Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

by Jules Verne

  ‘Captain,’ I replied, ‘I can only approve your intentions. The results of your studies must not be lost. But the means you employ seem slightly crude to me. Who knows where the wind will send the container, into whose hands it will fall? Why don’t you or one of your men . . .?’

  ‘Never, monsieur!’ said the captain, sharply interrupting me.

  ‘But my companions and I would be prepared to keep this manuscript secret, and if you gave us back our freedom . . .’

  ‘Your freedom!’ repeated Captain Nemo, getting up.

  ‘Yes, monsieur, and it is this subject that I wished to speak to you about. We have been on board your vessel for seven months, and I wish to ask you today, in my name and my companions’, if it is your intention to keep us here for ever.’

  ‘Dr Aronnax,’ said Captain Nemo, ‘I will answer you today as I answered you seven months ago: he who enters the Nautilus is destined never to leave it again.’

  ‘But you are inflicting slavery on us!’

  ‘Give it whatever name you wish.’

  ‘But wherever you go, the slave retains his right to regain freedom! And no holds are barred in how he attempts to do so!’

  ‘Who is depriving you of that right?’ replied Captain Nemo. ‘Have I ever thought of binding you with oaths?’

  The captain was staring at me, his arms crossed.

  ‘Monsieur,’ I said to him, ‘covering this same ground a second time would be neither to your taste nor to mine. So since this subject has been broached, let us make sure we close it. I repeat, I am not the only one concerned. For me, study is a support, a powerful diversion, a fascination, a passion which can help me forget everything. Like you, I can live unknown and obscure in the fragile hope of some day leaving the results of my work to the future, in a risky container entrusted to the winds and waves of chance. In short, I admire and happily follow you in your role, part of which I can understand. But there are other aspects of your life I have caught glimpses of, which remain shrouded in confusion and mystery, and in which my companions and I have no part. Even on the occasions when our hearts have gone out to you, moved by some of your pain or acts of genius or courage, we have had to hide all signs of the sympathy that comes from the sight of what is fine and good, whether displayed by friend or enemy. Well, it is this feeling that we are foreign to everything that concerns you which makes our position untenable. An impossible one even for me, but doubly impossible for Ned. Every human being, by the very fact of being human, is worthy of respect. Have you ever asked yourself what plans of vengeance could be engendered by the love of freedom and hatred of slavery in a nature like the Canadian’s, what he could think or do . . .?’

  I fell silent. Captain Nemo got up.

  ‘Ned Land can think or do as he wishes. What difference does it make to me? It was not I who sought out his company. It is not for my own pleasure that I keep him on board my vessel! As for you, Dr Aronnax, you are amongst those who can understand anything, even silence. I have nothing more to say to you. May this first time that you have raised this subject be also the last; I will not even be able to listen to you a second time.’*

  I withdrew. Starting from that day, our relationship was very tense. I relayed the conversation to my two companions.

  ‘We now know’, said Ned, ‘that there is nothing to be expected from this man. The Nautilus is approaching Long Island. We will try to escape, whatever the weather.’

  But the sky was becoming more and more threatening. Signs of a hurricane were approaching. The air was turning pale white, even milky. The fine sheaves of cirrus on the horizon were being replaced by strata of cumulonimbus. Other low-lying clouds were quickly fleeing. The sea roughened as it rolled in in long swells. The birds disappeared, with the exception of the petrels, which revel in storms. The barometer was dropping significantly, showing an exceptional amount of moisture in the air. The contents of the storm-glass were decomposing due to the electricity filling the air. A battle of the elements was nigh.

  The storm broke on 18 May,* when the Nautilus was off Long Island and a few miles from the passes into New York. I am able to describe this battle of the elements, because Captain Nemo felt an inexplicable caprice and decided to brave it on the surface, instead of fleeing to the depths of the sea.

  The wind was blowing from the south-west, first as a near gale, namely 15 metres a second, and then increasing to 25 at about three in the afternoon. In other words, a tempest had blown up.

