by Jules Verne
205 Mississippi or Hudson steamboats: in New York, Verne took a huge steamboat, the St John, up the Hudson to Albany (10–11 April 1867, A Floating City, chs. 35–6).
210 Est in Carpathio Neptuni gurgite vates | Caeruleus Proteus . . . : ‘In Neptune’s Carpathian flood there dwells a seer, Proteus, of sky-blue hue’ (Virgil, Georgics, book 4, lines 387–8).
The next day, 14 February: this should be ‘13’. Similarly ‘19 March’ seems to occur on two different days (II 13).
what had become of the insurrection since then, I had absolutely no idea: the Cretan revolt against Turkish rule broke out in 1866, and continued on and off until 1869.
211 Vitellius: (15–69), briefly Roman emperor in the ‘year of the four emperors’ (69). This paragraph borrows, often verbatim, from the Life of the Twelve Caesars (371), by Suetonius, perhaps via Lacépède.
Mark Antony’s vessel at the Battle of Actium, in this way helping Augustus to victory: Mark Antony (83?–30 bc), general and politician, and Cleopatra were defeated at Actium in western Greece (31 bc), leading to the crowning in 27 bc of the first Roman emperor, Augustus.
212 Pesce: the diver must be inspired by Nicolas Pesce-Cola (13th century; Italian pesce = fish), a legendary fisherman from Messina, with webbed hands and feet, meant to be able to stay underwater for days; some situate his exploits in Charybdis, a whirlpool that engulfed ships and contained monstrous polyps. This episode, with no clear impact on the story, and where Nemo displays an unusual sociability, is absent from the first manuscript. Hetzel’s involvement cannot be excluded; in the other manuscripts, he adds edifying scenes, designed to inspire young people, but often implausible and badly integrated.
Where had this precious metal come from, representing as it did an enormous sum of money?: no doubt from Vigo Bay.
the captain wrote an address on its lid, using characters that looked like modern Greek: MS2 has Nemo writing, ‘in black ink’, ‘an address in copper-plate as follows:’, followed by a page break; in other words it was planned to include the actual address. In MS1, Nemo writes to ‘A. P. Leader of the Cretan Insurrection’. Nemo may be partly based on Gustave Flourens (1838–71), a French revolutionary. He fought in both the 1863 Polish Insurrection and the 1866 Cretan revolt, supported the Irish nationalists, lived in exile in London and Belgium, and wrote distinguished volumes, like Histoire de l’homme (1863) and Science de l’homme (1865), as well as political works (1863, 1864).
213 Until five o’clock I wrote up my notes: if earlier Aronnax referred to the existence of his notes, now he is referring to his own writing. But further levels also exist. Thus Aronnax’s ‘sort[s] out [his] notes’; recasts them in past-tense, personal-memoir style; submits the result to Ned and Conseil; and in the end publishes it.
we were not at high latitudes: a slip for ‘low latitudes’.
214 Cassiodorus: Flavius Magnus Aurelius (c.490–c.585), statesman and historian.
Finally, on 10 March a small island called Reka appeared: to know the name, Nemo must either have launched his submarine after 10 March 1866 or still have some contact with dry land.
215 the mare nostrum of the Romans: ‘our sea’; Verne visited the Mediterranean twice, in the company of Hetzel: in 1866 and in about January 1868.
Pluto: Greco-Roman god of death and the underworld; here referring to volcanic action.
217 Lucullus: Lucius Licinius Lucullus (115–56? bc), general and consul, fond of original banquets.
218 Arachne: (Greek for ‘spider’), Arachne wove a tapestry depicting the gods’ amorous activities. When Athena tore it up out of jealousy, she hanged herself, and was turned into a spider.
219 ‘it blocks the whole of the Strait of Libya, and Smyth’s soundings prove that the two continents were formerly connected between Capes Bon and Farina’: (Verne: ‘Smith’s . . . Boco . . . Furina’), Verne’s ‘détroit de Libye’, where ‘Libya’ meant most of North Africa, seems to correspond to the modern Sicilian Channel. Smyth: Rear-Admiral William Henry, author of The Mediterranean (1854).
222 the Atlas, which had disappeared with all hands twenty years before: in fact a few years: this French liner left Marseilles for Algiers on 3 December 1863.
222 Strait of Gibraltar: the Nautilus heads from Sicily to Gibraltar, passing not far from Provence, but with hardly a mention of France. The Greek islands having been presented in the preceding chapter, this chapter, ‘The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours’, consists of little more than long lists of marine life.
