishing its victim like a quill, remained twisting in the air. But just as Captain Nemo and his first officer were rushing at the animal, it gave out a spurt of blackish liquid, secreted from a bursa in its abdomen.* We were blinded. By the time the cloud had cleared, the squid had vanished, carrying with it my unfortunate compatriot.*

  Then our rage boiled over against the monsters. We were no longer in control of ourselves. Ten or twelve squid had invaded the platform or sides of the Nautilus. We were sliding around in the midst of the truncated serpents, tossing about on the platform in waves of blood and black ink. It was as if the viscous tentacles were coming back to life again like Hydra’s heads. Ned Land’s harpoons plunged repeatedly into the glaucous eyes of the squid, destroying some with each blow. But my brave companion was abruptly knocked down by the tentacles of a monster he could not avoid.

  God! My heart leapt with revulsion and horror! The formidable squid’s beak gaped open before Ned. The poor man was about to be cut in two. I rushed to help him. But Captain Nemo was there first and his axe disappeared between the two enormous jaws. Miraculously saved, the Canadian got up and drove his harpoon right through the triple heart of the squid.

  ‘For services rendered!’ Captain Nemo said.

  Ned bowed in silence.

  The battle had lasted a mere quarter of an hour. The vanquished monsters, mutilated and fatally wounded, finally retreated and disappeared under the waves.

  Captain Nemo, red* with blood, motionless near the searchlight, examined the sea which had swallowed up one of his companions, as large tears flowed from his eyes.

  19

  The Gulf Stream

  None of us will ever forget that terrible scene of 20 April. I wrote about it under the impression of powerful emotions. Since then, I have re-examined the narrative and read it to Conseil and Ned. They found it factually correct, but too pallid. To paint such a canvas would take the pen of the most illustrious of our poets, the author of The Toilers of the Sea.*

  I said that Captain Nemo wept as he regarded the waves. His grief was immense. This was the second companion he had lost since we had arrived on board, and what an end! This friend had been crushed, suffocated, and broken by the formidable arms of the squid, then ground in its iron jaws, and so could not rest with his companions in the peaceful waters of the coral cemetery!

  As for me, it was the cry of despair the wretch uttered in the heart of the battle which had torn at my heart. The poor Frenchman had forgotten his conventional language and had gone back to speaking the tongue of his country and his mother to issue his ultimate appeal. Amongst the crew of the Nautilus, bound to Captain Nemo body and soul, like him fleeing contact with humanity, I had a compatriot! Was he the only one representing France in this mysterious association, clearly composed of individuals of different nationalities? This was yet another of the unanswerable questions constantly surfacing in my mind.

  Captain Nemo went back to his room, and I did not see him for some time.* But how evidently sad, desperate, and irresolute he was, if I can judge the state of his soul from our ship, which reflected his every mood! The Nautilus no longer maintained a fixed course. It came, it went, it drifted like a plaything of the waves. Its propeller had been freed, and yet was hardly used. The Nautilus was sailing at random, unable to tear itself away from the scene of its great battle, the sea which had swallowed up one of its own!

  Ten days went by in this way. It was only on 1 May that the Nautilus again set a clear course for the north, after sighting the Bahamas at the opening of the Bahama Channel. We were f
ollowing the current of the sea’s largest river, with its own banks, its own fish, and its own temperature. I refer to the Gulf Stream.

  It is indeed a river, flowing freely through the heart of the Atlantic, but without mixing with the surrounding water. It is a salt river, saltier than the adjoining sea. Its average depth is 3,000 feet, and width, 60 miles. At places it moves at a speed of 4 kilometres an hour. The unchanging volume of its water is larger than all the rivers of the globe combined.

