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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World

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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

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

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