first edition 20000 leagues under the sea

This also allowed life-long fan and mini-submarines builder Pat Regan to publish a sequel (mostly inspired by Disney's movie), titled Vulcanium. Sadly, it is also the most common translation-check your bookshelves for this version!

8 times that of water, while Verne really wrote 7.8 times that of water, which is the correct value). This translation, done by the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier, is widely considered to be the worst translation of the book it is riddled with errors and censorship, as well as incorrect numbers (for example, the density of steel is given as. Alternatively, check out the most common edition here. This English translation, done by Verne scholar Frederick Paul Walter, is a modern, highly accurate translation of the book, free of the errors that many other editions of the book have. The book is now out of copyright, and the original French text can be obtained from Project Gutenberg here. A Saturday Night Live sketch with guest host Kelsey Grammer as Nemo lampshaded this misconception. The translation is partly to blame a closer translation would be Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the 'Seas', which is sometimes used in more modern translations. 20,000 leagues vertically would be impossible, being 80,000 kilometers, note Verne used the metric league, which is 4 km or twice the circumference of the Earth. The novel has a sequel, The Mysterious Island, which tells Nemo's Back Story.įun fact that people sometimes forget: the title refers to the distance the Nautilus travels horizontally over the course of the book, not the depth it dives to. Aronnax finds himself torn between his passionate interest in marine biology and his desire for freedom-should he try to escape with his comrades or stay and find out why Nemo sails around the world? While refusing to put our heroes ashore, he lets them live, and takes them on a fantastic journey under the seas of the world, showing them the many wonders of the world beneath the waves. The mysterious narwhal is in fact not a whale, but a high-tech electric submarine known as the Nautilus, owned and designed by the mysterious and eccentric Captain Nemo. They clamber onto the only dry spot in the sea, namely the narwhal's back, expecting to drown as soon as it dives. Once they find the narwhal, it attacks, causing Aronnax, his trusty manservant Conseil and Ned Land, the ship's Canadian harpoonist, to fall overboard (well, Conseil jumped, to rescue the Professor). It has a strong focus on technology, existentialism, and marine biology.ĭuring a visit to America, Professor Aronnax, a famous French marine biologist, is invited to join a US Navy expedition in the hunt for a mysterious sea monster (believed to be a giant narwhal) that has attacked and damaged two ships. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a 1869 French adventure novel by Jules Verne.

First edition 20000 leagues under the sea