3. A mysterious beast is attacking ships the world over. The famous
oceanographer, Pierre Aronnax, thinks that the beast is a
gargantuan narwhale So, Aronnax is invited on a special mission
by the U.S. Secretary of the Navy to board the USS Abraham
Lincoln and begin hunting for this sea creature. After weeks of
searching, the ship finally encounters the beast, but it's simply no
match for it.
Aronnax is thrown overboard when the monster rams the ship,
which leads his servant Conseil to go in after him. The two
struggle to get back onboard the Lincoln, only to end up on the
deck of some other vessel.
4. All is not well on the new ship. A bunch of men throw Aronnax, Conseil,
and Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner, into a cell below deck. Soon
after, they are visited by their crazy captain, who reveals that he can
speak all of the languages that they speak—French, German, English,
and Latin—even though he pretended not to at first. So we know very
little about this guy who calls himself Captain Nemo, but he says
already knows who Aronnax and his men are… Anyway, Nemo tells the
guys that he has "broken with humanity" and lives a secret life under
the sea. Not really. Nemo's break with normal people means that our
three main dudes can never go back on land. Nemo says they'll have
freedom onboard his vessel, the Nautilus, except for the fact that he
might lock them up again at any time… which doesn't sound much like
freedom to us.
5. Nemo then announces that he will be taking the Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned on a
voyage through all the world's seas. And boy do they voyage. They hunt in the
underwater forests of Crespo Island and visit Vanikoro, the site of two famous
shipwrecks.
One of their expeditions gets interrupted by cannibals. They travel through the
Indian Ocean and visit a bed of pearls, where Nemo saves a pearl diver from a
shark, and then has to be saved himself—by Ned.
Next, the crew visits some wrecked Spanish galleons carrying tons of gold, where
Nemo solves his cash flow problems. Nemo even takes Aronnax on an expedition
to see the lost city of Atlantis before setting a course for the South Pole. After some
struggling, Nemo miraculously manages to plant his own flag on the Pole And
adventure is beginning... Finally, while sailing north of England, Nemo himself
becomes the target of revenge; he's attacked by an unknown ship. Aronnax is
horrified when Nemo sinks this ship in order to get back at those people who Nemo
says took away his family and his country.
6. Lastly, the Nautilus drifts aimlessly until it encounters… the
Maelstrom. Don't worry, it's just a gigantic deadly vortex of water.
As the Nautilus is being pulled into this vortex, Aronnax, Ned, and
Conseil manage to jump ship. They wake up in a cabin on a
remote Norwegian island.
There, our first-person narrator Aronnax finishes recounting his
wild and wacky voyage. But he hardly answers all of our
questions. Or even most of them. He still doesn't know Nemo's
home country or general backstory—or if he even survived the
Maelstrom.
Aronnax hopes that Nemo survived. And if Nemo did survive, he
hopes that Nemo will be a changed man.
9. Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and
playwright.
Verne's collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages
extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870),
and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he
has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism.[3] His reputation is
markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre
fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in
which his novels have often been printed.[4]
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between
Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare.[5] He has sometimes been called the "Father of
Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, and Hugo
Gernsback.
10.
11. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, novel by Jules Verne, first published
in French as Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers in 1869–70. It is perhaps the most
popular book of his science-fiction series Voyages extraordinaires (1863–1910).
