by Jules Verne
Luis Vaez de Torres: (Verne: ‘Louis Paz de Torrès’), Spanish navigator (b. 1565; flourished in 1606): he served under Quiros (see note to p. 117).
Vincendon-Dumoulin and Ensign (now Admiral ) Coupvent-Desbois: Clément-Adrien Vincendon-Dumoulin (1811–58) wrote Îles Marquises, ou Nouka Hiva (1843), Îles Taîti (1844), and Hydrographie du voyage au Pôle sud et dans l’Océanie, par Dumont d’Urville (1843–5). Auguste-Élie-Aimé Coupvent-Desbois (1814–92), ensign in the circumnavigation via Antarctica of 1837–40, co-author with Vincendon-Dumoulin of Physique (1850). The ‘Map of the route of the corvettes the Astrolabe and the Zélée through the Torres Strait’ (1840) was published in the Atlas hydrographique, a volume accompanying Dumont d’Urville’s Voyage au pôle Sud et dans l’Océanie (1842).
125 Captain King’s: Phillip Parker King (1791–1856), admiral, explorer, and author of A Voyage to Torres Strait (1837). His ‘Chart of the Intertropical and West Coasts of Australia’ was published in his Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (1825).
Toud Island and the Bad Channel: (Verne: ‘Tound’), features that appeared in a map dated 1840 in the Atlas hydrographique.
Gueboroar Island: no trace has been found of this archetypal Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson-inspired desert island. Given that the reefs in the following paragraph seem to be Warrior Reefs, it is probably Gabba Island or, more frequently, Guebe or Guebé (Two Brother Island, Gerbar in the indigenous language), an Australian island, discovered by Torrès in September 1605; ‘Gebar’ island appears on some contemporary maps. But in any case the information about Gueboroar is invented, given the variety of fauna and of ‘mountains’ and ‘plains’, absent in reality from the low-lying islands around.
128 two legs and feathers: allusion to Plato’s apocryphal definition of man as a ‘featherless biped’.
130 rima in Malay: the Malay words of Verne were rarely attested at the time; however, Rienzi gives the translations: ‘rima’ (breadfruit, vol. 1, p. 106); ‘mado’ (‘leader or respected person’ in the language of Murray Island, vol. 1, p. 338); and ‘Assai’ (‘come here’, vol. 1, p. 338).
135 great emerald bird of paradise, one of the rarest: given Verne’s description, this may be the Magnificent Bird of Paradise; in contrast with Verne’s ‘eight species’, more than 40 species of birds of paradise have now been identified.
137 a species of ‘rabbit kangaroos’ which normally live in the hollows of trees: these must be tree kangaroos, hare wallabies, or forest wallabies.
139 are those that you call savages any worse than the others?: in a contemporary humorous letter to his father, the novelist maintains that ‘savages are more civilized’ than others, for they have ‘authority over their parents’ [March? 1868]. The last two sentences of this very Vernian dialogue, opposing a naive Aronnax to an ironic Nemo, were, however, written by Hetzel in the margin of the second manuscript, Verne merely retracing them in ink.
142 weight in gold: this paragraph closely follows Frédol (p. 279). More generally, when Verne cites ‘naturalists’, he is often referring to the same writer.
146 ‘I have given the order to open the hatches’: why? They will be on the open sea in a couple of hours. Are the hatches opened only to demonstrate the power of electricity?
the handrail of the stairs: it seems strange that all the attackers touch the handrail, and that Ned seizes it ‘in both hands’.
Ten suffered the same fate: MS2 has a significant variant here: ‘He pressed the switch. A blood-curdling cry was heard outside. I was pale with fright. The hatches had been opened. I looked at Captain Nemo, still impassive, and rushed out of the salon. | I arrived on the platform. Twenty canoes were fleeing, a hundred dead bodies lay over the flanks of the Nautilus. | I understood: the platform, insulated by some unknown mechanism and charged with all the electricity on board, had produced the effect of a huge battery. The savages crowded on it had been struck by lightning!’
Between his assailants and him, Nemo had extended an electric circuit that none could cross with impunity: the language and the action, here and elsewhere, coincide largely with the device ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’, for the captain is responding to wrongs.
147 it left behind the dangerous passes of Torres Strait: MS2 contains a description of a French three-master observed as the submarine leaves Torres Strait, but this was deleted after Hetzel’s reading (see Appendix 1: Inception).
Ægri Somnia: ‘bad dreams’, quotation from Seneca and Horace, perhaps via Dumas.