  The true source of the Gulf Stream, discovered by Commander Maury, its starting-point so to speak, is the Bay of Biscay. There its pale water, still cool, begins to collect. It heads southwards, heads along equatorial Africa, warms its water in the rays of the tropics, crosses the Atlantic, reaches Cape São Roque on the Brazilian coast, and then splits into two branches, with one heading off to renew itself in the warm molecules of the Antilles. Then the Gulf Stream begins its role as moderator, for it is charged with re-establishing the equilibrium between temperatures and with mixing the waters of the tropics with the northern waters. Greatly heated in the Gulf of Mexico, it heads north along the American coast, reaches as far as Nova Scotia, changes direction under the impact of the cold current from the Davis Strait, and heads back out to sea. Following a line of latitude, a loxodromic track, it splits in two at about the 43rd degree, with one branch, helped on by the north-east trade wind, returning to the Bay of Biscay and the Azores, and the other, having slightly warmed the shores of Ireland and Norway, heading past Spitsbergen, where it falls to 4° and forms the open sea of the Pole.*

  It was on this oceanic river that the Nautilus was sailing. When it leaves the Bahama Channel, which is over 14 leagues wide and 350 metres deep, the Gulf Stream moves at 8 kilometres an hour, but this speed decreases constantly as it heads north. Indeed, we have to hope that this regularity is maintained; for if its speed and direction were ever to change, as some believe is happening already, the climate of Europe will undergo changes of an unforeseeable scope.

  At about midday I was on the platform with Conseil. I explained the peculiarities of the Gulf Stream. When my description was over, I asked him to put his hand in the current. Conseil obeyed, and was astonished to feel a sensation of neither cold nor warmth.

  ‘This is because the water of the Gulf Stream is at almost blood-temperature when it leaves the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Stream is a huge reservoir of heat, allowing the coasts of Europe to cloak themselves in permanent foliage, and if Maury can be believed, the heat from this current would provide enough calorific value to maintain in fusion a river of molten iron as big as the Amazon or the Missouri.’

  At this point the Gulf Stream was moving at 2.25 metres a second. Its current is so distinct that its water clearly stands out from the cold water of the sea around. Darker and with a greater concentration of saline matter, its pure indigo contrasts markedly with the green water around it. Such indeed is the clearness of the line of demarcation, that off the Carolinas the Nautilus visibly had its ram in the Gulf Stream, while its propeller was still beating the ocean.

  This current held a whole universe of living beings within it. The argonauts, so common in the Mediterranean, sailed here in numerous schools. Amongst the cartilaginous fish, the most remarkable were the rays, whose slender tails made up about a third of their bodies, in vast rhomboids 25 feet long. We also saw some small, metre-long sharks, with big heads, short rounded snouts, several rows of pointed teeth, and bodies apparently covered in scales.

  Amongst the bony fish, I noted some dusky wrasses particular to these seas; Sparus sinagris with irises shining like fires; metre-long sciaenas with large jaws bristling with tiny teeth, and which produce a slight cry; specimens of the Acanthurus nigricans mentioned above; blue dolphinfish picked out in gold and silver; parrot fish, true oceanic rainbows competing in colour with the most beautiful birds of the Tropics; naked blennies with triangular heads; bluish rhombuses without scales; batrachoidids with a crossways yellow strip representing a Greek ‘t’; swarms of small Gobiosoma bosc covered in brown blotches; lungfish with silvery heads and yellow tails; various examples of salmonids; mullets with slender waists and dazzling soft lustres, fish which Lacépède dedicated to his good lady wife;* and finally a beautiful fish, the Eques americanus decorated with all the orders and bedecked with every ribbon, which frequents the shores of that great nation where ribbons and orders are so little valued.

  I will add that during the night, the phosphorescent water of the Gulf Stream competed with the electric beam from our searchlight, especially in the stormy weather that frequently assailed us.

  On 8 May we were still off Cape Hatteras, with North Carolina to our left. The width of the Gulf Stream is 75 miles here, and its depth, 210 metres. The Nautilus continued to wander at will. It was as if no lookout existed on board. I will admit that an escape would have been possible in these circumstances. Everywhere were populated shores offering easy refuge. The sea was crisscrossed by numerous steamers between New York or Boston and the Gulf of Mexico, and traversed day and night by the little schooners plying between various points on the American coast. We could hope to be picked up. It was in sum a perfect opportunity, despite the 30 miles between the Nautilus and the shore of the Union.

