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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Chapter 1. A SHIFTING REEF
The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, a mysterious and puzzling happening that no one has probably forgotten yet.
Not to mention the rumors that excited the people on the coasts and even in the middle of continents, sailors were especially stirred up.
Merchants, sailors, captains, and officers from Europe and America, and governments of several countries on both continents, were deeply interested.
For some time, ships had been meeting "an enormous thing,"
A long object, shaped like a spindle, sometimes shining in the dark, and much larger and faster in its movements than a whale.
The facts about this appearance were written in various ships' logs.
They agreed on the shape of the object or creature.
They also agreed on its tireless speed and surprising power of movement.
The logs noted the special life it seemed to have.
If it was a whale, it was bigger than any known to science.
We took the average of observations made at different times.
We rejected shy guesses of two hundred feet and wild opinions of a mile wide and three miles long.
We concluded this mysterious being was much larger than any size accepted by fish experts.
And that it did exist was an undeniable fact.
And with the human mind's tendency to love the marvelous, we can understand the excitement caused in the whole world by this supernatural appearance.
As for calling it a fable, that idea was out of the question.
On July 20, 1866, steamer Governor Higginson, Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, met the moving mass five miles off Australia's east coast.
Captain Baker thought at first that he was facing an unknown sandbank.
He even prepared to find its exact position.
Two columns of water shot up a hundred and fifty feet into the air with a hissing noise, driven by the unexplained object.
The Governor Higginson was dealing with an unknown water mammal.
The creature threw up columns of water mixed with air and steam from its blowholes.
On July 23 that year the Columbus, of the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company, reported similar events in the Pacific Ocean.
But this extraordinary whale-like creature could move from one place to another with surprising speed.
Within three days the Governor Higginson and the Columbus saw it at two map points over seven hundred nautical leagues apart.
Fifteen days later, the Helvetia and the Shannon were two thousand miles farther away.
They sailed against the wind in the Atlantic between the United States and Europe.
At 42 degrees 15 minutes north latitude and 60 degrees 35 minutes west longitude, they signaled the monster to each other.
From these observations, they thought they could estimate the mammal's minimum length.
It was more than three hundred and fifty feet.
The Shannon and Helvetia were smaller than it, though they measured three hundred feet overall.
The largest whales in the seas around the Aleutian, Kulammak, and Umgullich islands have never exceeded sixty yards.
These reports greatly influenced public opinion, they arrived one after another with fresh observations from the transatlantic ship Pereire.
There was a collision between the Etna of the Inman line and the monster.
An official report came from officers of the French frigate Normandie.
A careful survey was made by Commodore Fitz-James's staff on the Lord Clyde.
Light-minded people joked about the phenomenon, but serious, practical countries like England, America, and Germany treated the matter more seriously.
In every popular place, the monster was the fashion.
People sang about it in cafes, made fun of it in the newspapers, and showed it on stage.
All kinds of stories were spread about it.
Caricatures appeared in the papers of every giant, imaginary creature.
They ranged from the white whale, "Moby Dick," to the huge kraken.
The kraken's tentacles could catch a five-hundred-ton ship and drag it into the ocean's depths.
Old legends were even brought back to life.
The opinions of Aristotle and Pliny were revived.
They accepted the existence of these monsters.
Norwegian tales of Bishop Pontoppidan and accounts of Paul Heggede also returned.
Finally, reports of Mr. Harrington appeared, his honesty no one could doubt.
He said that, while on board the Castillan in 1857, he had seen this enormous serpent, which had never before visited any seas except those of the ancient "Constitutionnel."
Then burst out the endless argument between the believers and the doubters in the learned societies and scientific journals.
"The question of the monster" excited everyone's mind.
Editors of scientific journals, arguing with believers in the supernatural, spilled seas of ink during this memorable campaign, and some even drew blood.
From the sea serpent, they moved to direct personal attacks.
War was fought with changing success for six months.
It appeared in leading articles of the Geographical Institution of Brazil.
It was also in the Royal Academy of Science of Berlin and the British Association.
The Smithsonian Institution of Washington joined the debate.
Discussions continued in the "Indian Archipelago" and the Cosmos of the Abbe Moigno.
Petermann's Mittheilungen and scientific chronicles of great journals in France and other countries also took part.
The cheaper newspapers replied sharply and with endless energy.
These satirical writers made fun of a remark by Linnaeus.
