Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
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Chapter I: A Shifting Reef
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several states on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.
For some time past, vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.
The facts relating to this apparition (entered in various log-books) agreed in most respects as to the shape of the object or creature in question, the untiring rapidity of its movements, its surprising power of locomotion, and the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. If it was a cetacean, it surpassed in size all those hitherto classified in science. Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times,—rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length,—we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the ichthyologists of the day, if it existed at all. And that it did exist was an undeniable fact; and, with that tendency which disposes the human mind in favour of the marvellous, we can understand the excitement produced in the entire world by this supernatural apparition. As to classing it in the list of fables, the idea was out of the question.
Only the opening three paragraphs fit here; the novel runs to forty-six chapters and about 104,000 words. Take the complete text in EPUB, AZW3 or KEPUB with the button below.
Download Full EPUB1870
~104,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 5.8 hours
Voyages extraordinaires
The oceans, aboard the Nautilus
46 chapters in twelve legs
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
3.08 MB (EPUB) · 3.23 MB (AZW3) · 3.12 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #164
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea begins in 1866, when ships start meeting a spindle-shaped thing that swims faster than a whale, and ends ten months later with three men washed ashore in Norway after a whirlpool. In between, Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land are taken aboard the Nautilus, a submarine driven by electricity and commanded by a man who has cut himself off from the world. They cross the Pacific, the Red Sea and the Atlantic, stand at the South Pole and fight the creatures of the deep, and the voyage is as much a tour of nineteenth-century science as an adventure story.
The novel is the longest of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires and the least tidy of them. It digresses into fish, currents, cables, pearls and the geology of the sea floor, and its captain darkens as the journey runs on. Nemo’s grievance is never fully explained, and the last page does not say whether he went down in the maelstrom. Read it for the machine, the ocean, and the strangest host in nineteenth-century fiction: a man who says he is not a civilised man, and means it. See Wikipedia’s article on Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #164.
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, the 1870 novel in which Jules Verne put three men inside a submarine and sent them round the world under water. It is a book of two halves: forty-six chapters, a Pacific voyage and an Atlantic one, with a funeral in coral between them. The plot is thin on purpose. What holds a reader is the ship, the sea and Captain Nemo, a host who lectures on oceanography, plays the organ, keeps a museum of the drowned and will not say who he is. The argument of this page is that the novel’s power comes from the collision between Aronnax’s appetite for knowledge and Nemo’s appetite for revenge.
The author is Jules Verne, and the text of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea itself has a long critical history. The author is Jules Verne, born in Nantes in 1828, who came to Paris to write plays, worked the stock exchange to live, and in 1863 published Five Weeks in a Balloon, the first of the Voyages extraordinaires that made him the most widely translated novelist of his century. Twenty Thousand Leagues was serialised in 1869 and 1870 and drew on the French submarine Plongeur, on the new Atlantic cable, on the first deep-sea soundings and on Verne’s own reading in geography and zoology. He had not sailed the route himself. The book is a library voyage, and it shows in the pleasure it takes in facts.
The form is a travelogue with a plot attached. Aronnax is a professional classifier, and he classifies: fish by family, coastlines by latitude, the sea floor by depth, and the reader is expected to enjoy it. The famous scenes arrive without warning between the catalogues, the walk on the sea bed, the shark in the pearl bed, the iceberg prison, the squid. Verne writes in short declarative paragraphs and uses dialogue for exposition, so Nemo can explain the boat’s engines in one chapter and the next can be pure event. The chronology is loose: the sightings belong to 1866 and 1867, the voyage itself to the winter and spring of 1868, and the book never quite reconciles the two dates. The two-part structure matters. Part One ends with a burial; Part Two begins with Aronnax wondering what his host is planning.
Its reputation has been carried by adaptations that keep the machine and drop the science. The Disney film of 1954 gave Nemo a submarine that looks nothing like this one and a plot that resolves his mystery; later versions made him an ecologist before his time. The novel is stranger, colder and much less sentimental about its hero. Nemo sinks a warship with his spur, weeps for a crewman killed by a squid, hands a bag of pearls to a poor Ceylonese diver, and pays for an insurrection with gold lifted from a Spanish galleon, and he refuses every request to explain himself. The English text most readers meet is an 1873 Victorian translation, which trims some of the science and keeps the period diction.
The text on this page follows the Project Gutenberg #164 transcription, complete in forty-six chapters and about 104,000 words, which is roughly six hours of reading. It keeps the two parts and the chapter marks of the original, so the funeral in the coral still falls between them, and it keeps the punctuation of the source rather than a modernised reset. A reader coming from the films will find the boat smaller and the captain much less explained. If you want more Verne afterwards, Around the World in Eighty Days is the same love of itinerary with a clock attached, and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth sends its professor downward instead of across. For a colder and stranger machine, The Time Machine takes the same Victorian confidence in engineering somewhere much worse.
