Jules Verne: Jules Verne: 25 Greatest Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition)

Jules Verne

Science Fiction and Action & Adventure Classics: 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From Earth to Moon...Translator: Lewis Page Mercier, W. G. Hanna, W.H.G. Kingston, Eleanor E. King, Frederick Amadeus Malleson, George Makepeace Towle, N. D'Anvers, Virginia Champlin, A. Estoclet

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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)

The Mysterious Island (1875)

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864)

From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

Around the Moon (1869)

Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar (1876)

In Search of the Castaways or, The Children of Captain Grant (1868)

Adrift in Pacific or, Two Years' Vacation (1888)

Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863)

Robur the Conqueror or, The Clipper of the Clouds (1886)

The Master of the World (1904)

The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866)

Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (1879)

Mathias Sandorf (1885)

Hector Servadac or, Off on a Comet (1877)

Facing the Flag (1896)

The Begum's Fortune (1879)

Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (1878)

The Survivors of the Chancellor: Diary of J. R. Kazallon, Passenger (1875)

The Underground City or, The Child of the Cavern (1877)

Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (1881)

The Purchase of the North Pole or, Topsy Turvy (1889)

Cæsar Cascabel (1890)

The Castle of the Carpathians (1892)

Table of Contents

Translator: Lewis Page Mercier

PART ONE

CHAPTER I A Shifting Reef

CHAPTER II Pro and Con

CHAPTER III I Form My Resolution

CHAPTER IV Ned Land

CHAPTER V At a Venture

CHAPTER VI At Full Steam

CHAPTER VII An Unknown Species of Whale

CHAPTER VIII Mobilis in Mobili

CHAPTER IX Ned Land's Tempers

CHAPTER X The Man of the Seas

CHAPTER XI All By Electricity

CHAPTER XII Some Figures

CHAPTER XIII The Black River

CHAPTER XIV A Note of Invitation

CHAPTER XV A Walk on the Bottom of the Sea

CHAPTER XVI A Submarine Forest

CHAPTER XVII Four Thousand Leagues Under the Pacific

CHAPTER XVIII Vanikoro

CHAPTER XIX Torres Straits

CHAPTER XX A Few Days on Land

CHAPTER XXI Captain Nemo's Thunderbolt

CHAPTER XXII "Aegri Somnia"

CHAPTER XXIII The Coral Kingdom

PART TWO

CHAPTER I The Indian Ocean

CHAPTER II A Novel Proposal of Captain Nemo's

CHAPTER III A Pearl of Ten Millions

CHAPTER IV The Red Sea

CHAPTER V The Arabian Tunnel

CHAPTER VI The Grecian Archipelago

CHAPTER VII The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours

CHAPTER VIII Vigo Bay

CHAPTER IX A Vanished Continent

CHAPTER X The Submarine Coal-Mines

CHAPTER XI The Sargasso Sea

CHAPTER XII Cachalots and Whales

CHAPTER XIII The Iceberg

CHAPTER XIV The South Pole

CHAPTER XV Accident or Incident?

CHAPTER XVI Want of Air

CHAPTER XVII From Cape Horn to the Amazon

CHAPTER XVIII The Poulps

CHAPTER XIX The Gulf Stream

CHAPTER XX From Latitude 47° 24' to Longitude 17° 28'

CHAPTER XXI A Hecatomb

CHAPTER XXII The Last Words of Captain Nemo

CHAPTER XXIII Conclusion

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

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 whale, 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 learned ones 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.

On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from its blow-holes columns of water mixed with air and vapour.

Similar facts were observed on the 23rd of July in the same year, in the Pacific Ocean, by the Columbus, of the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company. But this extraordinary creature could transport itself from one place to another with surprising velocity; as, in an interval of three days, the Governor Higginson and the Columbus had observed it at two different points of the chart, separated by a distance of more than seven hundred nautical leagues.

Fifteen days later, two thousand miles farther off, the Helvetia, of the Compagnie-Nationale, and the Shannon, of the Royal Mail Steamship Company, sailing to windward in that portion of the Atlantic lying between the United States and Europe, respectively signalled the monster to each other in 42° 15' N. lat. and 60° 35' W. long. In these simultaneous observations they thought themselves justified in estimating the minimum length of the mammal at more than three hundred and fifty feet, as the Shannon and Helvetia were of smaller dimensions than it, though they measured three hundred feet over all.

Now the largest whales, those which frequent those parts of the sea round the Aleutian, Kulammak, and Umgullich islands, have never exceeded the length of sixty yards, if they attain that.