Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World

From the opening

1. A Runaway Reef 2. The Pros and Cons 3. As Master Wishes 4. Ned Land 5. At Random! 6. At Full Steam 7. A Whale of Unknown Species 8. “Mobilis in Mobili” 9. The Tantrums of Ned Land 10. The Man of the Waters 11. The Nautilus 12. Everything through Electricity 13. Some Figures 14. The Black Current 15. An Invitation in Writing 16. Strolling the Plains 17. An Underwater Forest 18. Four Thousand Leagues Under the Pacific 19. Vanikoro 20. The Torres Strait 21. Some Days Ashore 22. The Lightning Bolts of Captain Nemo 23. “Aegri Somnia” 24. The Coral Realm

1. The Indian Ocean 2. A New Proposition from Captain Nemo 3. A Pearl Worth Ten Million 4. The Red Sea 5. Arabian Tunnel 6. The Greek Islands 7. The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours 8. The Bay of Vigo 9. A Lost Continent 10. The Underwater Coalfields 11. The Sargasso Sea 12. Sperm Whales and Baleen Whales 13. The Ice Bank 14. The South Pole 15. Accident or Incident? 16. Shortage of Air 17. From Cape Horn to the Amazon 18. The Devilfish 19. The Gulf Stream 20. In Latitude 47° 24′ and Longitude 17° 28′ 21. A Mass Execution 22. The Last Words of Captain Nemo 23. Conclusion

“The deepest parts of the ocean are totally unknown to us,” admits Professor Aronnax early in this novel. “What goes on in those distant depths? What creatures inhabit, or could inhabit, those regions twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the water? It’s almost beyond conjecture.”

Jules Verne (1828-1905) published the French equivalents of these words in 1869, and little has changed since. 126 years later, a Time cover story on deep-sea exploration made much the same admission: “We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans.” This reality begins to explain the dark power and otherworldly fascination of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

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