Historical Context
Jules Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, the son of a lawyer, and went to Paris to be a playwright. He stayed for the theatres and the libraries, and by 1862 he had a manuscript about a balloon crossing of Africa. The publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel took it, renamed it Five Weeks in a Balloon, and made Verne the house author of a series: the Voyages extraordinaires, journeys to places that could be mapped and to places that could not. Verne wrote them at a desk in Amiens, out of atlases, encyclopedias and the published reports of explorers, and the science in them is the science of the 1860s, the decade of the first deep soundings, the first ocean cables and the first serious submarine trials.
The Nautilus had real ancestors. Robert Fulton built a submarine called the Nautilus in 1800, and the French navy launched the Plongeur in 1863, a compressed-air boat that Verne could see at the Paris exhibition of 1867. The Confederate Hunley had sunk a ship in 1864. Verne’s invention is the power source: electricity, drawn in the book from sodium taken out of sea water, which in 1870 was a laboratory curiosity rather than an engine. The route is equally of its moment. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, and Verne, who had sailed the Red Sea, gave his captain an undersea tunnel instead, because Nemo’s passage had to be secret.
The politics was a problem for the publisher. Verne’s first Nemo was a Polish nobleman avenging the crushed rising of 1863, and Hetzel, whose firm was friendly with Russia, asked for the nationality to be left vague. What survives in the text is a man who calls himself the oppressed and sinks a ship named the Avenger’s enemy without a trial, and a French professor who objects that this is the right of a savage. The Franco-Prussian war broke out in July 1870, the year of publication, and the book’s contempt for the society of the land has been read against that season ever since. Verne never settled the question, and the last page still asks whether the Nautilus came up again.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Professor Pierre Aronnax: The narrator, forty years old, assistant professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and the author of a two-volume work on the great submarine grounds. He joins the Abraham Lincoln as its scientific expert and spends the voyage taking notes, which is how the book exists at all: ‘I had now the power to write the true book of the sea.’ His curiosity is the reason he stays aboard. He is a prisoner who keeps being handed gifts, and his judgment of Nemo moves between admiration and alarm.
- Conseil: Aronnax’s servant, a Flemish boy of thirty, ceremonious to the point of speaking of himself in the third person and calling his employer ‘master’. He is a classifier by instinct, naming fish while the boat sinks, and he is the one who jumps overboard after Aronnax without being asked. His calm is both a joke and a comfort, and it holds up in the ice when the air runs short. He has no family and no plans, and he never once suggests leaving.
- Ned Land: The Canadian harpooner, forty, six feet tall, ‘the prince of harpooners’, who comes aboard for the money and spends the voyage asking for meat, wine and the first chance to leave. He is the book’s counter-voice: where Aronnax wants to know, Ned wants out. He flings a steward down and holds him by the throat when the door is locked on them, plots escape more than once, and in the end it is his nerve in the boat that carries the three of them through the maelstrom.
- Captain Nemo: The commander: engineer, organist, oceanographer and host, who designed the Nautilus, built it in secret and lives on it with a crew of several nations. He is courteous, learned and absolute, and he says of himself, ‘I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely.’ His reasons are withheld for two hundred pages and then arrive as a sentence: ‘I am the law, and I am the judge!’ He is the novel’s centre and its open question.
- The Nautilus: The machine is a character in its own right: a spindle of riveted plate, lit by electricity, with a saloon that holds a museum, a library and an organ, a diving chamber, a spur on the bow and a motto, ‘Mobilis in mobili’, that Verne uses as a chapter title. It is the only country Nemo has, and the book keeps measuring it, in tons, in fathoms, in miles an hour. Everything that happens happens because the boat can go where no ship can, and because it can refuse to surface.
- The crew: Perhaps twenty men, silent, of several nationalities, speaking a language Aronnax cannot place. One of them is French. They work the boat, take the horary angles, cut ice with picks and bury their dead in the coral. Nemo’s second lieutenant never speaks a word that is translated. The crew is the novel’s proof that Nemo is not alone in his hatred, and the funeral in the coral kingdom is the only ceremony in the book.
Core Literary Themes
- The sea as the last free country: Nemo’s creed is stated in one chapter and never withdrawn: ‘The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe.’ The ocean is a place without frontiers, police, tariffs or newspapers, and the Nautilus is a state of one. Verne takes the idea seriously enough to show its cost. Freedom under water means no harbour, no letters, no family and no grave on land, and the crew’s cemetery is at the bottom of the Pacific because there is nowhere else for them to lie.
