Captain Nemo is the most famous mystery in nineteenth-century fiction, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea never tells you who he is. A man of no stated nationality, driven by a grief he will not explain, who sinks a warship belonging to a country the reader is never told the name of.
That is not artistry. It is a deletion.
Verneโs Nemo was a Polish nobleman. His family had been killed by Russian troops during the January Uprising of 1863, and the Nautilus was a machine for taking revenge on the Russian Empire. He was to sink Russian warships, and the reader was to know exactly why.
Verneโs publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, pronounced the book unprintable.
It was cut twice more after that, and the second cutter was working in English.
Fiction by Renรฉ Rehn
Why
Three reasons, and only one of them was political.
France was a putative ally of the Russian Empire in the 1860s, so a French novel celebrating the destruction of Russian warships was a diplomatic problem.
Russian censors would have banned it.
And Russia was a lucrative book market that Hetzel had no intention of losing.
He was a thoroughly commercial publisher, and the third reason was the one that decided it.
Verne Fought Back, and the Letter Survives
Hetzelโs position was that the sinking of the Russian ship was an evil act committed by a man who kills for killingโs sake.
Verneโs reply is the best thing either of them wrote about the book.
If that man does not have the right to sink Russian frigates wherever he finds them, he wrote, then revenge is merely a word. In such a situation he would sink them himself, without remorse.
And he set out what he had built. A Polish aristocrat whose daughters had been raped, whose wife had been hacked to death, whose father had been tortured and killed, whose friends had died in Siberia, and whose nationality was about to disappear from Europe under Russian rule.
He lost the argument. He obscured the backstory, and the Nemo we have is what was left.
It ran in Hetzelโs own fortnightly, the Magasin dโรฉducation et de rรฉcrรฉation, from March 1869 to June 1870.
Two Traces Got Past Hetzel
Scholars have noticed two things in the published French that only make sense if you know what was removed.
There is an allusion to an unsuccessful rebellion led by Tadeusz Koลciuszko, who led the Polish rising against Russia and Prussia in 1794.
And Nemo hangs portraits of freedom fighters in his stateroom, among them Daniel OโConnell, the campaigner for Irish independence.
A man with no nationality, who has hung pictures of nationalists on his wall.
Remember the portraits. They come back in a minute, and not in a good way.
Then Hetzel Changed Him Again
Five years later, and again at the publisherโs suggestion, Nemo was brought back for The Mysterious Island.
And given a completely different past.
He is now Prince Dakkar, an Indian aristocrat, a fictional descendant of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who fought in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and lost his family to the British.
The second version of him appears in The Mysterious Island, and my Mysterious Island page covers why the two booksโ dates cannot be made to work.
So the enemy has been moved from Russia, which France was allied to, onto Britain, which France had been fighting for centuries.
The two accounts do not fit together. The later novel contradicts both the earlier one and Verneโs own letters, and a reader who reads them in order is reading two different characters with one name.
And Then the Translator Got Hold of It
All of the above happened in French, before a word of English was written.
Then the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier produced the first English version in 1872, and the figure is not a rounding error.
He cut nearly a quarter of Verneโs text and made hundreds of translation errors.
Some of them are simply incompetent. Scaphandre is a diving suit. Mercier rendered it as a cork-jacket, which is a life preserver, so the men walking on the sea floor are wearing the wrong equipment for the entire book.
And one of them is not incompetence.
He removed the portraits of freedom fighters from Nemoโs stateroom.
Which means that the two clues that survived Hetzelโs censorship in French did not survive the crossing. A reader of the standard English text, for a hundred years, could not see the single piece of evidence that had got past the first cut. Hetzel deleted Nemoโs reason. Mercier deleted the fingerprints.
The consequence is worse than a bad edition, and this is the sentence that should decide which copy you buy. Mercierโs translation was the standard English text for a century, and changes he made to Verneโs French have continued to be carried into more recent translations.
His errors did not stay in his book. They were inherited.
One last example of the kind of thing at stake. The French says poulpe, which is an octopus. In English it is almost always a giant squid.
Who Mercier was, and which translators to trust instead, is covered in full on my Jules Verne books guide.
The Nautilus Was a Real Machine, and It Was Much Worse
Verne did not invent the submarine and did not pretend to.
The Plongeur was laid down at Rochefort on June 1, 1860 and launched on April 16, 1863. It was the first submarine in the world driven by mechanical power rather than by men turning a crank, using twenty-three tanks of compressed air at twelve and a half bar.
That bought it five nautical miles at four knots.
A model of it was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. Verne studied the model, and the Nautilus comes out of it.
Hold the two numbers next to each other. The real thing could manage five miles. The fictional one crosses the planet six times over and never surfaces for fuel. That gap is the whole method: take the newest machine in the world, work out what it cannot yet do, and write the version that can.
What the Title Means, Which Is Not What Most People Think
The twenty thousand leagues is distance traveled, not depth.
It is roughly six times the diameter of the earth. The deepest the Nautilus goes is four leagues.
And the French is plural: sous les mers, under the seas. English has printed the singular since 1872 because Mercier put it there.
Which Edition
Three good ones and one to avoid.
The Naval Institute Press Completely Restored and Annotated Edition of 1993, by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter. This is the restoration project, it puts the cut passages back, and the North American Verne society recommends it.
William Butcher, Oxford Worldโs Classics, 1998, as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas. The scholarly one, and the plural title is correct rather than a mistake.
David Coward, Penguin Classics, 2017, with an introduction and notes. The newest, the easiest to find in a shop, and the one to buy if the other two are not in front of you.
Avoid anything bearing Mercierโs name in any of its forms, and anything that credits no translator at all.
If you want the Victorian object rather than the text, the 1871 Hetzel deluxe edition carried a hundred and eleven illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and รdouard Riou, and those are worth having in a modern reprint.
Where to Go Next
All fifty-four novels, and the short list of translators worth paying for, are on my Jules Verne books guide. The other big one, whose standard English text is literally a rewrite, has its own page in my Journey to the Center of the Earth guide, and the one with no invention in it at all, with the best of its translations sorted, is covered on my Around the World in 80 Days page. My Captain Nemo page follows the character across both his novels and a century of European casting, and the rest of the tradition lives on the French classics hub.
