20 000 Leagues Under The Sea Sparknotes

The book 20,000 Leagues under the Sea written by Jules Verne was a science fiction novel of its time, originally published in 1870 in French, and later translated many different times. The copy of this book that I read was 418 pages long, published by The Floating Press and copyrighted by the same company in 2009. This book began with rumors of a large oceanic ‘beast’, hypothesised to be a ‘narwhal’ being seen by many different boats. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist, was given an invitation to hunt this ‘beast’, along with the Canadian whaler Ned Land. Arronax also brought along his faithful servant Conseil. Eventually, the ship these three are traveling on meets the beast and crashes into its flank, causing these three
characters to be thrown overboard. They take refuge on the ‘beast’ itself, as it turns out to be mechanical and made of iron. After they are finally let inside the ‘beast’ by the crew, they are taken prisoner with no why, as the crew doesn’t speak their language. Eventually the captain of the ‘beast’, Nemo, comes and explains what has happened to them, and commands them to stay onboard. Throughout a couple of weeks, Arronax asks many questions of how this ‘submarine’ works, and explores the impressively valuable furnishings aboard. Eventually, Arronax, Conseil, Ned, and Nemo walk along the bottom of the ocean in special suits and explore ‘the forest of the island of Crespo’, an underwater marine habitat. Later, from the submarine, Nemo and Arronax also study shipwrecks. When traveling through Malaysia's islands, the boat is marooned on an island until the tides rise, and Ned’s eagerness to be free of the submarine causes a small group consisting of Arronax, Conseil, and Ned to explore the island. There, they collect food until they are attacked by ‘savages’, and once they run back to the ship, an electric current prevents the others from getting onboard. A few days after they are at sea again, Aronnax is seeked out again by Captain Nemo and asked for help to save a very injured man. The man’s death is unavoidable, and he is buried in a coral grave in the ocean.
The submarine travels through the Indian Ocean for several weeks until Arronax, Nemo, Conseil, and Ned once again go on a diving expedition off the coast of an island of India where there is many pearls growing in clams. Captain Nemo attempts to help a pearl diver who was attacked by a shark, but would have been killed himself if not for Ned. After this expedition, the submarine travels through the biological wonders of the Red Sea and through the ‘Arabian tunnel’, an underwater tunnel that connects the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Once they reach the Atlantic, Arronax is shown the riches lost on the bottom of the sea and Atlantis. The submarine also goes into the center of an extinct volcano, whose walls are slightly raised above the sea level. Once it has left the volcano, Captain Nemo massacres a herd of sperm whales with his submarine. The submarine also travels to the South Pole, where Nemo plants his flag. When the submarine attempts to get back into warmer waters, an iceberg falls and traps them within a tunnel. To escape, they must break a wall of ice, and barely get out before their fresh oxygen supply runs
out. Once they reach the American coasts, Ned is even more desperate than he previously was to get ashore, while Captain Nemo appears to be ignoring them. Their submarine is attacked by a giant cuttlefish, whose death soon draws others that the crew defeats. As they travel the American coast, they see a telegraph line, and another active ship that was most likely searching for the submarine. Nemo purposefully wrecks the ship with his submarine, and shortly afterwards drives the submarine into a whirlpool, during which Arronax, Ned, and Conseil escape and get to shore as the submarine is wrecked. One plus of this book the quantity of action and details that it includes. One minus of this book is that it is written with many extremely advanced vocabulary words and sentences that make it harder to read. One interesting factor of this book is the fact that at the time it was written, many of these things hadn’t been invented in exactly this way, yet they seem like very modern technologies. Overall, this book was extremely fascinating, and entertaining to read. Within 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, there are many, many examples of earth science topics.
Even though this book was written very early, Vernes knew (or correctly assumed) very much about some physical geology topics, and knew huge amounts of information about the ocean. Within the book, they use a nanometer to tell the pressure of the ocean, and therefore the depth of the ocean. Besides that, he predicted many of the technologies that we use today. The mention of ‘sounding’ is obviously a parallel of the sonar that we use today. The submarine and diving suits in the book were also usage of modern technology, considering the fact that the submarine used a chamber filled with water to sink or rise, just as modern submarines do. The knowledge about how water acts is also very advanced, as Arronax starts one of his many calculations with “the pressure of the atmosphere is represented by the weight of a column of water thirty-two feet high.” (Vernes, 35) Besides that, Vernes also included that the tides were affected by the moon, something that had been known for a very long time. The currents of the ocean were also very well known about, especially because of the fact that they needed to be used to sail many ships. Arronax even knew about the currents that formed whirlpools, shown by his comment saying that ‘We knew that at the tide the pent-up waters between the islands between Ferroe and Loffoden rush with irresistible violence, forming a whirlpool from which no vessel ever
escapes’ (Vernes, 411) The formation of atolls was also explained by the book with ‘the formation of atolls… summits of mountains or volcanoes that are submerged some feet below the level of the sea.’ (Vernes, 147) When the submarine crew was also exploring Antarctica, it was also suggested that they knew a continent had to be at the South Pole because some scientists had said that ice sheets that large couldn’t form without it. Vernes also obviously knew, or at least suspected that the ocean had very varied depths, shown again by Arronax explaining that he knew what the sounding had shown, that there was a depth of 2,500 yards in the Mediterranean and 15,000 yards in the South Atlantic. The difference of average temperatures at different depths was also mentioned. Uneven bottoms of seafloors obviously a commonly known fact, shown by the simple quote ‘A slight declivity ended in an uneven bottom.’ (Vernes, 200) Vernes also knew about the mountains and volcanos that protruded and formed under the surface of the ocean, shown by the quote ‘must climb a mountain’ (Vernes, 288) when they are attempting to walk underwater to a certain location. Vernes also knew that there was volcanoes in Antarctica, shown when Arronax states that ‘We knew that in those Antarctic countries, James Ross found two craters, the Erebus and Terror, in full activity…’ (Vernes, 314). Overall, Vernes included many scientific details within this adventure book.