Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the WorldThe Project Gutenberg eBook of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. *** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook. Details Below. *** *** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. *** Title: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World Author: Jules Verne Translator: Frederick Paul Walter Illustrator: Milo Winter Release date: January 1, 2001 [eBook #2488] Most recently updated: October 25, 2025 Language: English Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488 *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS: AN UNDERWATER TOUR OF THE WORLD *** Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas An Underwater Tour of the World JULES VERNE Translated from the Original French by F. P. Walter Copyright (C) 1999, Frederick Paul Walter. A complete, unabridged translation of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers by Jules Verne, based on the original French texts published in Paris by J. Hetzel et Cie. over the period 1869-71. The paintings of Illinois watercolorist Milo Winter (1888-1956) first appeared in a 1922 juvenile edition published by Rand McNally & Company. VERNE'S TITLE The French title of this novel is Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. This is accurately translated as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the SEAS-rather than the SEA, as with many English editions. Verne's novel features a tour of the major oceans, and the term Leagues in its title is used as a measure not of depth but distance. Ed. Contents Introduction Units of Measure FIRST PART 1. A Runaway Reef 2. The Pros and Cons 3. As Master Wishes 4. Ned Land 5. At Random! 6. At Full Steam 7. A Whale of Unknown Species 8. "Mobilis in Mobili" 9. The Tantrums of Ned Land 10. The Man of the Waters 11. The Nautilus 12. Everything through Electricity 13. Some Figures 14. The Black Current 15. An Invitation in Writing 16. Strolling the Plains 17. An Underwater Forest 18. Four Thousand Leagues Under the Pacific 19. Vanikoro 20. The Torres Strait 21. Some Days Ashore 22. The Lightning Bolts of Captain Nemo 23. "Aegri Somnia" 24. The Coral Realm SECOND PART 1. The Indian Ocean 2. A New Proposition from Captain Nemo 3. A Pearl Worth Ten Million 4. The Red Sea 5. Arabian Tunnel 6. The Greek Islands 7. The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours 8. The Bay of Vigo 9. A Lost Continent 10. The Underwater Coalfields 11. The Sargasso Sea 12. Sperm Whales and Baleen Whales 13. The Ice Bank 14. The South Pole 15. Accident or Incident? 16. Shortage of Air 17. From Cape Horn to the Amazon 18. The Devilfish 19. The Gulf Stream 20. In Latitude 47° 24′ and Longitude 17° 28′ 21. A Mass Execution 22. The Last Words of Captain Nemo 23. Conclusion Introduction "The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us," admits Professor Aronnax early in this novel. "What goes on in those distant depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water? It's almost beyond conjecture." Jules Verne (1828-1905) published the French equivalents of these words in 1869, and little has changed since. 126 years later, a Time cover story on deep-sea exploration made much the same admission: "We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans." This reality begins to explain the dark power and otherworldly fascination of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Born in the French river town of Nantes, Verne had a lifelong passion for the sea. First as a Paris stockbroker, later as a celebrated author and yachtsman, he went on frequent voyages-to Britain, America, the Mediterranean. But the specific stimulus for this novel was an 1865 fan letter from a fellow writer, Madame George Sand. She praised Verne's two early novels Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), then added: "Soon I hope you'll take us into the ocean depths, your characters traveling in diving equipment perfected by your science and your imagination." Thus inspired, Verne created one of literature's great rebels, a freedom fighter who plunged beneath the waves to wage a unique form of guerilla warfare. Initially, Verne's narrative was influenced by the 1863 uprising of Poland against Tsarist Russia. The Poles were quashed with a violence that appalled not only Verne but all Europe. As originally conceived, Verne's Captain Nemo was a Polish nobleman whose entire family had been slaughtered by Russian troops. Nemo builds a fabulous futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, then conducts an underwater campaign of vengeance against his imperialist oppressor. But in the 1860s France had to treat the Tsar as an ally, and Verne's publisher Pierre Hetzel pronounced the book unprintable. Verne reworked its political content, devising new nationalities for Nemo and his great enemy-information revealed only in a later novel, The Mysterious Island (1875); in the present work Nemo's background remains a dark secret. In all, the novel had a difficult gestation. Verne and Hetzel were in constant conflict and the book went through multiple drafts, struggles reflected in its several working titles over the period 1865-69: early on, it was variously called Voyage Under the Waters, Twenty-five Thousand Leagues Under the Waters, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Waters, and A Thousand Leagues Under the Oceans. Verne is often dubbed, in Isaac Asimov's phrase, "the world's first science-fiction writer." And it's true, many of his sixty-odd books do anticipate future events and technologies: From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Hector Servadac (1877) deal in space travel, while Journey to the Center of the Earth features travel to the earth's core. But with Verne the operative word is "travel," and some of his best-known titles don't really qualify as sci-fi: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) and Michael Strogoff (1876) are closer to "travelogs"-adventure yarns in far-away places. These observations partly apply here. The subtitle of the present book is An Underwater Tour of the World, so in good travelog style, the Nautilus's exploits supply an episodic story line. Shark attacks, giant squid, cannibals, hurricanes, whale hunts, and other rip-roaring adventures erupt almost at random. Yet this loose structure gives the novel an air of documentary realism. What's more, Verne adds backbone to the action by developing three recurring motifs: the deepening mystery of Nemo's past life and future intentions, the mounting tension between Nem |