20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Jules Verne (F.P. Walter Translation)

★★★★☆

Even though marine science and geology have passed it by, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still a gripping episodic adventure through a strange, hidden world of marvels.

Captain Nemo is compelling and mysterious as ever, if the passengers are rather broadly drawn (at least all three of them are distinct) and the crew is more or less faceless. (Aside from Nemo, the crew doesn’t speak to the passengers, so they’re never able to pick up the Nautilus’ private language.)

And Verne has really thought things through. Like, how did Nemo get something of this scale built without someone noticing? He farmed out different parts and systems to different factories scattered across the world. Ocean-based textiles, undersea mines, an isolated source of fuel that no surface-based ship will find.

Even the parts where he made up oceanography out of whole cloth, like the deeper outflow throgh Gibraltar (which as it turns out does exist, but not for the reasons Nemo suggests, which have since been found to be incorrect) or the open sea at the south pole (which doesn’t) – or Atlantis, for that matter, with the Canaries as the remnants of the sunken peaks – have at least some logic beyond the rule of cool.

I read an abridged version years ago, when I was in my early teens, and I’ve been meaning to read the whole thing ever since. I’m glad I finally got around to it! Though I suspect a lot of the abridgment had to do with the frequent (and lengthy) lists of fish.

Now I need to finally read The Mysterious Island…

Finding this Translation

The edition I read felt more modern than I expected. It turns out Frederick Paul Walter wrote his complete, unabridged translation in the 1990s and donated it to Project Gutenberg. From the license at the end of the book:

This particular work is one of the few individual works protected by copyright law in the United States and most of the remainder of the world, included in the Project Gutenberg collection with the permission of the copyright holder.

Older versions of the file didn’t clarify that it wasn’t legally in the public domain, and Standard Ebooks produced a nicely-formatted book from it somewhere along the line. That’s the version I downloaded and eventually read. The Project Gutenberg edition now contains a copyright notice, and Standard Ebooks has taken down their edition. They haven’t replaced it with another translation, stating that “the only public domain translations of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas are ones widely considered to be slapdash.”