  Captain Nemo, unshakeable in the blasts, had taken up position on the platform. He had made himself fast at the waist, so as to resist the huge wash of the waves. I had hoisted myself up and attached myself as well, dividing my admiration between the storm and the peerless man defying it.

  The raging sea was swept by large shreds of clouds that dipped into the waves. I could no longer see any of those small intermediate waves that form at the bottom of big troughs. Nothing but long fuliginous undulations, whose crests were so firm that they did not break. Aroused by each other, they grew taller. Now lying on its side, now erect like a mast, the Nautilus was pitching and rolling frighteningly.

  At about five o’clock, a torrential rain fell, but did not damp down the wind or sea. A hurricane unleashed itself at a speed of 45 metres a second, that is nearly 40 leagues an hour. In such conditions it tears tiles from roofs and smashes them into doors, breaks iron grilles, and bodily moves 24-calibre cannon. And yet even in the midst of the storm the Nautilus bore out the words of a wise engineer: ‘There is no well-constructed hull that cannot withstand the sea!’ This was not a fixed rock, that the waves would have demolished, but a mobile and obedient steel cylinder, without rigging or masts, and so able to resist the fury without suffering any damage.

  I carefully examined the unbridled waves. They measured up to 15 metres high by 150 to 175 metres long, and their speed was 15 metres a second, or half that of the wind. Their volume and power increased with the depth of the water. I understood then the function of the waves, capturing air and sending it down to the bottom of the sea, including life-giving oxygen. It has been calculated that their pressure reaches the enormous figure of 3,000 kilograms per square foot of the surface they batter. It was waves like this which moved a block in the Hebrides weighing 42 tons. It was they that, having flattened part of Tokyo in the Japanese storm of 23 December 1854,* went and broke on the shores of America the very same day, having crossed at 700 kilometres an hour.

  The intensity of the tempest increased as dusk fell. The barometer dropped to 710 millimetres, as happened during a cyclone in 1860 on Réunion. As the day ended, I saw a large ship passing on the horizon, struggling a great deal. It lay to at low steam in order to remain head-on to the wind. It was clearly from one of the lines between New York and Liverpool or Le Havre. It soon disappeared into the darkness.

  At ten o’clock the sky appeared to be on fire. The air was sundered by powerful flashes of lightning. I could not stand the light, but Captain Nemo contemplated them face on, as if drawing the soul of the storm into him. A terrifying noise filled the air, a complex sound composed of the roar of crushed waves, moans from the wind, and peals of thunder. The wind turned to all points of the compass, as the cyclone, which had started from the east, went back there after turning through north, west, and south, having rotated the opposite way from the storms of the southern hemisphere.

  Ah, the Gulf Stream! It fully justified its name of Ruler of Storms! It is the Gulf Stream which creates these frightening cyclones from the temperature difference between the air strata and its own currents.

  The drops had become a fiery rain. The tiny points of water had changed into exploding crests. It was exactly as if Captain Nemo, desiring a death worthy of him, was endeavouring to be struck by lightning. In a terrible movement of pitching, the Nautilus erected its steel ram into the air like the point of a lightning conductor, and I could see long sparks spurting from it.

  Exhausted, no strength left, I crawled to the hatch on my stomach.
I opened it, and climbed back down again to the salon. The storm was now reaching its maximum. It was impossible to stand up inside the Nautilus.

  Captain Nemo came in about midnight. I could hear the tanks filling gradually as the submarine gently sank below the surface of the waves.

  Through the open windows of the salon, I could see great frightened fish, passing like ghosts through the fiery waters. A few were struck by lightning in front of my eyes.

  The Nautilus was still going down. I thought that it would find calm water at a depth of 15 metres. But the upper strata were being shaken too violently. It needed to seek repose at 50 metres into the bowels of the sea.

  But what calm there, what silence, what peace! Who could have thought that a terrifying hurricane was being unleashed at that moment on the surface of the same ocean?

  20

  47° 24´ N, 17° 28´ W

  After this storm we were pushed eastwards. All hope disappeared of escaping to the landfalls of New York or the St Lawrence. Poor Ned, desperate, shut himself away like Captain Nemo. Conseil and I never left each other’s company.

