Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Also called: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Captain Nemo
Jules Verne’s novel of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus travelling round the world beneath the sea appeared in a magazine. The twenty thousand leagues (about 80,000 km) are not a depth but the distance the Nautilus travels.
Alphonse de Neuville · Public domain · Source
The novel opens in about 1866, with ships around the world reporting a mysterious “sea monster”. The French naturalist Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the harpooner Ned Land, aboard an American warship sent to hunt it, are thrown into the sea and discover that the monster is in fact the submarine Nautilus of Captain Nemo. The enigmatic captain, who has broken with the land, will not let them go, and for some seven months the Nautilus roams the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Antarctic seas.
It was serialised from March 1869 to June 1870 in the publisher Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, and in 1871 came out as a book with illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou. Verne is said to have seen the model of the French navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Paris Exposition. The name Nautilus came from Robert Fulton’s submersible of 1800, and was later given to the world’s first nuclear submarine.
