I’ve decided that, as a fan of the steampunk genre, it’s a shame and a crime that I haven’t read more Jules Verne. As a fan of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, not reading the original tale of Captain Nemo is just unacceptable.
A classic science fiction story along the lines of Journey To The Center of the Earth, Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea tells the story of three castaways – Professor Pierre Aronnax, his manservant Conseil, and the whaling shipman Ned Land – as they’re swept up in the travels of the mysterious Captain Nemo in his submersible, the Nautilus. It works as a character study, as an adventure story, and as a treasure for anyone who’s even a little bit curious about the sea and everything it contains (or at least everything that Victorian scientists thought it might contain.)
And of course the Nautilus is a straight-out steampunk fantasy. It’s a submarine. With a library. How can you not love that?
The biggest star of the novel is the Nautilus itself. Verne lingers over the submersible’s design and the science behind it; how the ship can withstand the pressure of the ocean’s depths, the electricity that powers it, the propulsion systems and how it can carry enough air to stay under for more than a day (pressurized air tanks, a larger version of the same system they use for their diving suits, something which wouldn’t be invented until at least fifty years after this book was published). At the beginning of the book Professor Aronnax hypothesizes that the mysterious object zipping from place to place across the ocean damaging ships has to be an undiscovered monster, since of course the Almighty Creator can make an animal that big and powerful and fast-moving, but the idea that humans could build something like that? Crazy talk.
Balancing out the science is loving descriptions of the fantastical interior of the submersible. Captain Nemo intends to spend the rest of his life aboard the Nautilus, and he’s gone to a lot of effort to make it comfortable. The passenger sections include an oak-paneled dining room, a library (I have to squee about that again here: a library!) with rosewood and copper shelves and comfy chairs, a museum filled with paintings by the old masters, and a natural history collection with glass cases stuffed full of scientific specimens and treasures from the sea. And just in case you’re bored with science, art, literature, and the comforts of wealth, the interior walls of the museum pull back to reveal long windows looking out on the sea on both sides of the submersible. The steampunk genre uses Verne’s novels for a lot of its inspiration, and to me the Nautilus is the crown jewel of Verne’s designs.
Aboard this amazing (and yet still grounded in actual science) vessel, the characters move from adventure to adventure, traveling within arms reach of an active underwater volcano, fleeing from cannibals, going on underwater hunting expeditions through forests of coral, wandering through the ruins of a sunken city (three guesses which city, and the first two don’t count), fighting a kraken, and having to escape from being frozen solid in the ice while rapidly running out of air. The science can be a little off sometimes; I can’t imagine there’s much chance that even the Nautilus’s high-tech diving suits would keep someone from freezing to death while using a pickax to dig away ice underwater in the Antarctic. (“The water struck me as unusually cold.” Gosh, Professor, ya think?) But most of it is based on the knowledge at the time, rather than strictly fantasy.
Verne doesn’t skimp on the scientific details in this book. Every chapter has at least one section where Professor Aronnax goes on for paragraphs at a time, giving the scientific classifications for all the fish they’re seeing. Or the coral. Or the shellfish. Or the geological formations of whatever landmass they’re traveling past and how it effects the weather. There’s two solid pages where Captain Nemo lists all of the explorers who have tried to reach the South Pole, plus the dates they traveled and how close they came. Any other author and all of this would be footnotes, but here the Professor just stops in the middle of the story and for at least twenty different critters seen outside will give order and phylum, habitat and behavior and, hilariously, how a lot of them taste and whether they’re easy to kill. It can be a little dry sometimes (dry, ha, see what I did there?) but mostly there’s something irresistibly charming about all the Victorian enthusiasm for getting out every detail and making sure everything’s sorted into its correct category.
A pleasant surprise amongst all the decor and SCIENCE and obsessive cataloging is the fun interactions between the characters. On their own they each might come across as a little one dimensional: Professor Aaronax is caught up in the scientific wonder of it all, Conseil has absolutely no goals of his own other than taking care of the Professor, and Ned Land is cast as the typical American (okay, Canadian) with a quick temper and a fondness for killing and eating anything bigger than a pocket watch. But Verne created a very improbably friendship between the three of them, and there were several scenes that made me smile: Ned scaring Conseil by pretending that even cannibalism sounded good compared to eating nothing but fish, Conseil teasing Ned about his improbable stories about whales, or the conversation where the Professor is freaking out about going shark-hunting later and determined to not let it show, except that he keeps accidentally replacing random words with the word “shark”.
The whole voyage would have been an extended holiday, if it weren’t for their mysterious captain. And there’s also the fact that they’re not allowed to leave. Ever.
“Professor,” the commander replied swiftly, “I’m not what you term a civilized man! I’ve severed all ties with society, for reasons that I alone have the right to appreciate. Therefore I obey none of its regulations, and I insist that you never invoke them in front of me!”
In adaptations I’ve seen or read before, Captain Nemo has always been portrayed as single-mindedly pursuing revenge, but in the novel it’s much more complicated. He’s a scientist and inventor, an art-lover and adventurer, and a terrifying fighter; at one point the man goes toe to toe with a shark using only a knife. The life he’s made for himself aboard the Nautilus has as much to do with his love of the sea as it does with his rejection of humanity. He’s also unshakably loyal to his crew, as we see when he becomes distraught over a a crew member’s death. He’s exiled himself from civilization, but he shows that he hasn’t completely lost his compassion when he helps to rescue a fisherman from a shark attack, and then without a word gives the terrified man a bag of pearls before disappearing again beneath the waves. Nemo swears he’ll never again set foot on land that’s been touched by the rest of humanity, but has personal reasons to have sympathy for the oppressed.
“It was no ordinary misanthropy that kept Captain Nemo and his companions sequestered inside the Nautilus’s plating, but a hate so monstrous or so sublime that the passing years could never weaken it.”
Nemo still has an unexplained vendetta against civilization, but what’s almost as scary is how he’s cut himself off from not just humanity, but all of humanity’s rules. The Professor and Conseil and Ned stumble across the Nautilus by accident, and Nemo makes it clear that they’ll be prisoners for the rest of their lives. Period. No discussion; Nemo is fiercely dismissive when the subject is brought up, and he concerned that any of them might have lives they would want to return to. The Professor keeps trying to make the best of it – a trip like this for a marine biologist is worth a lifetime of study – but he can’t ignore the fact that while he’s okay with staying on the Nautilus forever, Conseil might not be, and Ned definitely isn’t. When Nemo takes the opportunity to sink a ship and slaughter the entire crew for reasons that are never fully explained, the Professor finally has to admit that the only choice is to escape.
That was one of the saddest parts of the book for me. For Professor Aronnax, the voyage aboard the Nautilus has been better than a dream. There’s so much he’s been able to experience: walking through the beauty of a submerged, petrified forest, witnessing a burial held in an underwater cemetery surrounded by a garden of coral, traveling through a secret tunnel that connects the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and getting to see every possible kind of life that the ocean has to offer. Walking away now means losing all of that, and everything else he could have seen if he stayed. The details of the escape and the happy (sort of) ending seem kind of secondary to that very poignant moment when the Professor stands by himself in center of the museum of the Nautilus, looking at all of the treasures around him and trying to store it all up in his memory, and then walks out of the room forever.