223 the temple of Hercules, sunk, according to Pliny and Avienus: this mythical temple corresponded approximately to the columns of Hercules, the site of the theft of oxen, one of his twelve works; it was made up of rocks on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. Rufius Festus Avienus was a fourth-century poet, author of Ora Maritima (Sea Coasts), a wild account of the Mediterranean and surrounding areas.
225 My novel was falling from my hands half-way through: is Aronnax thinking of novel-reading in general or referring to his own ongoing book? 20T is in any case the story of its own writing. As the author of The Mysteries . . ., Aronnax is invited to write for the New York Herald, producing the written invitation to hunt the monster. Nemo later admits that he too has kept a record, and may entrust it to the waves in a floating container (a favourite Hetzelian trope). At the end, Aronnax will reveal that his new ‘study’ of the sea, which, turned into ‘memoirs’, has now become a ‘narrative’, is somehow already complete. His book thus ends up coinciding with Verne’s novel.
226 in perpetuity: instead of the words following ‘gratitude’, MS2 has ‘No, however, for the captain was exceeding his rights in claiming to be able to keep us on board his ship in perpetuity.’
227 Kosciusko . . . John Brown: heroes who often died defending a liberal or patriotic cause. The list, which was added to the novel after Hetzel had read it, includes one Pole, two Greeks, one anti-Austrian, two anti-Confederates, and two anti-Britons. Kosciusko: Thaddeus (1746–1817), Polish general who fought for American independence and in 1794 led a rebellion against Russian and Prussian control of his homeland; at the Battle of Maciejowice (1794), he uttered the cry, ‘Poland is finished’, a defeat followed by the dismemberment of the country; Botsaris, the Leonidas of modern Greece: Markos (1786–1823), who fought in the war of independence against the Turks, and died in the defence of Missolonghi; Leonidas: king of Sparta who perished defending the Pass of Thermopylae with only 300 men (480 or 481 bc) in the Second Persian War; O’Connell, the defender of Ireland: Daniel, ‘the Liberator’ (1775–1847), political leader who campaigned for Irish independence; Washington, the founder of the American Union: George (1732–99), commander-in-chief in the War of Independence and first president (1789–97); Manin, the Italian patriot: Daniele (1804–57), led the Venetians against Austrian rule in 1848 and headed a short-lived republic; Lincoln, who fell shot by a supporter of slavery: Abraham (1809–65), sixteenth US president (1861–5); he maintained the Union in the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation (1863); John Brown: (1800–59), abolitionist celebrated in the song ‘John Brown’s Body’; he used force to liberate Southern slaves, but was finally hanged. Verne wrote to Hetzel, ‘The incident of John Brown [of which no trace has survived] pleases me by its concise form, but in my view, diminishes the captain. His nationality needs to be kept vague, together with the causes which cast him into his strange existence. In addition the incident of an Alabama or a false Alabama is unacceptable and inexplicable; if Nemo wanted to take revenge on the slavers, he only had to serve in [Ulysses] Grant’s army and everything was settled’ [17 May 1869]. The Alabama, which claimed to have destroyed 75 merchantmen, was sunk by the Unionist Kearsarge off Cherbourg on 11 June 1864, and was commemorated in a painting by Manet.
229 Louis XIV . . . imposed his grandson, the Duke of Anjou: historical events. Louis XIV: (1638–1715), the Sun King (ruled 1643–1715), built the Palace of Versailles. The Duke of Anjou: (1683–1746), ruled Spain as Philip V (1700–4
6).
Admiral de Château-Renaud: (Verne: ‘Château-Renault’; MS2: ‘Château-Renaud’), François-Louis de Rousselet de (1637–1716). Despite the problems, he was congratulated by Louis XIV.
230 Vigo Bay: in the Battle of Vigo Bay (23 October 1702), French ships under Château-Renaud were escorting Spanish galleons. It was not in fact this admiral who gave the order to scuttle the ships, an order which, despite Nemo’s account, was only partially executed.
Hernando Cortez: (1485–1547), Spanish explorer who brutally conquered the Aztecs.
231 the work of a rival company: following electricity-illuminated searches from 1865 by Ernest Bazin, a society was founded to recover the galleons from Vigo Bay in 1869, meaning that Aronnax cannot know of its founding.
233 33° 22´ N, 16° 17´ W, that is 150 leagues from the nearest coast: these coordinates are in fact close to Madeira. Might it be a deliberate mistake by Aronnax to prevent Ned’s escape?
