海底两万里 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 0

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 Nemo and hot-tempered harpooner Ned Land, and Ned’s
ongoing schemes to escape from the Nautilus. These unifying threads
tighten the narrative and accelerate its momentum.


Other subtleties occur inside each episode, the textures sparkling
with wit, information, and insight. Verne regards the sea from many
angles: in the domain of marine biology, he gives us thumbnail
sketches of fish, seashells, coral, sometimes in great catalogs that
swirl past like musical cascades; in the realm of geology, he studies
volcanoes literally inside and out; in the world of commerce, he
celebrates the high-energy entrepreneurs who lay the Atlantic Cable or
dig the Suez Canal. And Verne’s marine engineering proves especially
authoritative. His specifications for an open-sea submarine and a
self-contained diving suit were decades before their time, yet modern
technology bears them out triumphantly.


True, today’s scientists know a few things he didn’t: the South Pole
isn’t at the water’s edge but far inland; sharks don’t flip over
before attacking; giant squid sport ten tentacles not eight; sperm
whales don’t prey on their whalebone cousins. This notwithstanding,
Verne furnishes the most evocative portrayal of the ocean depths
before the arrival of Jacques Cousteau and technicolor film.


Lastly the book has stature as a novel of character. Even the
supporting cast is shrewdly drawn: Professor Aronnax, the career
scientist caught in an ethical conflict; Conseil, the compulsive
classifier who supplies humorous tag lines for Verne’s fast facts; the
harpooner Ned Land, a creature of constant appetites, man as heroic
animal.


But much of the novel’s brooding power comes from Captain
Nemo. Inventor, musician, Renaissance genius, he’s a trail-blazing
creation, the prototype not only for countless renegade scientists in
popular fiction, but even for such varied figures as Sherlock Holmes
or Wolf Larsen. However, Verne gives his hero’s brilliance and
benevolence a dark underside—the man’s obsessive hate for his old
enemy. This compulsion leads Nemo into ugly contradictions: he’s a
fighter for freedom, yet all who board his ship are imprisoned there
for good; he works to save lives, both human and animal, yet he
himself creates a holocaust; he detests imperialism, yet he lays
personal claim to the South Pole. And in this last action he falls
into the classic sin of Pride. He’s swiftly punished. The Nautilus
nearly perishes in the Antarctic and Nemo sinks into a growing
depression.


Like Shakespeare’s King Lear he courts death and madness in a great
storm, then commits mass murder, collapses in catatonic paralysis, and
suicidally runs his ship into the ocean’s most dangerous
whirlpool. Hate swallows him whole.


For many, then, this book has been a source of fascination, surely one
of the most influential novels ever written, an inspiration for such
scientists and discoverers as engineer Simon Lake, oceanographer
William Beebe, polar traveler Sir Ernest Shackleton. Likewise
Dr. Robert D. Ballard, finder of the sunken 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 degrees centigrade = freezing water


37 degrees centigrade = human body temperature


100 degrees centigrade = 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 viii