Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne - Free Book Summary
Introduction to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea “In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon…” And so, the first voyage of Professor Pierre Aronnax begins and with it an entire history of science fiction literature. In my personal opinion, all science fiction books look back to this magnificent beginning and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a very good place to dive into this world. Join French oceanic scientist, Professor Aronnax, to the adventure of a lifetime, together with the captain of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo. The narrator of the story, Professor Aronnax, boards an American frigate on its way to investigate attacks on international shipping by an amphibious monster. The sea creature, who turns out to be the submarine Nautilus, sinks the vessel and imprisons Aronnax together with his devoted servant Conseil and the ship’s Canadian harpooner, Ned Land. The three meet Captain Nemo, who leads them on a worldwide underwater adventure. "Hey Ruth, Just what I needed! Thanks for the book summary..." During the late years of the nineteenth century, the world was rocked by reports of a strange and gigantic sea creature that traveled the open seas, attacking and sinking ships. It appeared to be 150 feet long and moved at amazing speeds—much faster than modern vessels. Professor Aronnax, a marine-life researcher for the Museum of Paris, theorized that the creature was a huge narwhal, native to waters so deep that it had to be much larger and stronger than an average sea-going mammal. At any rate, whatever the monster was, it was strong enough to punch holes in the sides of even the strongest cast iron ships, sending them to the ocean floor. On the high seas, Captain Farragut, chief officer of the Abraham Lincoln, ordered his crew to track the menace and destroy it. Professor Aronnax was asked to accompany them in order to identify the mysterious monster. After a lengthy search, Farragut finally sighted his deadly quarry. All day long the creature led the steamer through a taunting game of tag; at night it lay as a sinister shadow on the surface, a phosphorous light shining from its bulk. Finally, the command was given and the ship steamed toward its target. When they were almost upon the monster, Ned Land, the ship’s expert harpooner, thrust his weapon directly into it. To his horror, the harpoon barely made a dent. Suddenly, a rushing torrent broke on the steamers deck and washed the professor, his servant Conseil, and the harpooner Ned overboard. As they floundered half conscious in the dark swells, they caught their last glimpse of the frigate, a crippled and shadowy hulk torn from stern to rudder. The abandoned group was ready to give up, until they felt something firm under their feet and found themselves standing on the creature itself—a beast made of sheet iron! Soon a hatch opened; eight men appeared and politely guided the three survivors inside the metal monster. This free book summary of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is complimentary from the www.free-book-summary.com website. Want to say Thanks? Tell about the book summary to your friends, link to it from your blog, or include a link to it in a book report forum. Cheers! The castaways were given clothing and a meal of various seafood selections. Finally, the commander of the mysterious vessel appeared. Tall and imposing, Captain Nemo introduced his crew. Then, with an air of troubled annoyance, he accused Aronnax and his companions of trying to destroy his submarine, the Nautilus. “I am not what you call a civilized man!” Nemo warned his new prisoners. “I am done with society entirely. I do not obey its laws and I want you never to refer to them before me again.” With the exception of a few occasions when they were ordered to retire to their cabins, Aronnax, Ned, and Conseil were given free run of Captain Nemo’s intricately appointed submarine—but they were denied permission ever to leave the Nautilus. “In retaining you,” Nemo told them, “it is not you that I guard but myself. I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo and you are nothing to me but passengers of the Nautilus.” Professor Aronnax was immediately intrigued by his jailer-host and asked many questions. During one conversation at the dinner table, Nemo declared his passion for the ocean depths: “The sea does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces and be carried away with earthly horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their control ends. There I recognize no masters. There I am free!” Aronnax was also captivated by Nemo’s magnificent craft. A tour of the submarine revealed lavish furnishings, European art, and a vast library of twelve thousand volumes. The many complex devices and inventions that made the vessel a splendidly intricate and self-sufficient organism were no less remarkable. Besides being able to net its own food from the sea and to store the oxygen that allowed it to remain submerged for days at a time, the submarine was powered entirely by electricity—generated from refined sodium, an extract of sea water. Shaped like a 232-foot-long cigar with armor plating, the Nautilus was capable of speeds up to fifty miles an hour; its high-intensity lamp could shine half a mile into the darkest depths. Nemo had avoided detection as he built this huge vessel by obtaining each part from a different corner of the world and then assembling the craft on a deserted island. Clearly, Captain Nemo was a man of enormous wealth—and genius. But Nemo’s submarine held one treasure that the marine biologist considered the most wonderful of all: in the forward room, two metal panels slid apart to reveal a great port-window view of the underwater panorama. The beautiful and vast variety of exotic fish drew gasps from the newcomers to the Nautilus. “Ah, I understand the life of this man,” Aronnax marveled. “He has made a world apart for himself in which he treasures all its greatest wonders.” After several days of enjoying the library and museum, Aronnax received an invitation from Nemo to accompany him on a walk—a walk on the sea floor. During their excursion, they explored Crespo, an underwater forest. Aronnax, far from feeling imprisoned, was more than content to remain on this marvelous submarine. Ned Land, however, did not share this love of the depths. One day, when the Nautilus ran aground on an island near Borneo, he begged permission to go ashore to hunt for game and to feel solid earth beneath his feet one last time. Nemo granted Ned and his companions a brief leave. The next day, island natives attacked the hunters, forcing them to again seek safety aboard the Nautilus. When Aronnax informed Nemo that the island was inhabited by savages, the captain replied, “Savages! Where are there not any? Besides are they worse