236 and so boldly followed him: MS2 has the interesting: ‘and due to a purely physical effect, the more I rose towards the top strata, the heavier I felt’.
awe-inspiring squid: MS2 has ‘giant squid’; the same paragraph in MS2 has ‘crustaceans, lurking like tigers’ and ‘crabs . . . ready to pounce’.
237 not those of the Creator: MS2: ‘not those of nature’.
‘Come on! Further! Come with me!’: in this imaginary conversation Nemo uses the intimate form (‘Viens!’), perhaps in response to Aronnax’s seizing of his arm. In MS2 it is Nemo who takes Aronnax’s arm to point out the reddish glow.
another Torre del Greco: a port and valley below Vesuvius, destroyed many times.
238 a whole Pompeii sunk beneath the waters: Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79, and rediscovered in 1748.
238 that ancient Meropis . . . d’Avezac: believers and disbelievers in Atlantis. Theopompus: (c.380–c.315 bc), Greek historian. According to the Varia Historia (book 3, ch. 18) of Aelianus (flourished early 2nd century ad), Theopompus writes of a conversation that Midas, king of Phrygia, has with the aged satyr Silenus, who tells him of the continent of Meropis (mer + opis (‘over or near’)), considerably larger than the known world. Plato: (427–347 bc), Greek philosopher, author of The Republic. Origen: or Origines Adamantius (185?–254?), Christian philosopher who castrated himself to ensure celibacy; Porphyry: (c.232–c.305), philosopher who helped found Neoplatonism; Iamblichus: (d. c.330), Syrian-born Greek mystic philosopher, author of De Mysteriis; d’Anville: Jean-Baptiste Bourgignon d’Anville (1697–1782), geographer and cartographer; Malte-Brun: probably Conrad (1775–1826), Danish geographer, founder of the Société de géographie (of which Verne was a member); author of Précis de la géographie universelle (1812–29)—praised to the skies in Journey to England and Scotland—which contains a page on Atlantis, characterized as ‘uncertain’ (vol. 1, p. 56); Posidonius: (135–50 bc), Greek stoic philosopher, volcanologist, polymath, and partial believer in Atlantis; Ammianus Marcellinus: (c.325/330–c.395), Latin historian born in Antioch, prolific continuer of Tacitus; Tertullian: Quintus Septimus Florens (c.160–c.230), Carthaginian church father, founder of the schismatic Tertullianists; he describes Atlantis in the Apologetic and De Pallio; Engel: Samuel (1702–84), Swiss geographer, author of Quand et comment l’Amérique a-t-elle été peuplée d’hommes et d’animaux? (Amsterdam, 1767); Scherer: (Verne: ‘Sherer’), Jean-Benoît (1741–1824), diplomat, historian, and author of Recherches historiques et géographiques sur le Nouveau-monde (1787), about the origins of the American Indians; he quotes Plato on Atlantis (pp. 583–4); Tournefort: Joseph Pitton de (1656–1708), botanist and author of Voyage au Levant (1717), which discusses Atlantis; Buffon: Georges-Louis-Leclerc (1707–88), French pre-evolutionary naturalist. His works include a Histoire naturelle (1749–1804), with an illustration of a cephalopod embracing a frigate, and Époques de la Nature, which describes Atlantis (Sixth Epoch); d’Avezac: Armand (1799–1875), geographer and author of Les Îles fantastiques de l’océan occidental (1845).
the land of the powerful Atlanteans: the Atlantis idea has gripped generations of writers. It is normally taken as being in the Atlantic—Michelet places it at Tenerife (I, 4), but also englobing Auvergne and the West Indies. However, it is sometimes situated, following Strabo, in Thira (near modern Santorini), an island buried in a volcanic eruption and 30-metre tidal wave (c.1615 or 1500 bc). Thira’s Bronze Age ruins were first explored in the 1860s, when the French quarried pumice to build the Suez Canal. Atlantis is also central to ‘Eternal Adam’ (1910), where remains of ‘columns and pottery, such as we had never seen’ prove to survivors of a future cataclysm that they formed part of an indefinite number of civilizations that emerged and failed.
His dialogues of Timaeus and Critias were, so to speak, dictated under the inspiration of Solon, poet and legislator: Plato used Atlantis to illustrate his theory of human history as a cyclical rise and fall. His Timaeus (c.395 bc) describes a large island Utopia on the other side of the Pillars of Hercules: ‘There occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all the warlike men sank together into the Earth, and the island of Atlantis similarly disappeared into the depths of the ocean. For this reason, the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, with a shoal of mud blocking the route.’ The information in Verne’s next two paragraphs is taken mainly from Plato’s Critias (18th dialogue onwards), in which Critias, an Athenian politician, philosopher, and poet, provokes Timaeus’s response. But whereas Verne describes the unnamed town as ‘nine hundred centuries old’, Plato says ‘9,000 years’. Solon: (c.639–c.559 bc), statesman whose constitutional reforms gave rise to the Athenian state. Mentioning ‘ruins that were hundreds of thousands of years old’ allows Verne to make coevals of ‘the contemporaries of the first man’, the ‘geological epochs’, the ‘fabulous times’, and ‘the gigantic inhabitants [who] lived for whole centuries’.
