Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

The year is 1866, and the oceans have stopped being safe. A monster--vast, luminous, swifter than any warship afloat--is striking hulls on every sea lane of the globe, and the great shipping nations demand action. Science shrugs; newspapers roar; armadas steam out and come home empty. At last the United States arms its fastest frigate, the Abraham Lincoln, and fills her deck with the finest hunting gear of the age, among them Professor Pierre Aronnax of Paris, the most celebrated naturalist alive; his unflappable servant Conseil; and Brody Land, king of harpooners, a Canadian giant who has sworn to kill the beast with a single thrust.

The beast kills the hunt instead. Hurled into the black Pacific, the three men are pulled from the waves--by the monster itself. It is no animal. It is the Nautilus, a steel wonder beyond anything science dreams of, her lounge lit by electric light, her library lined with treasures from every shore, her captain a man who calls himself Nemo: Nemo, the Latin word for nobody.

"I'm not what you term a civilized man! I've severed all ties with society." Host and jailer in one breath, Captain Nemo offers his prisoners the whole ocean--and refuses them the shore. Whoever boards the Nautilus may never leave it, for the secret of the deep must be kept at any cost.

So begins a voyage of twenty thousand leagues. Across submarine forests bright with impossible light. Down the drowned streets of Atlantis, glowing under an extinct volcano. Through the pearl beds of Ceylon where a shark's shadow falls across a diver's body, the buried millions of Vigo Bay, the hidden tunnel beneath the Arabian sands, the crushing pack ice of the Antarctic--where the great ship is sealed inside a frozen ocean and every lung aboard draws the same dwindling air. And in the black water off the Bahamas, eight living arms of iron: the giant squid, rising from the deep to drag men to their deaths on the Nautilus's own platform.

Through it all moves Captain Nemo--genius, exile, mourner, avenger. He plays his organ above a forest of coral graves, weeps over crewmen no flag has ever named, and steers his warship of the deep like a sentence passed upon the world above. What grief made him? What nation does he hunt? Aronnax admires him, fears him, and cannot decide whether he is a martyr or a monster, while Brody Land marks the days until one desperate chance offers escape.

That chance will come at the edge of the world's most terrible whirlpool, where the sea itself takes sides--and where the professor, the servant, and the harpooner must stake everything on the fury of the Maelstrom for one last breath of freedom.

Verne's immortal novel of the deep: a voyage that foretold the future, captained by a man out of the past. Adventure, science, wonder, and vengeance--the sea keeps every secret, and the Nautilus keeps them all.