The monster's opponents had quoted him saying "that nature didn't make fools." They begged their contemporaries not to lie to nature.
They shouldn't accept krakens, sea serpents, "Moby Dicks," or other inventions of crazy sailors.
At last, a favorite writer, the head of the staff, published an article in a well-known satirical journal.
It finished off the monster like Hippolytus, giving it the death blow amid a great burst of laughter.
Wit had beaten science, and the public laughed uproariously at scholarly defeat.
During the first months of 1867, the question seemed buried, never to come back, when new facts were presented to the public.
It was no longer a scientific problem to be solved, but a real danger to be seriously avoided.
The question took on a completely different shape.
The monster became a small island, a rock, a reef, but a reef of uncertain and changing size.
On March 5, 1867, the Moravian of the Montreal Ocean Company was at 2730' N, 7215' W by night.
She struck on her starboard quarter a rock that was marked on no chart for that part of the sea.
With the combined force of the wind and its four hundred horsepower, she was going at a speed of thirteen knots.
The great strength of the Moravian's hull saved the ship.
Without it, she'd have been broken by the shock and gone down with the 237 passengers she was bringing home from Canada.
The accident happened about five o'clock in the morning, as the day was breaking.
The officers on the quarterdeck hurried to the back part of the ship.
They examined the sea with the greatest care.
They saw nothing but a strong whirlpool about three cables' length away, as if the surface had been violently stirred.
They took the exact position of the place, and the Moravian continued her route without visible damage.
Had she struck on a hidden rock, or on an enormous wreck?
They couldn't tell, but when they examined the ship's bottom during repairs, they found that part of her keel was broken.
This fact, so serious in itself, might perhaps have been forgotten like many others, if three weeks later it hadn't happened again under similar circumstances.
But because of the ship's nationality and the company's reputation, the event became widely known.
On April 13, 1867, the Scotia, of the Cunard Company's line, sailed with a beautiful sea and favorable wind.
She found herself at 15 degrees 12 minutes longitude and 45 degrees 37 minutes latitude.
She was going at a speed of thirteen and a half knots.
At seventeen minutes past four in the afternoon, the passengers gathered for lunch in the great dining room.
A slight shock was felt on the Scotia's hull, behind the port paddle wheel.
The Scotia hadn't hit anything, she had been hit, and seemingly by something rather sharp and piercing than blunt.
"The shock was slight, no one would have been alarmed until the carpenter's watch rushed onto the bridge shouting, "We're sinking!
"We're sinking!" At first, the passengers were very frightened, but Captain Anderson hurried to calm them down.
The danger couldn't be immediate, the Scotia, divided into seven compartments by strong partitions, could safely face any leak.
Captain Anderson went down immediately into the hold.
He found that the sea was pouring into the fifth compartment.
The speed of the flow showed that the force of the water was great.
Luckily, this compartment didn't hold the boilers, or the fires would have been put out at once.
Captain Anderson ordered the engines to be stopped immediately, and one of the men went down to find out how bad the damage was.
A few minutes later, they discovered a large hole, two yards across, in the ship's bottom.
Such a leak couldn't be stopped, the Scotia, with her paddles half underwater, had to continue her course.
She was then three hundred miles from Cape Clear, and after a three-day delay, which caused great worry in Liverpool, she entered the company's dock.
The engineers visited the Scotia, which was put in dry dock.
They could hardly believe it was possible.
At two and a half yards below the waterline was a clean break, in the shape of an isosceles triangle.
The broken place in the iron plates was so perfectly defined that it couldn't have been made more neatly by a punch.
It was clear, then, that the tool that made the hole wasn't an ordinary one.
After being driven with force and piercing an iron plate one and three-eighths inches thick, it pulled back in an unexplainable motion.
Such was the last fact, which resulted in exciting the torrent of public opinion once more.
From this moment, all unlucky accidents that couldn't be explained otherwise were blamed on the monster.
This imaginary creature was held responsible for all these shipwrecks, which unfortunately were many.
Every year, Lloyd's recorded the loss of three thousand ships.
Of these, at least two hundred sailing and steam ships were thought to be completely lost.
No news was ever heard from them.
Now, it was the "monster," rightly or wrongly, that was accused of their disappearance.
And thanks to it, communication between the different continents became more and more dangerous.
The public demanded firmly that the seas should at any price be freed from this terrible whale.