Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne, opens in the year 1866, when a mysterious phenomenon unsettles the maritime world. Ships of several nations report an enormous, spindle-shaped object, sometimes phosphorescent, moving faster than any whale and larger than any cetacean known to science. The sightings are entered in log-books, and the first chapter lists vessels such as the Governor Higginson, the Columbus, the Helvetia and the Shannon that meet it in different oceans within days of one another.

Public opinion divides. Newspapers joke about the creature, cafés sing about it, and learned societies argue over whether it is a giant narwhal, a kraken or a sea-serpent. The debate seems to end in ridicule, until early 1867 when ships begin to strike something in the dark. The Moravian breaks part of her keel on an unmarked rock, and the Scotia of the Cunard line suffers a similar shock. The monster is no longer a curiosity but a danger to shipping.

The United States prepares a fast frigate to hunt the creature and clear the seas. The narrator is Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French naturalist who happens to be in New York and is invited to join the expedition. He accepts, and brings his devoted servant Conseil, who classifies everything calmly. On board they meet Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner of great skill and a stubborn, practical temper, who doubts the monster is a living animal at all.

The hunt crosses the Atlantic and rounds South America into the Pacific. When the frigate finally engages its quarry, the encounter goes badly. Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land are thrown into the sea and find themselves on the back of the supposed beast. It proves to be a metal vessel, a submarine called the Nautilus.

The three men are taken prisoner by its commander, Captain Nemo, a learned and secretive figure who has cut all ties with life on land. He tells them they may live aboard, but they may never leave. The Nautilus runs entirely on electricity drawn from the sea, and Nemo uses it to roam the oceans of the world, free of any government.

The rest of the book is a voyage of observation and adventure. The captives walk on the sea floor in diving gear, visit a submarine forest, pass among coral reefs, and view the wreck sites and islands of the Pacific. They cross the Indian Ocean, pass through the Red Sea by an underwater tunnel, and reach the Mediterranean. Later chapters take them to the legendary ruins of a vanished continent, an undersea coal mine, the Sargasso Sea, the ice of the South Pole, and a battle with giant squid.

Throughout, Aronnax is fascinated by Nemo and by the science he displays, while Ned Land grows increasingly desperate to escape. Tension between wonder and captivity drives the story toward its last chapters, in which a violent episode and a final flight bring the voyage to its conclusion.