  I have said that the Nautilus headed east. More precisely, I should have said north-east. For several days it wandered, now beneath the surface, now on top amongst those fogs that are so feared by navigators. They are mainly caused by ice melting, which produces a very high degree of humidity in the atmosphere. How many ships have been lost in these waters when just about to sight the glimmering lights on shore! How many wrecks due to these opaque blankets! How many impacts on reefs whose undertow was hidden by the noise of the wind! How many collisions between ships, in spite of their position lights and the warnings of their whistles and alarm bells!

  As a result, the floor of the sea resembled a battle-scene, where there still lay all the vanquished of the ocean: some old and already encrusted, others young and reflecting the light from our searchlight on their copper fittings and hulls. Amongst them, how many vessels lost with all hands and their communities of immigrants, on the dangerous spots, notorious in the accident statistics, of Cape Race, St Paul Island, the Strait of Belle Isle, and the St Lawrence estuary! And in just the last few years, how many victims have been added to those funereal annals by the Royal Mail, Inman, and Montreal lines! How many ships: the Solway, the Isis, the Parramatta, the Hungarian, the Canadian, the Anglo-Saxon, the Humboldt, and the United States, all wrecked; the Arctic and the Lyonnais, sunk in a collision; and the President, the Pacific, and the City of Glasgow,* all vanished, cause unknown: sombre debris, amongst which the Nautilus navigated as though inspecting the dead!

  On 15 May we were near the southern tip of the Bank of Newfoundland. This bank is the product of considerable amounts of marine alluvium, an accumulation of organic waste brought either from the equator by the current of the Gulf Stream or from the North Pole by the counter-current of cold water running down the American coast. Erratic blocks of disintegrating ice were piled up on one another, and a vast bone cemetery of billions of dead fish, molluscs, and zoophytes had built up.

  The sea is not very deep at the Bank of Newfoundland, a few hundred fathoms at most. But to the south, a deep depression suddenly drops, a 3,000-metre hole. There the Gulf Stream grows wider and its current spreads out. But in losing speed and temperature, it becomes a sea.

  Amongst the fish that the Nautilus frightened as it passed, I will cite the metre-long cyclopteroid with a black back and orange stomach, providing an example of conjugal fidelity rarely followed by its congeners, a huge Forsskal’s stingray, a sort of emerald moray eel which has an excellent taste, big-eyed wolf-fish whose heads resemble dogs’, blennies viviparous like snakes, 20-centimetre dusky frill gobies or black gudgeons, and Macrura with long tails and shining with a silvery glitter: fast-moving fish that had ventured far from the hyperborean seas.

  The nets also brought in a fish that is daring, audacious, energetic, muscly, and armed with spines on its head and spurs on its fins, a real two- or three-metre scorpion, the relentless enemy of the blennies, gadids, and salmon: this was the Cottus of the southern seas, with a brown tuberculous body and red fins. The fishermen of the Nautilus found it difficult to take hold of this animal, which uses the shape of its opercula to protect its respiratory organs from the drying effect of the atmosphere and so can live some time out of water.

  I will cite — for the record — naked blennies, which are small fish that accompany ships in the northern seas, oxyrhynchous whitebait found only in the northern Atlantic, and scorpion fish; and so I reach the gadids, principally from the species of cod, which I surprised in their favourite waters on that inexhaustible Bank of Newfoundland.

  These cod can be said to be mountain fish, for Newfoundland is really a submarine mountain. While the Nautilus opened up a route through their crowded battalions, Conseil could not refrain from making an observation:

  ‘Are those cod?’ he said. ‘But I thought that cod were flat like dab or sole?’

  ‘Fool!’ I exclaimed. ‘Cod are only flat at the grocer’s, where they are slit open and spread out. But in the water, they are spindle-shaped like mullet, and perfectly adapted for swimming.’

  ‘I can well believe it, monsieur,’ replied Conseil. ‘What a swarm, what an ant-heap!’

  ‘Well, my friend, there would be more without their enemies, namely scorpion fish and men! Do you know how many eggs have been found in a single female?’

  ‘Let’s not be stingy. Five hundred thousand.’

