Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1870
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1870
The ocean has a monster. Or so every ship captain claims when they return to port with wild stories of something massive moving beneath the waves. When the U.S. Navy mounts an expedition to kill this creature, French oceanographer Pierre Aronnax finds himself aboard the Abraham Lincoln, chasing a legend across the Pacific with his loyal servant Conseil and the irascible Canadian harpooner Ned Land. What they discover defies everything they know: the Nautilus, a submarine decades ahead of its time, commanded by the enigmatic Captain Nemo, a man of science and vengeance, of genius and ghosts. Forced aboard this vessel of wonder and terror, Aronnax and his companions embark on an odyssey spanning 20,000 leagues, witnessing coral cathedrals beneath the sea, the ruins of Atlantis, battles with giant squid, and the crushing silence of miles-deep trenches. This is the novel that invented submarine fiction, a book so prescient that its vision of underwater exploration feels less like 19th-century fantasy and more like prophecy. It asks what drives human curiosity, what price we pay for knowledge, and whether we can ever truly master the world beneath the waves.
Editions
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“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. ””
— Jules Verne
“We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.””
— Jules Verne
“If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.””
— Jules Verne
“The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.””
— Jules Verne
“Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not””
— Jules Verne
“Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.””
— Jules Verne
“Mobilis in Mobile””
— Jules Verne
“If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.””
— Jules Verne
“The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence... For the sea is itself nothing but love and emotion. It is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets has said. Nature manifests herself in it, with her three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. The ocean is the vast reservoir of Nature.””
— Jules Verne
