Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas

Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist, his devoted servant Conseil, and the blunt Canadian harpooner Ned Land sail aboard an American frigate hunting a sea monster reported across the world's shipping lanes in 1866, only to discover the monster is a submarine, the Nautilus, commanded by the brilliant, embittered Captain Nemo. Nemo takes the three men prisoner rather than let them reveal his existence, and for months he carries them through coral forests, the wreck strewn Antarctic ice, and the sunken ruins Verne imagines as the last remains of Atlantis, alternating genuine scientific wonder with Nemo's private, unexplained grief over a homeland conquered and a family he will not discuss. Nemo's rage finally surfaces when the Nautilus rams and sinks a warship in what reads as an act of personal vengeance, and the horrified Aronnax, Conseil, and Land seize their chance to escape soon after, abandoning ship as the Nautilus is drawn into a maelstrom off the coast of Norway. What becomes of Nemo and his submarine afterward, Verne leaves open, a question he would only answer years later in a different novel.

Verne grounds even the Nautilus's most fantastic capabilities in real engineering of the period, drawing on the French submarine Plongeur, which he studied firsthand at the 1867 Paris exposition, and on two rival types of 1860s diving apparatus that he combines into Nemo's own gear. The title itself describes distance traveled rather than depth, some twenty thousand leagues, nearly twice around the earth, and the book moves at the unhurried pace of a voyage of discovery rather than a chase, more interested in what the ocean actually contains than in mounting tension.

Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton's real 1800 submarine, itself named for the chambered mollusk.