I could not follow its revolutions, let alone count them: hardly surprising, since Aronnax is inside the submarine.
a holy ark: reference to Noah’s Ark (Genesis 6: 14–16), ultimate refuge from man’s iniquities, rather than to the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25: 10–22), containing the Ten Commandments.
the sacred lizards: crocodiles are not of course lizards. But Verne’s other facts are authentic, with virgins sacrificed to crocodiles in Timor until at least 1850.
149 1.018 for the Ionian Sea: given that the other densities are at least 1.026, ‘1.018’ may be a misprint.
152 near the front of the platform: in I 6 the searchlight is implied to be at the rear.
invisible point of the horizon: it will later become clear that Nemo has seen an enemy ship in these Dutch waters on the route to Australia.
155 19 January: Verne avoids weighing his climaxes down with dates; this is the last one of the first volume. The second volume opens on 21 January 1868 (the voyage across the Pacific began around 8 November 1867).
Moquin-Tandon: Horace-Benedict-Alfred (1804–63), botanist and doctor, author of Histoire naturelle des mollusques (1855) and Le Monde de la mer (1865, under the pseudonym of Alfred Frédol), an important source for 20T.
156 which struck this man: MÉR and 1869 add: ‘The first officer was at his side. He [the injured man] threw himself forward to prevent the collision . . . A brother getting himself killed for his brother, a friend for his friend, what could be simpler! That is the law for everyone on the Nautilus.’ This passage, with its rather implausible action, is the only real interaction we observe between Nemo’s crew members, and illustrates high ideals. It may also contain a slight allusion to Dumas père’s ‘One for all, and all for one!’ Its didactic tone and ineffective altruism suggest that Hetzel at least contributed to it. Other ideas probably taken from The Count of Monte Cristo—to which Verne dedicated his Mathias Sandorf (1885)—include Xenophon, Lucullus, and Château-Renaud; the Mediterranean boat called a ‘tartan’, ‘the famous sea serpent of the Constitutionnel’, and a large, multilingual library; the notions of Greek liberation from the Turks, of fashioning pen and ink from fish remains while in prison, of cruelly watching fish change colour as they die on the dining table, of the hero keeping a portrait of a young woman on his bedroom wall; and a parading of artists, including Meyerbeer, Delacroix, Decamps, Potter, Dow, Murillo, and Raphael.
157 something like a funereal plain-chant. Was this the prayer for the dead: the prayer for the dead is associated with the belief in purgatory; together with the ‘plain-chant’ and the ‘cross’ depicted below, an impression is created of Catholicism—and hence of a non-northern origin for Nemo.
the coral kingdom: the Musée des familles, to which Verne had contributed regularly, contained an article by Bertsch on coral reefs (March 1863), as well as one, written by Verne’s friend, director, and co-author Pitre-Chevalier, on Hallett’s trials of the Nautilus on the Seine ( July 1858).
it was only in 1694 that the Marseillais Peyssonnel: (Verne: ‘Peysonnel’) Claude-Charles de (1727–90), author of Traité du corail (London, 1756; Verne’s date should be 1723).
159 But as one thinker has remarked: Michelet, in La Mer, who entitles a chapter ‘Flower of Blood’ (II, 4), words reproduced by Verne three paragraphs below.
160 The clearing was a cemetery: this powerful burial scene shares elements with the funeral of a sailor similarly killed by ma
chinery on the Great Eastern (A Floating City, ch. 30).
161 And in a sudden movement . . . the surface of the waves: these two paragraphs, together with the more melodramatic parts of the previous lines and most of the Christian symbols, are absent from both manuscripts. They may easily be some of the ‘tears’ that Verne invites Hetzel to add to the book (14 August 1868); in any case they are in the publisher’s style.
163 Part Two: the division is an important one, as MS2 Part One was revised before MS1 Part Two. There was also a gap of a year between the book publication of the two parts, leading Verne to write: ‘Paris, 27 December 1869 | My dear father . . . I haven’t tried to obtain articles [reviews] for Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas. I’m waiting for the second volume to appear, as the first alone cannot give an idea of the work.’
Here begins the second part of this voyage under the seas: MS1 adds, obscurely: ‘Not that it cannot deviate, either through the space we have covered, or through the time spent covering it.’