- Knowledge, and what it is for: Aronnax catalogues the sea; Nemo exploits it. The same instruments serve both, and the novel is careful not to decide between them. The professor’s science is generous and useless, the captain’s is precise and weaponised, and the museum in the saloon is the place where the two meet. The book’s quiet argument is that knowledge is not a moral position: Nemo knows more about the ocean than any man alive and still rams a ship, and Aronnax, who knows almost as much, watches him do it.
- The drowned world underneath: The sea floor in this novel is a map of what the surface has lost: the wrecks of the Florida and the ships at Vanikoro, the Atlantic cable lying in 1,400 fathoms, the gold of Vigo Bay, the drowned continent of Atlantis. Aronnax calls one stretch of it a charnel-house. Verne’s invention is to make the reader travel through this graveyard as a tourist, in comfort, with electric light, and to let the pleasure of the view and the fact of the death sit together without comment.
- Revenge and the reasonable man: Nemo’s grievance is political and personal at once, and the novel stages the argument in the hostage’s cabin. Aronnax objects that the right Nemo claims is the right of a savage, not of a civilised man; Nemo answers that he has done with civilisation. The last chapters settle nothing. A warship is sunk with its crew, Nemo calls himself the law and the judge, and Aronnax, who has been given the run of the boat for months, records that he was made not an accomplice but a witness.
- Hospitality and captivity: The three are guests and prisoners from the first night, and Verne keeps the two words in the same sentence: ‘passengers on board the Nautilus’, Aronnax notes, ‘in reality prisoners of its commander’. The invitations are real, a hunt in the forest, a walk on the sea bed, a dive among the pearls, and so is the locked door. Every kindness is also a demonstration of power, and the moment Nemo stops being courteous he stops the clocks as well. The book’s hardest joke is that Aronnax likes it: he is treated better than he would be on land, and he remembers the saloon, the organ and the library as a kind of home.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea?
Because the Nautilus is still the best machine in nineteenth-century fiction. It is a home, a laboratory, a museum and a weapon, and Verne builds it out of parts his readers could check: riveted plate, sodium cells, a screw, a diving chamber. The book taught the twentieth century what a submarine might feel like from the inside, and it did so before anybody had built one that could stay down for a week.
Because the digressions are the book. The chapters on currents, cables and pearl beds are not filler; they are the texture of a voyage that is being recorded by a scientist, and they are what the adaptations throw away. Read whole, the novel is a travel book with a revenge plot buried in it, and the ending, which explains nothing, is stronger than any film version that explains everything.
Because this edition is complete and easy to move around in: both parts, all forty-six chapters, chapter marks in the right places, and a file that opens fast on a phone. It is long enough to want a bookmark and structured enough to read a chapter a night, which is close to how its first readers met it in the magazine.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #164 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
- Made for reading Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #164 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings as Verne set them.
- Made for reading Two parts, forty-six chapters Part One and Part Two in order, with the coral funeral where it belongs, between the halves, and every chapter marked for navigation.
- Made for reading Readable on any device EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files with real chapter marks; short paragraphs and a small file that opens quickly on a phone or an e-reader.
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Chapter summaries
Twenty Thousand Leagues has forty-six chapters in two parts, and the twelve entries below follow the voyage leg by leg rather than chapter by chapter. Each names the chapters it covers and says what happens in them, from the first sightings of 1866 to the maelstrom. Verne’s own titles are kept where a leg is one or two chapters; where a leg is several, the heading is ours. The order is the order of the text.
- Part One I–IV · A shifting reef: In 1866 the maritime world starts meeting ‘an enormous thing’, spindle-shaped, phosphorescent and faster than a whale. The Scotia limps home with an isosceles triangle torn in her iron plates. Aronnax, just back from Nebraska, publishes his narwhal theory on 30 April and is invited aboard the Abraham Lincoln, where the harpooner Ned Land refuses to believe in the animal at all: either the frigate would kill the narwhal, or the narwhal would kill the captain.
- Part One V–VIII · The chase and the cell: Months of empty Pacific, a promise of three days that runs out on 5 November at 31° 15′ N, 136° 42′ E, and then the thing appears. Ned’s harpoon rings off a hull. Aronnax is thrown into the sea, Conseil jumps after him, and the two are hauled onto a steel plate by men who will not answer. Inside: a hull, eight masked figures, food laid on a table, and then the door of a saloon. Verne gives the chapter the motto ‘Mobilis in mobili’.
- Part One IX–XII · The man of the seas: Ned wants to break out, Conseil wants to classify, and Aronnax wants to know. Nemo receives them in a saloon that is half museum and half chapel and tells them he is ‘not what you call a civilised man’. He explains the motive power, electricity drawn from the sea, then the figures: the hull, the speed, the cost. They are offered the run of the boat or the cell, and the difference between those two is not clear, which is the point.