  But an unfortunate circumstance scuppered the Canadian’s plans. The weather was very bad. We were approaching waters where frequent storms blew, the home of waterspouts and cyclones generated by none other than the Gulf Stream. To confront an often raging sea in a frail boat was to face certain death. Even Ned Land agreed. So he reined in his terrible homesickness, that only escape could cure.

  ‘Monsieur,’ he said that day, ‘it’s got to finish. I have to know what’s what. Your Nemo is steering clear of land and heading north, but I tell you I have already had enough of the South Pole, and am not going with him to the North Pole.’

  ‘What can we do, Ned, since escape is impossible for the moment?’

  ‘I come back to my original idea. The captain needs to be confronted. You said nothing when we were in your home seas. I wish to speak now that we are in mine. When I think that in a few days’ time the Nautilus is going to be off Nova Scotia, that a large bay opens out there near Newfoundland, and that the St Lawrence empties into that same bay! When I think that the St Lawrence is my own river, the river of my home town, Quebec; when I think of all this, I get very angry. My hair stands on end. Look, monsieur, I would prefer to throw myself into the sea! I can’t stay here! I’m suffocating!’

  The Canadian was clearly at the end of his tether. His energetic personality could not get used to our extended imprisonment. His physiognomy changed from day to day. His personality was getting gloomier and gloomier. I knew how much he was suffering for I too was feeling homesick. It was nearly seven months since our last news from land. In addition, Captain Nemo’s isolation, his taciturnity, and especially his changed mood since the battle with the squid — all this made things appear in a different light to me. I no longer felt the same enthusiasm as at the beginning. One had to be a Fleming like Conseil to accept an environment designed for whales and sea creatures. Truly, if this good fellow had had gills instead of lungs, I think he would have made a very good fish.

  ‘Well, monsieur?’ Land asked again, seeing that I was not going to reply.

  ‘Well, Ned, would you like me to ask Captain Nemo what his intentions are?’

  ‘Yes, monsieur.’

  ‘Even though he has already told us?’

  ‘Yes, I wish to be doubly certain. Say it’s from me, from me alone if you wish.’

  ‘But I rarely meet him. He even seems to be avoiding me.’

  ‘All the more reason for going and finding him.’

  ‘I’ll ask him then.’

  ‘When?’ said the Canadian insistently.

  ‘When I next meet him.’

  ‘Dr Aronnax, do you want me to go and see him myself?’

  ‘No, let me do it. Tomorrow . . .’

  ‘Today.’

/>   ‘All right. I will see him today,’ I replied to Ned, who would certainly have ruined everything had he acted on his own.

  I remained alone; having decided to put our case, I resolved to get it over with immediately. I like things that have been done more than things still to do.

  I returned to my room. From there I could hear steps in Captain Nemo’s. The opportunity of seeing him had to be seized. I knocked on his door. There was no reply. I knocked again, then turned the knob. The door opened.

  I went in. The captain was there. Bent over his desk, he had not heard me. Determined not to leave until I had spoken to him, I went up to him. He raised his head, frowned brusquely, and said to me in an abrupt tone:

  ‘You here! What do you want?’

  ‘To speak to you, captain.’

  ‘But I am busy, monsieur, I am working. Will you not give me the same freedom to remain alone that I give you?’

  This reception was hardly encouraging. But I was determined to hear him out so I could respond to everything he said.

  ‘Monsieur,’ I said coldly, ‘I have to speak to you of a matter which will suffer no delay.’

  ‘Which matter, monsieur?’ he replied sarcastically. ‘Have you made some discovery which has slipped my attention? Has the sea yielded some new secrets?’

  We were still a long way off the point. Before I could reply, he showed me a manuscript open on his desk, and said to me in a graver tone:

  ‘This, Dr Aronnax, is written in several languages. It contains a summary of my studies on the sea, and God willing, it will not perish with me. This manuscript, signed with my name and also containing the story of my life, will be enclosed in a small floating container.* The last survivor from among us on board the Nautilus will cast the container into the sea, and it will go wherever the waves carry it.’

  The name of this man! His story written by himself! Would his mystery be unveiled one day? But at this moment,* I only saw what he said as a way of broaching my subject.