Always the same defiance of human society, wild and implacable: MS2 has the stronger: ‘Always the same defiance of the human race, or rather the same hatred, implacable and permanent, wild and implacable. | That was the true mystery surrounding him, the key to his enigmatic existence . . . Yes, it was in this hatred that the secret was to be sought.’ Five lines lower, it reads, ‘. . . the wound of that man, most certainly struck in a violent battle’, a clearer hint of Nemo’s agenda.
some terrible but unknown sort of revenge: it is hard to see how Aronnax deduces Nemo’s mission of vengeance from the existence of a wounded man.
writing, so to speak, at the dictation of events: Aronnax claims to be writing mostly without the benefit of hindsight, the mixture of tenses in these opening pages being a sign. He presumably writes notes every day or at the first opportunity, but has to conceal information (and conceal his concealment). By the time he is able to write up the underwater excursion, for instance, he knows that it is a funeral, but chooses not to reveal this until the end.
164 could not understand French . . . but he remained mute and impassive: MS1 adds, ‘and yet I sometimes saw his lips purse and his eyes sparkle below their lids’, a rare sign of passion in Nemo’s crewmen—and another hint at a French nationality.
167 Remington: Philo (1816–89), American developer of the breech-loading rifle, with his father Eliphalet Remington (1793–1861); he also improved the typewriter from about 1873.
Captain Fitzroy: (later vice-admiral) Robert (1805–65), hydrographer and meteorologist, captain of the Beagle on Darwin’s 1831–6 journey and editor of Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships ‘Adventure’ and ‘Beagle’ (1839). MS1 says Darwin’s visit to Keeling Island was in ‘1858’.
168 the thermometer still invariably indicated +4°: modern studies indicate a minimum of 1 degree.
Oppian: Greek poet born in Cilicia (flourished 2nd century ad), author of Halieutica (‘On Fishing’).
169 raised for the wind like light sails: according to Léon Renard, Le Fond de la mer (pp. 256–7), and Figuier (p. 474), the webbed arms do not serve as sails.
‘it never does’: only the female does not come out, so as to protect the eggs.
he should have called his ship the Argonaut: the quest of Jason and the Argonauts is to find the Golden Fleece.
171 28 February: or January?
a volume by H. C. Sirr, Esq. entitled Ceylon and the Cingalese: (Verne and MS2: ‘Ceylan and . . .’; MS1: ‘Ceylon’), Henry Charles Sirr (1807–72), diplomat: his book was published in 1850, with a chapter on the Mannar pearl fishery.
172 Treaty of Amiens in 1802: between Britain and Napoleonic France.
Percival: (Verne: ‘Perceval’, MS1: ‘Percival’), Robert (1765–1826), author of An Account of Ceylon (1803).
some divers can stay as much as 57 seconds and very good ones, 87: these figures seem very low.
174 turning the pages automatically: from about 1867, Verne’s writing includes vocabulary of ‘automatically’, ‘instinctively’, and even ‘subconsciously’, signs of an interest in the hidden workings of the mind.
177 Charles V of France: (1500–58), reigned over the Holy Roman Empire (1519–57); also known as Charles I of the Spanish Empire, which he founded.
Caesar gave Servilia a pearl estimated to be worth about 120,000 francs of our money: Servilia was the mother of Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins (44 bc). This gift, reported by Suetonius in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, encouraged the rumour that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son. Frédol gives the correct sum: ‘Julius Caesar offered Servilia a pearl valued at about 1,200,000 francs of our money’ (p. 267).
Cleopatra: Cleopatra VII, Thea Philopator (c.69–30 bc), queen of Egypt (51–30), famous for her beauty and her relationship with Julius Caesar.
179 that etymology derives the French word for shark, requin, from the word requiem: according to popular belief; the word is probably more akin to ‘chien’ (dog).
182 Darwin . . . coconuts: in The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’, Darwin describes a crab that splits coconuts.
184 the phenomenal mollusc: the giant clam (Tridacna gigans) does reach a few feet in size, can weigh 440 pounds, and can trap divers.
188 Vasco da Gama: (1469?–1524), Portuguese explorer, the first European to reach India by sea (1497–9).
190 Idrisi: (1099?–1164?), Arabian geographer, scientist, and poet. His monumental Kitab Rujjar (1154) contains a description of the known Earth.
191 this classical importance, one which the railways of Suez have already brought back in part: the British considered the 204-mile Cairo-to-Suez railway (1858) a triumph for their imperial communications, and subsequently opposed the building of the Suez Canal.
193 The latter method, requiring the use of divers, is preferable: a few pages previously, pearl fishing had been castigated for its effect on divers’ health.
194 Strabo: (63? bc–ad 24?), Greek historian, philosopher, volcanologist, and firm believer in monsters in the Mediterranean; author of a Geographia.