than others, these whom you call savages?” While Nemo waited for the high tide to carry his submarine from its sandy perch, the natives surrounded it and tried to board the craft. But when they grasped the handrails, a paralyzing “thunder bolt” of electricity threw them off and sent them fleeing back to their dugouts. The Nautilus resumed its voyage; and Dr. Aronnax continued his daily log, noting every new wonder he saw. The port window revealed a whole world of exotic living marvels; creatures of every size, shape, and color lived in the depths. Then one day Nemo announced, without explanation, that the professor and his companions would be must stay in their rooms for a time. Locked within, they were fed a delicious dinner—food that turned out to be tainted with drugs. When Aronnax awoke, he realized that the sub had been in some kind of battle; but only later did he discover what had happened. This free book summary of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is complimentary from the www.free-book-summary.com website. Want to say Thanks? Tell about the book summary to your friends, link to it from your blog, or include a link to it in a book report forum. Cheers! Some days later, when they reached the coast of Ceylon, Nemo suggested the group go shark hunting—without guns. “Don’t mountaineers attack the bear with a dagger in their hand,” Nemo reasoned, “and isn’t steel surer than lead?” On their hunt the adventurers came across a huge oyster, which Nemo pried open, revealing a pearl the size of a coconut. Eventually, they came upon another hunter—an Indian skin diver, searching for pearls. Then, from the rocks where they had hidden themselves to observe the diver, they watched in horror as a large shark swam menacingly closer. As man and shark met and grappled, the shark struck the diver with its tail, knocking him senseless. Armed with only a knife, Nemo intervened. The shark turned on the captain, and he stabbed at it desperately, again and again, but soon the powerful jaws of the predator pinned him to the ocean floor with the intent of snapping him in two. At that last, desperate moment, Ned rose from hiding and swiftly plunged his harpoon deep into the heart of the enraged beast. When the little group gratefully reached the surface, Nemo gave the Indian diver a bag of valuable pearls. “That Indian is an inhabitant of an oppressed country,” he explained cryptically, “and I am still to my last breath one of them!” Not until the expedition had returned to the Nautilus did Nemo thank Ned. Ned’s stinging reply was terse: “I owed you that.” After a harrowing voyage to the Antarctic—in which the Nautilus was nearly crushed by icebergs and run aground by strong ocean currents—the submarine made its way to the Mediterranean by way of a secret passage under the Isthmus of Suez, anchoring near the site of a shipwreck. Here Aronnax finally learned the source of Nemo’s fortune: the captain had been plundering the treasures of sunken ships. And what was to be the destiny of all this treasure? Nemo’s vague reply was, “Do you think these riches are lost because I gather them? Do you think I don’t know there are suffering beings and oppressed races on the earth? Do you not understand?” Once again the Nautilus resumed its journey. On one occasion, the vessel was attacked by a huge school of octopi. Surfacing, the crew—including Ned and the professor—struggled to the deck armed with axes. As Ned struck savagely with his harpoon at the invaders, he was knocked to the deck. Then, just as one of the monsters was about to sink its sharp beak into Ned’s body, Nemo emerged from behind and clubbed it, allowing Ned to escape and plunge his harpoon through its heart. Now he had settled his score with Land. Nevertheless, one of the Nautilus’ crew had been killed, and Nemo could not hide the tears that rushed down his cheeks. The restless Ned finally convinced Aronnax to ask once more for their release. Aronnax confronted Nemo. “You impose actual slavery upon us,” he charged. But Nemo coldly refused the request, an act that made even Aronnax determined to escape at the earliest opportunity. One day, an approaching vessel fired off several volleys at the Nautilus. Furious, Nemo laid plans to counterattack. He retreated and hid from the hostile ship for a day; then, once the enemy’s guard was down, he turned and sped back towards it, ramming it and passing completely through its hull. Below deck, the professor could only gaze helplessly through the window, appalled at the unfortunate crew’s fate. And the sight of the struggling, drowning men was too much for even Nemo to bear. When the professor saw him again, Nemo was weeping in his own cabin, kneeling, his arms outstretched towards a picture of his family, murmuring in despair. “Almighty God, enough! Enough!” The desperate men were now determined to leave the Nautilus and the fits of its captain by any means possible. Jumping on a side boat, they fought to cut the riggings. Just then the submarine began to dive, and all at once their small craft was wrenched from its moorings by the submerging craft’s whirlpool. Somehow, through some miracle, Aronnax and his companions awoke on dry land. To the end of their lives they were left to wonder about the fate of the Nautilus—the vessel that had shown them the ocean’s magical secrets—and that had left them to consider forever all the secrets of Captain Nemo. "Ruth, My sincere thanks to you for a book summary well done!" Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was first published in French in 1870. It is the most known book of his science-fiction series Voyages Extraordinaires, following the adventures of Professor Pierre Aronnax. This book is noted for the technological innovations it describes so early in the development of science fiction literature, and the tense relationship among the three captives and Captain Nemo. It also introduces the Nautilus, which came before our modern nuclear submarines. In fact, though most of the inventions described in Nemo’s delicately detailed underwater world have long been passed by reality, Verne’s uncanny speculations also include some technology that modern science has yet to achieve. Jules Verne (1828–1905) fills his work with the most detailed observations. He identifies thousands of species of marine life, using Latin names familiar only to the most experienced marine biologist. The author himself had a deep love for the sea, and ran away from home at an early age to enlist on a ship as a cabin boy, only to be retrieved by anxious parents. In a later work, Mysterious Island, Verne unravels many mysteries about the fate of the Nautilus and the secrets of its charismatic captain Nemo that are left so intriguingly unanswered in Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The Complete Book Verne, Jules. Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
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