  ‘Eleven million, my friend.’

  ‘Eleven million! I will never believe it until I have counted them myself.’

  ‘Count them, Conseil. But it would be quicker if you believed me. In any case, the French, British, Americans, Danes, and Norwegians catch cod by the thousand. They are consumed in tremendous quantities, and without the astonishing fecundity of these fish, the seas would soon be emptied of them. In Britain and America alone, 5,000 ships with 75,000 men work at cod fishing. Each ship brings back 40,000 fish on average, which makes a total of 25 million.* On the coasts of Norway, the same again.’

  ‘Well, I will trust monsieur, and not count them.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The eleven million eggs. But I will simply make a remark.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That all the eggs hatched by four cod would be sufficient to feed Britain, America, and Norway.’

  While we were skimming over the bottom of the Bank of Newfoundland, I could easily see the hundreds of long lines, each with two hundred hooks, deployed by each boat. The lines, dragged along using small clips, were stopped from sinking by cross-hatched cords fixed to cork buoys. The Nautilus had to manoeuvre carefully through this submarine network.

  But in any case we did not remain long in these busy waters. The Nautilus moved up to the 42nd degree of latitude. This was off St John’s, Newfoundland, and the port of Heart’s Content, where the transatlantic cable ends.

  Instead of continuing northwards, the Nautilus headed east, as if wanting to follow the telegraphic plateau on which the cable rests, and whose relief has been mapped out with extreme precision by large numbers of soundings.

  It was on 17 May, approximately 500 miles from Heart’s Content and at a depth of 2,800 metres, that I first spotted the cable lying on the ground. I had not warned Conseil, and at first he took it for a gigantic sea serpent, and was about to classify it according to his usual method. But I soon enlightened the worthy fellow, and to make up for his disappointment, told him various details of the laying of the cable.

  The first one was laid in 1857–8; but it stopped working after transmitting about four hundred telegrams. In 1863 the engineers constructed a new cable, measuring 3,400 kilometres and weighing 4,500 tons, and loaded it on to the Great Eastern. This attempt also failed.

  On 25 May the Nautilus was at 3,836 metres depth, at the precise spot where the first break happened that halted the enterprise. It occurred 638 miles from the coast of Ireland. It was realized at two o’clock
one afternoon that communication with Europe had been interrupted. The electricians on board decided to cut the cable before bringing it up again, and by eleven o’clock they had brought up the damaged parts. A join and splice were made; and then the cable was let down again. But a few days later it broke once more and could not be retrieved from the depths.

  The Americans were not discouraged. The audacious Cyrus Field,* the promoter of the enterprise, who was risking his entire fortune, launched a new subscription. It was immediately snapped up. Another cable was installed taking greater precautions. The cluster of conducting wires was insulated in a sheath of gutta-percha, but also protected by a coating of textile matter, in turn enclosed in a metal casing. The Great Eastern sailed off again on 13 July 1866.

  This time the operation worked well. However, one incident did occur. Several times while unrolling the cable, the electricians noticed that nails had recently been driven into it so as to damage its core. Captain Anderson* and his officers and engineers held a meeting, discussed the problem, and put up notices saying that if the guilty party were found, he would be thrown into the sea without further notice. From that moment on, the criminal acts ceased.

  On 23 July the Great Eastern was only 800 kilometres off Newfoundland, when the news of the armistice between Prussia and Austria after Sadowa* was telegraphed to it from Ireland. On the 27th it sighted Heart’s Content through the fog. The enterprise had succeeded, and in its first telegram, young America sent old Europe wise words which are so rarely understood: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men.’*

  I did not expect to find the electric cable in the same state as when it came out of the workshops. The long serpent, covered with the remains of shells and bristling with foraminifers, was indeed encrusted in a stony coat, thus protecting it from the perforators of molluscs. It rested calmly, sheltered from the movements of the sea, at a pressure suitable for the transmission of the electric spark, which goes from America to Europe in 0.32 seconds. The life of this cable will undoubtedly be infinite, for it has been observed that its gutta-percha covering actually improves the longer it stays in salt water.