Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. Professor Aronnax, a French marine biologist, is invited onto an American naval vessel hunting what appears to be a gigantic sea monster that has been ramming ships. The monster turns out to be the Nautilus, a sophisticated submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. Aronnax, his manservant Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land become involuntary guests aboard the Nautilus, which tours the world's oceans: the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Antarctic, the North Atlantic, and dozens of remarkable sites in between. Nemo is hospitable, scientifically brilliant, and absolutely unwilling to allow them to leave.
Nemo is Verne's most complex creation, an aristocrat of unknown origin who has renounced the surface world entirely, supports revolutionary movements from the profits of sunken treasure, feeds the poor of Crete, and periodically attacks warships with the Nautilus in acts of political violence he never explains. His name in Latin means "nobody," and his deliberate anonymity is the novel's central mystery. Aronnax genuinely admires him; Ned Land finds his imprisonment intolerable regardless of its intellectual stimulation; Conseil is professionally indifferent to everything except accurate zoological classification. These three responses to captivity, structured as a contrast throughout, function as Verne's meditation on the competing claims of freedom and knowledge.
Verne's underwater world is one of the great imaginative achievements of nineteenth-century fiction, the coral forests, the sunken Atlantis, the Antarctic iceberg, the giant squid attack, the undersea walk in diving suits, each described with the precision of a naturalist and the invention of a romantic. Nemo's revelation in L'Île mystérieuse, the 1874 sequel, makes him even more interesting retrospectively. Reading Twenty Thousand Leagues as Verne intended it, as a novel of wonders whose central character is deliberately withheld, is to experience a form of narrative mystery that predates the detective novel while working through very different means.
Jules Verne predicted the internet, the moon landing, and video conferencing in his novels, over 100 years before they happened.
This book is in the public domain , its copyright has expired, meaning it now belongs to everyone. All books on EbookVaultFree are sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library. Downloading them is 100% legal, free, and requires no sign-up.