20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (With All Original Illustrations). Jules Verne
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Titanic, confesses that this was his favorite book as a teenager, and Cousteau himself, most renowned of marine explorers, called it his shipboard bible.
The present translation is a faithful yet communicative rendering of the original French texts published in Paris by J. Hetzel et Cie.—the hardcover first edition issued in the autumn of 1871, collated with the softcover editions of the First and Second Parts issued separately in the autumn of 1869 and the summer of 1870. Although prior English versions have often been heavily abridged, this new translation is complete to the smallest substantive detail.
Because, as that Time cover story suggests, we still haven’t caught up with Verne. Even in our era of satellite dishes and video games, the seas keep their secrets. We’ve seen progress in sonar, torpedoes, and other belligerent machinery, but sailors and scientists—to say nothing of tourists—have yet to voyage in a submarine with the luxury and efficiency of the Nautilus.
F. P. WALTER
University of Houston
Units of Measure
cable length: In Verne’s context, 600 feet
centigrade: 0° C = freezing water, 37° C = human body temperature, 100° C = boiling water
fathom: 6 feet
gram: Roughly 1/28 of an ounce
milligram: Roughly 1/28,000 of an ounce
kilogram (kilo): Roughly 2.2 pounds
hectare: Roughly 2.5 acres
knot: 1.15 miles per hour
league: In Verne’s context, 2.16 miles
liter: Roughly 1 quart
meter: Roughly 1 yard, 3 inches
millimeter: Roughly 1/25 of an inch
centimeter: Roughly 2/5 of an inch
decimeter: Roughly 4 inches
kilometer: Roughly 6/10 of a mile
myriameter: Roughly 6.2 miles
ton, metric: Roughly 2,200 pounds
FIRST PART
12. Everything Through Electricity
18. Four Thousand Leagues Under the Pacific
22. The Lightning Bolts of Captain Nemo
1. A Runaway Reef
THE YEAR 1866 was marked by a bizarre development, an unexplained and downright inexplicable phenomenon that surely no one has forgotten. Without getting into those rumors that upset civilians in the seaports and deranged the public mind even far inland, it must be said that professional seamen were especially alarmed. Traders, shipowners, captains of vessels, skippers, and master mariners from Europe and America, naval officers from every country, and at their heels the various national governments on these two continents, were all extremely disturbed by the business.
In essence, over a period of time several ships had encountered “an enormous thing” at sea, a long spindle-shaped object, sometimes giving off a phosphorescent glow, infinitely bigger and faster than any whale.
The relevant data on this apparition, as recorded in various logbooks, agreed pretty closely as to the structure of the object or creature in question, its unprecedented speed of movement, its startling locomotive power, and the unique vitality with which it seemed to be gifted. If it was a cetacean, it exceeded in bulk any whale previously classified by science. No naturalist, neither Cuvier nor Lacépède, neither Professor Dumeril nor Professor de Quatrefages, would have accepted the existence of such a monster sight unseen—specifically, unseen by their own scientific eyes.
Striking an average of observations taken at different times—rejecting those timid estimates that gave the object a length of 200 feet, and ignoring those exaggerated views that saw it as a mile wide and three long—you could still assert that this phenomenal creature greatly exceeded the dimensions of anything then known to ichthyologists, if it existed at all.
Now then, it did exist, this was an undeniable fact; and since the human mind dotes on objects of wonder, you can understand the worldwide excitement caused by this unearthly apparition. As for relegating it to the realm of fiction, that