There is an ingrained human fear of sinking below the waves. And it can also be seen in the enduring idea of the mermaid, or the comic world of SpongeBob SquarePants – which was created by a marine science educator, the late Stephen Hillenburg. This can be seen in Plato’s ancient idea of a lost kingdom called Atlantis. The mysteriousness of what lurks down there makes the seabed a prime location for fantasy. Still, “more than eighty percent of this vast, underwater realm remains unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored.” The National Ocean Service reminds us that the seas cover more than two-thirds of the planet. Indeed, it is often said that we know more about Mars than we do about the bottom of the sea. Like outer space, it is truly a final frontier. In his poem, he imagines how sea-worms – “grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent” – now crawl over the gilded mirrors that were meant to “glass the opulent.” Unexplored depths In Melville’s novel, the great white whale rams the good ship Pequod and drags Captain Ahab to a watery death.įor Hardy, the claim that the Titanic was “unsinkable” is a prime example of human arrogance. Verne’s novel and other classics – such as Herman Melville’s “ Moby-Dick” in 1851, and Thomas Hardy’s 1912 poem on the sinking of the Titanic, “ The Convergence of the Twain” – are allegories of nature shattering the hubris of technology. The deepest place on Earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, is only 3½ leagues down, whereas the journey of the imaginary submarine, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, is a 40,000-mile circumnavigation of what used to be called “the seven seas.” So Verne was alluding to distance traveled, not depth of descent. A “league” (French “lieue”) was a measure that has been different lengths at different times in history. Verne’s original title had “les mers” - seas, plural.

Marka/Universal Images Group Editorial via Getty Images Exploring the ‘seven seas’ Jules Verne’s novel ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ follows a wealthy man who voyages to the bottom of the sea to explore a ship that sank years before. It reaffirmed for me how classic literature – particularly stories about adventures at sea and, quite frankly, misadventures, as well – continues to serve as one of the best ways for humanity to educate itself about the largely unexplored realm. And not everyone survives.įor me, as the leader of a “ Blue Humanities” initiative at Arizona State University that explores how the literature of the past can inform the present about the importance of the oceans, revisiting the novel served another purpose. But later in the novel a technical problem in the submarine starts a race against time as crew members try to reach the surface before their oxygen tanks are empty. He descends to the ocean floor in order to gawk at the wreckage of a great ship that sank years before. A man of untold wealth dreams of voyaging to the bottom of the sea, sharing with a select few passengers a glimpse of the mysteries of the deep. In the novel, a supposedly indestructible vessel strikes an iceberg.

There are indeed eerie similarities between the 1870 French novel and the circumstances surrounding the Titan submersible, which lost contact less than two hours into its descent into the depths of the Atlantic. When OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration enterprise, created a promotional video for its ill-fated US$250,000-per-head trip to see the wreck of the Titanic, it told prospective passengers to “Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine – a 12,500-foot journey to the bottom of the sea.” Those behind the video hoped viewers would recognize the allusion to the author of one of the most influential and widely read oceanic novels of all time, “ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

Blue planet sea of life the deep