Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

About this book

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is Jules Verne’s novel of a voyage around the world’s oceans aboard a submarine, the Nautilus, commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. It was published in French in 1870 as part of Verne’s long series of Voyages extraordinaires. The “twenty thousand leagues” of the title measures the distance the ship travels, roughly 80,000 kilometers; the depth of the ocean is far smaller.

The book has lasted because of Nemo and the Nautilus. Verne imagined an electrically powered submarine with a library, a museum, and an organ, decades before such vessels existed in any comparable form, and he gave it a captain whose reasons for leaving the land are only partly explained. The combination of technical detail and a withheld backstory has kept readers returning, and the name Nautilus has since been given to real submarines in his honor.

The story

In 1866 ships around the world report encounters with an enormous sea creature that moves faster than any vessel and can hole a steamship’s hull. The United States sends a frigate to hunt it, and among those aboard are Pierre Aronnax, a French professor of marine biology; his servant Conseil, who classifies everything he sees; and Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner. When the frigate finds its quarry, the three men are thrown into the sea and discover that the monster is a machine.

They are taken aboard the Nautilus by its captain, who calls himself Nemo and tells them they will never be allowed to leave. What follows is a tour of the world’s oceans: the coral beds of the Indian Ocean, the pearl fisheries of Ceylon, an underwater tunnel beneath Suez, the lost city of Atlantis, the ice of the South Pole, and the giant squid of the Atlantic. Aronnax is fascinated; Ned Land wants to escape; and Nemo’s hatred of some unnamed enemy on land gradually comes to the surface.

Themes and historical context

Verne wrote the novel in the late 1860s, a decade of rapid progress in oceanography and marine engineering. Real submarines had been tried in the American Civil War, undersea telegraph cables were being laid, and aquariums had opened in European cities. Verne read widely in the scientific literature and built his fiction on it, which is why the book includes long passages on fish species, ocean currents, and the mechanics of the ship.

The novel’s other current is political. Nemo has withdrawn from human society and declares himself free of its laws, and the book hints that he has been the victim of some oppression by an imperial power. Verne’s publisher asked him to keep the captain’s nationality and grievance vague, and the result is a character who can be read as a freedom fighter, a terrorist, or a grieving man, depending on the reader. Verne returned to Nemo in a later novel, The Mysterious Island.

Themes include the appeal and danger of total independence, the sea as both refuge and prison, and the tension between scientific wonder (Aronnax) and the simple desire to go home (Ned Land).

Who should read it

The novel runs to around 140,000 words in English and is divided into two parts of roughly equal length. Readers should know going in that Verne stops the story at intervals to list what the characters see through the windows. Some find these catalogs tedious and skim them; others find they are the point. The adventure set pieces are vivid and the central mystery of Nemo carries the book. It is a good choice for readers who liked Around the World in Eighty Days and want something longer and stranger.

Edition notes

This Project Gutenberg text is an English translation whose translator is not named in the catalog record. Several nineteenth-century English versions of the novel shortened or altered Verne’s text; readers who want a complete modern translation may wish to compare editions. The Project Gutenberg record credits a number of anonymous volunteers with its preparation.