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
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
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