Arrian . . . Artemidorus: Greek thinkers. Arrian: or Flavius Arrianus, 2nd-century historian, author of the Indica and Anabasis, a life of Alexander the Great; Agatharchidas: flourished 177 bc, general in the Peloponnesian War and author of On the Erythraean Sea; Artemidorus: flourished 100 bc, author of a systematic geography.
195 a fourteenth-century chronicler: the chronicler is named as an untraceable ‘Nacos de [of] la Charité sur Loire [a place name in Nièvre]’ by Léon de Laborde (1807–69), Commentaire géographique sur l’Exode et les nombres.
the Hebrew word “Edom”: MS2 and the 1869 and 1871 editions have ‘Edrom’, corrected here to ‘Edom’, following the MÉR edition. ‘Edom’ certainly means ‘red(dish-brown)’ in Hebrew, but the ‘Red Sea’ in the English Bible is the translation of ‘Yam Suf’ (literally ‘sea of reeds’), not now confirmed to be the modern Red Sea. The posthumous story ‘Eternal Adam’, of unparalleled brilliance and ascribed mainly to Michel Verne, is entitled ‘Edom’ in manuscript form. According to Genesis (36: 8), Edom was Esau’s other name; and those reputed to be his descendants were also known as Edom, as was the area they lived in, south-east of ancient Israel.
196 Sesostris . . . Necho: probably Sesostris III (1878–1843 bc), the fifth ruler of the twelfth dynasty of Egypt; his work was on the first cataract of the Nile, but also on a separate canal. Necho: twenty-sixth-dynasty pharaoh (ruled 610–595 bc), mentioned in the Bible (2 Chronicles 35: 20, 22; 36: 4). He sent Phoenicians on an expedition that may have circumnavigated Africa.
Darius . . . Ptolemy II: ancient rulers. Darius: Darius I (the Great) (c.558–486 bc), king of Persia, defeated at the Battle of Marathon (490 bc). Hystaspes: (flourished 550 bc), satrap of Parthia. Ptolemy II: (c.308–246 bc), king of Egypt (285–246 bc); married his sister.
until the century of the Antonines . . . Caliph Umar: Roman emperors Marcus Aelius Aurelius Antoninus (121–80 bc) and Antoninus Pius (ad 86�
�161). Umar ibn al-Khattab (c.586–644), or Umar I, second caliph, who expanded the Muslim empire and probably instituted the haj to Mecca.
filled in once and for all by Caliph al-Mansur to prevent food reaching Mohammed ben Abdallah, who had rebelled against him: Abu Jaafer Abdullah al-Mansur (712?–75), caliph (754–75); it seems to have been in fact in 775 that he filled in the canal. Mohammed ben Abdallah (c.712–64), now called Abdulla ibn Ali, was al-Mansur’s uncle and governor of Syria; his rebellion apparently took place in 754.
General Bonaparte: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), emperor of France (1804–14 and 1815); reformed the administration and conquered most of Europe; exiled to Elba and St Helena. In 1799 a survey he ordered concluded that building a sea-level canal between the Mediterranean and Red Sea was impractical.
Hazeroth, the very place where Moses had camped 3,300 years before: the precise location is not in fact known; and of course there is no historical confirmation of much of the Bible. According to Numbers 11: 35, the Israelites ‘camped at Hazeroth’, whereas in Numbers 12: 16, they ‘moved from Hazeroth and camped in the Wilderness of Paran’.
197 M. de Lesseps: Ferdinand-Marie (1805–94), French diplomat who built the Suez Canal (17 November 1869), described in Around the World as ‘the magnificent work of M. de Lesseps’. Verne’s Légion d’honneur of 1870 may have been proposed by Lesseps.
198 Aures habent et non audient: ‘they have ears and do not hear’ (Psalms 6: 115, cf. Mark 8: 18).
200 dugong: Ned’s 7-metre, 5,000-kilogram dugong is exceptional, as the maximum size is normally 4.5 metres and slightly over a ton.
202 which formed splayed tusks: tusks indicate a male dugong, and so Ned could not have seen its breasts two pages previously. Also, dugongs do not have ‘fingers’; and they are usually inoffensive.
204 Mount Horeb, the Sinai on whose summit Moses saw God face to face: Mount Horeb was indeed where Moses received the Ten Commandments, but its location is uncertain. Although Moses leaves with the intention of seeing God’s face, He appears only in the form of a burning bush, since: ‘thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen’ (Exodus 33: 23).
