20,000 Leagues Under the Seas , livre ebook

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“… a unique and impressive red, white, and blue-collar collection of refreshing translations of Verne that gives new life to some of the old storyteller's most famous tales.”
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“… this new version emphasizes the wit, theatricality, and brilliance captured by the writer in these remarkable tales. Here is a classic series of adventures that, in spite of technological advances, will still enthrall the reader, and should be part of every young person's library.”
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20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS
A WORLD TOUR UNDERWATER
J ULES V ERNE

TRANSLATED BY
Frederick Paul Walter
WITH 117 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE 1871 FRENCH EDITION

The illustrations are by Alphonse de Neuville (1835–1885) and Édouard Riou (1833–1900) as engraved by Henri-Théophile Hildibrand (1824–1897). They first appeared in the octavo edition of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers published by J. Hetzel et Cie. on November 16, 1871.
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
Translation and critical materials © 2010 by Frederick Paul Walter
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Verne, Jules, 1828–1905.
[Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. English]
20,000 leagues under the seas : a world tour underwater / Jules Verne; translated by Frederick Paul Walter.
p. cm. — (Excelsior Editions)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4663-9 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4664-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Walter, Frederick Paul. II. Title. III. Title: Twenty thousand leagues under the seas.
PQ2469.V4E5 2013
843'.8—dc23
2012023551
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
T RANSLATOR ' S P REFACE
The underwater set pieces in this haunting novel rank with the most imaginative achievements in literature. As usual Verne did his homework—here in the areas of marine science and nautical engineering—but the unforgettable scenes in the book are his own brainchildren. Yes, underwater boats and diving outfits were in use long before he went to press, but that use was dismally restricted—nobody inside the contraptions dared travel out of sight of shore. But in 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas , Verne's futuristic submarine, the Nautilus , goes on an ocean voyage covering 49,000+ miles, and its diving-suited passengers hike across the seafloor at depths of 500 to 1,000 feet.
Real life would take many decades to catch up. The 19th century's top submersible performance was an 1898 run along the Atlantic seaboard from Norfolk to Sandy Hook—barely 120 nautical leagues, let alone 20,000. Only in the 1950s would nuclear subs and atmospheric diving suits match the undersea doings in Verne's story. Consequently the novel's highlights are spectacular feats of imagination: when the Nautilus goes aground on a reef, streaks through an underwater tunnel, descends into a miles-deep trench, or gets sealed up in antarctic ice, Verne had nobody's true-life example to lean on—he took a few bits of décor from the textbooks, but he himself conceived or extrapolated the action at stage center.
In the process he gives us a pageant of the deep, and his sequences for hard-hat divers are especially vivid: they're set in undersea forests, coral graveyards, oyster beds—even the sunken ruins of Atlantis, here making their first appearance in popular fiction. Verne sprinkles his backgrounds with fish, seashells, and zoophytes lifted from the treatises of Buffon, Lacépède, and the ranking French scientists of his day, but he puts together his foreground events and effects on his own.
So 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas presents a uniquely rich, crowded panorama. The novel was first serialized in the family periodical Magasin d'éducation et de récréation: the science here is extensive, in line with the educational side of the magazine's mission. Accordingly the tale is told by a leading marine biologist, his field notes heighten the story's verisimilitude, and there are frequent checklists of aquatic life forms. They're “on the dry side,” the narrator admits, hinting that it's okay to skate over them. Some readers find them fascinating all the same: big-name fans of the novel have included such undersea specialists as Jacques Cousteau, William Beebe, and Robert Ballard.
In one additional way 20,000 Leagues differs from other Verne favorites: its plot isn't goal-driven. There's no equivalent here to, say, aiming at the moon, heading for the earth's core, or going on a global junket with an 80-day deadline—instead we experience an unprecedented state of being, a new alternative existence . The Nautilus belongs to a shadowy, mystical, preternaturally imposing man who calls himself Captain Nemo: his destiny, we're told, is to “live out his entire life in the heart of this immense sea, and even his grave lay ready in its impregnable depths.” Nemo heads up a multinational crew who share his values, speak their own private dialect, even have a sign language for treks on the ocean floor. Who are these refugees? What are they after? Why do they lead this alternative lifestyle beneath the sea? These mysteries are the book's undertow, and Chapter 45 , just before the end, gives the outlines of an answer. This, too, will prove an innovative and imaginative achievement.
My translation is based on the Livre de Poche red-cover reissue of the French original, double-checked against the many available online texts as well as early Hetzel and Hachette editions.
FREDERICK PAUL WALTER
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Note: In this novel of undersea exploration, Verne reports travel distances using a 19th century “nautical league,” which is equivalent to roughly 2½ statute miles.

Jules Verne
(1828–1905)
PART ONE
1. A R UNAWAY R EEF
he year 1866 was marked by a peculiar development, a baffling, bewildering phenomenon that surely nobody has forgotten. Without getting into those rumors that troubled civilians in the seaports and muddled public thinking even far inland, it must be said that professional seamen were especially alarmed. Traders, shipowners, sea captains, skippers and master mariners from Europe and America, naval officers everywhere, and at their heels the various national governments on those two continents all were extremely disturbed by the business.
In essence, over a period of time several ships had met up with “an enormous thing” at sea, a long spindle-shaped object that sometimes gave off a phosphorescent glow and was infinitely larger and faster than a whale.
As entered in various logbooks, the relevant data on this apparition agreed pretty closely as to the makeup of the object or creature in question, the record-setting speed of its movements, its startling ability to get from one location to another, and the unique energy it seemed to enjoy. If it was a cetacean, it exceeded in bulk any whale classified by science to that day. No naturalist, not Cuvier or Lacépède or Messrs. Duméril and de Quatrefages, would have accepted the existence of such a monster unless he'd seen it himself—seen it, let's emphasize, with his own trained scientific eyes.
After striking an average of the estimates made on various occasions—ignoring the timid appraisals that gave the object a length of only 200 feet and excluding the exaggerated claims that it was a mile wide and three long—you could state that this phenomenal creature exceeded by far any dimensions previously acknowledged by ichythologists, assuming it existed in the first place.
Now then, it did exist, this was an undeniable fact, and since the human mind is automatically partial to wondrous things, you can appreciate the worldwide excitement caused by this uncanny apparition. As for relegating it to the realm of fish stories, that charge had to be dropped.

A runaway reef.
To get down to cases, on July 20, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson from the Calcutta & Burnach Steam Navigation Co. met up with this moving mass 500 miles off the east coast of Australia. At first Captain Baker thought he was facing an unknown reef; he was even getting ready to fix its exact position, when two waterspouts shot out of this bewildering object and sprang hissing into the air some 150 feet. So unless this reef was subject to the sporadic eruptions of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had fair and honest dealings with some aquatic mammal, unknown till that moment, whose blowholes spurted waterspouts mixed with air and steam.
Similar events were likewise witnessed in Pacific seas, on July 23 of the same year, by the Christopher Columbus from the West India & Pacific Steam Navigation Co. Consequently this extraordinary cetacean could transfer itself from one locality to another with surprising speed, since, within the space of just three days, the Governor Higginson and the Christopher Columbus had spotted it at two positions on the charts separated by a distance of more than 700 nautical leagues.
Two weeks later and 2,000 leagues farther, the Helvetia from the French transatlantic line and the Shannon from the Royal Mail fleet, running on opposite tacks in that part of the Atlantic lying between the United States and Europe, respectively signaled each other that they'd sighted the monster in latitude 42° 15′ north and longitude 60° 35′ west of the meridian of Greenwich. In their simultaneous estimates they were able to put