- Part One XIII–XVI · The black river and the sea floor: The Nautilus rides the Kuroshio past Japan, and the days fill with currents, fish and soundings. Then the invitation: a hunt in the submarine forest off Crespo Island, with cork jackets, air-guns and electric bullets that kill without a sound. Aronnax walks on the bottom for the first time, among trees that are animals, and comes back with a new sense of what the sea floor is. It is a country, not a depth.
- Part One XVII–XX · Vanikoro, Torres Straits, Papua: The Pacific crossing is a graveyard tour: a wreck with five corpses still bound with ropes on the bridge, a young woman among them with an infant in her arms. At Vanikoro, Nemo brings Aronnax to the coral where La Perouse’s two ships, the Boussole and the Astrolabe, broke up, and shows him the iron box of naval instructions annotated in Louis XVI’s handwriting. Then the Nautilus runs aground in Torres Straits, waits for the tide, and the three go ashore in Papua for bread-fruit, birds of paradise and coconuts.
- Part One XXI–XXIII · The thunderbolt and the coral grave: Papuan warriors meet them at the shore, and Nemo settles the matter with a current through the hull’s plates: the canoes fall back, and the boat floats off on the tide. Then the three are locked in the cell and drugged through a night Verne titles ‘Ægri somnia’. In the morning a crewman lies dying, his skull smashed. Nemo says a lever of the engine broke and struck him, weeps like a man, and buries him in the coral: ‘forgotten by all else, but not by us.’
- Part Two I–III · Ceylon and the pearl of ten millions: Part Two opens with Aronnax wondering what his host is planning, and the answer is Ceylon. At the Manaar bank they walk the oyster beds at night, and Nemo opens a pearl that Verne’s chapter title prices at ten millions. A shark pins an Indian diver to the bottom; Nemo kills it with a knife and gives the poor man a bag of pearls. ‘That Indian, sir, is an inhabitant of an oppressed country; and I am still, and shall be, to my last breath, one of them!’
- Part Two IV–VII · The Red Sea, the tunnel and the Mediterranean: Ned points out that the Isthmus of Suez is not yet cut, and Nemo takes the boat under it through a tunnel of his own. Then the Grecian archipelago, the volcano of Santorin boiling red, and a diver who comes alongside for a chest of gold, which Aronnax connects with Crete. The Mediterranean is crossed in forty-eight hours at twenty-five miles an hour, with no chance to leave, and Gibraltar is passed at sunrise on 18 February.
- Part Two VIII–XI · Vigo Bay, Atlantis, the Sargasso: In Vigo Bay the crew raise the gold of the Spanish galleons sunk in 1702, and Nemo says it goes to suffering peoples and oppressed races. Farther out, Aronnax walks a drowned country in the dark and watches Nemo trace the word ATLANTIS in chalk on a rock of black basalt. The Nautilus shelters in the crater of an extinct volcano and takes coal from a forest under the sea. Then the weed of the Sargasso Sea, and the deepest soundings in the book.
- Part Two XII–XIV · Cachalots, icebergs, the South Pole: Ned begs for a whale hunt against a herd of cachalots, and Nemo refuses to kill for killing’s sake, then drives the boat’s spur through the herd anyway. Farther south the sea freezes, the Nautilus goes under the ice, and Nemo announces that he is going to the pole. The boat surfaces off a bare rock: he climbs it, crosses his arms and seems to take possession of the continent, saying that no human being has left a trace there, while a night of six months falls on his domain.
- Part Two XV–XVIII · The ice prison, Cape Horn, the poulps: An iceberg turns over and capsizes the Nautilus under a ceiling of ice. Nemo gives his lecture: there are two ways of dying, crushed or suffocated. The crew cut through the ice by hand while the air thins, and Aronnax passes out. Then up the Atlantic side to Cape Horn and the Amazon, where a shoal of poulps attacks: a man is taken, Nemo hacks at the arms, and a Frenchman dies calling out in his own language.
- Part Two XIX–XXIII · The Gulf Stream, the hecatomb, the maelstrom: The boat follows the Gulf Stream past the wreck of the Atlantic cable, then meets a man-of-war that flies no colours. Nemo tells Aronnax at last who he is: ‘I am the law, and I am the judge! I am the oppressed, and there is the oppressor!’ He rams the warship and watches it go down. In the confusion the three take the boat, the maelstrom takes the Nautilus, and Aronnax wakes in a fisherman’s hut on the Loffoden Isles.
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Part of: Adventure & Sea Stories · Science Fiction