Sais, a town already 800 years old: Sais was the ancient capital of Lower Egypt, with an important temple complex. The ‘800 years’, inconsistent with the figures of 1,000 and 9,000 years, is a misquoting of Plato’s ‘8,000 years’.
239 Machimos the warlike and Eusebia the holy: (Verne: ‘Makhimos . . . Eusebès’), the source for these two localities is Aelianus, whose Varia Historia (book 3, ch. 18) invents the great towns in ‘Meropis’ of ‘Machimos (the warlike) and . . . Eusebia (the holy)’.
241 Bailly: Jean-Sylvain (1736–93), scholar and politician, author of Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon (London, 1779), president of the States-General (1789), and mayor of Paris (1790); guillotined. Captain Hatteras refers to the ‘astronomer Bailly, who maintained that the Atlanteans, the disciplined lost race of which Plato speaks, lived here [at the North Pole]’ (II 24).
242 I did not know where we were: the position is important, indicating the location of both Atlantis and the captain’s home port. Nemo’s invitation to visit the lost continent was issued at 33° 22´ N, 16° 17´ W. Then from dawn until 4 p.m. the Nautilus sails ‘southwards’ at ‘20 knots’, covering about 200 miles, until it nears ‘a continent or at the very least an island, perhaps one of the islands of the Canaries or of Cape Verde’. Aronnax is again being duplicitous, for this must be Funchal or the Canary Islands, whereas Cape Verde is a good 1,000 miles away. The submarine then continues more slowly on into the night, covering about 100 miles to reach Nemo’s base. (Verne drops heavy hints when he has Aronnax discover bees, ‘so common throughout the Canary Islands’.) The Canaries are perfect for the captain, since they are actively volcanic (thus hiding his smoke), partly deserted, and Spanish, an appropriate home port for ‘Juan Nemo’.
244 served me well: MS2 adds ‘Here I am master of the lake!’, apparently an allusion to The Lady of the Lake (1810), by Walter Scott (1771–1832), who is referred to at the end of this chapter and forms a major inspiration for Journey to England and Scotland.
244 those of Newcastle: on the night of 3–4 September 1859, V
erne saw these underwater coalmines on the train from Edinburgh to London ( Journey to England and Scotland, ch. 37).
248 Walter Scott’s hero: perhaps Darsie Latimer in Redgauntlet (1824), almost overtaken by the tide of Solway Firth (letter IV), or Arthur Wardour in The Antiquary (1816, French translation, 1857; chs. 6 and 7).
249 Sargasso Sea: the calm centre of the clockwise rotation of the North Atlantic. Although nautical lore referred to vessels trapped in dense seaweed, in fact the area was avoided mostly because of the lack of wind. It is now a relatively small area in the western Atlantic, but Maury’s Plate VI, ‘Gulf Stream and Drift’, shows the main Sargasso Sea as centred on 30° W, south-west of the Canaries, with the area around Bermuda as an extension.
250 sargazo: (Verne: ‘sargazzo’), the following paragraph quotes Maury approximately. To ensure a faithful translation of Verne, the French version is here translated back into English.
The Physical Geography of the Globe: in reality Physical Geography of the Sea (1855, French translation, 1858); the following paragraph is taken from its sec. 688.
252 horse and its rider: information taken from Frédol (p. 428), who attributes these observations not to the fishermen, but respectively to navigator and author John Barrow (1764–1848), to French students, and to an unidentified ‘Müller’.
a certain gentleman from Copenhagen: Daniel Friedrich Eschricht (1798–1863), a whale specialist.
253 Captain Denham of the Herald: (cf. Maury, sec. 688), Henry Mangles Denham (1800–87), naval surveyor, later admiral, who drew navigational charts of the Fijian archipelago (1855–6).
Lieutenant Parker of the American frigate Congress: (Verne: ‘Parcker’), quoted by Maury (secs. 466 and 688) as Lieutenant J. P. Parker, in 1852. The ‘15,140 metres’ in this paragraph was ‘15,149 metres’ in I 18; but both figures are faulty.
