If I had to choose which of Jules Gabriel Verne’s books was the best, I would probably go with the novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This book is characterized by the four men; Ned Land (the tempered whaler), Captain Nemo (captain of the Nautilus), Monsieur Arronax, and his loyal servant Conseil. The book has the Nautilus and its crew run into a few scrapes, and Ned Land has a temper like a tornado. As Jules Verne lays the foundation for the modern submarine, he not only fascinates readers but allows them to see from the eyes of professor Arronax as he travels the world around in a submarine.
It was almost like Jules Verne could see into the future – the modern submarine fits nearly perfectly his description of it. Maybe, once we get the strength of light and glass portrayed in Verne’s book, we may be able to do everything that he did, even down to the sea diving but with better gear. A regular swim suit with iron boots and a full-face mask is just the thing for the task – simply put on a diving suit with iron boots to keep you on the bottom and a mask for better viewing and you have the ideal gear for that purpose. As he wrote, Verne went down into the details of the ship, even to the point of making a schematic with nothing but pencil, paper, and words. He even went so far as to calculate what shape and thickness of wall would be required to resist that kind of pressure 14000 feet below the surface; he then threw it all casually into the book.
The story initially starts as the sub being counted as some type of infinitely strong and large narwhal. This slowly but surely becomes a hunt to kill the narwhal, and Ned Land, Arronax, and his servant Conseil are invited on the hunt. As they approach the thing, Ned throws his harpoon. Because he expected it to stick, and it didn’t, he lost his balance. The professor and Conseil tried to catch his fall but got pulled over themselves. They were left for dead by the ship they had been on. Luckily, they washed up on top of the supposed “narwhal”. By this time Ned had figured out why his harpoon had bounced off it – it was solid steel. The captain, named Nemo, finds them and lets them in under one condition – they will never leave, and if they do, they will never tell of the ship.
Once they had met the stern captain Nemo, they were thrown into a bare room, with some food ad water. From that point on, they never leave the nautilus except for underwater excursions. In the meantime, though, Ned Land storms around the sub as he waits for a chance to escape. It’s kind of ironic that whenever land comes into sight, he rages about not being on it. That’s funny because his last name is Land. He eventually devises a plan to get off the desolate ship, just before the whole Nautilus goes to debris during the maelstrom.
As they travel, they come to the red sea, and when the Captain says that they would be in the Mediterranean by the next day, M. Arronax asks a question. He asked how the ship, even at its fastest, could go all the way around Africa in only 8 hours? Captain Nemo then told him of the passage under the Suez Canal, through which he had tracked some fish to test its reality. He then tried it himself and succeeded in crossing under the Suez without being seen. I think that if the theory, explained in the book by the Mediterranean’s always being lower than the Red Sea, how the Red Sea fish were also commonly found in the Mediterranean, but nowhere in between, and both of those suggest a channel between them. If it were true, the channel would help submarine shipping drastically by allowing the submarine to cross the area faster than if it was going across the canal itself.
After this discovery, the Nautilus then turned its nose towards the absolute south – the pole itself. They ran into a massive clump of seals that blocked their way for a time, but these eventually moved away, and they traveled on to the pole. Once they reached it, Captain Nemo and M. Arronax climbed to the top of the mountain with the pole on the top, and planted Captain Nemo’s flag there. His flag was a big black banner with a bold red N in the middle. On the way away from the pole, back in the Nautilus, they mistakenly ran between two icebergs which collapsed around them, trapping them underwater. As the workers tried to break away the ten feet of ice, the Nautilus itself had to pump boiling water out to keep the hole from refreezing. After five days with very little air, the Nautilus broke free and gained the surface. After that, the journey north was not very eventful.
If there’s anything I learned from any of these things the people experienced in the book, it’s that foresight can be a great thing. Jules Verne’s foresight laid the foundation for our modern submarine, and while captivating the audience, gives them characters they will never forget.
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