I fell silent. Captain Nemo stood up.
“Ned Land can think, attempt, or endeavour anything he wants, what difference is it to me? I didn’t go looking for him. I don’t keep him on board for my pleasure. As for you, Professor Aronnax, you’re a man able to understand anything, even silence. I have nothing more to say to you. Let this first time you’ve come to discuss this subject also be the last, because a second time I won’t even listen.”
I withdrew. From that day forward our position was very strained. I reported this conversation to my two companions.
“Now we know,” Ned said, “that we can’t expect a thing from this man. The Nautilus is nearing Long Island. We’ll escape, no matter what the weather.”
But the skies became more and more threatening. There were conspicuous signs of a hurricane on the way. The atmosphere was turning white and milky. Slender sheaves of cirrus clouds were followed on the horizon by layers of nimbocumulus. Other low clouds fled swiftly. The sea grew towering, inflated by long swells. Every bird had disappeared except a few petrels, friends of the storms. The barometer fell significantly, indicating a tremendous tension in the surrounding haze. The mixture in our stormglass decomposed under the influence of the electricity charging the air. A struggle of the elements was approaching.
The storm burst during the daytime of May 13, just as the Nautilus was cruising abreast of Long Island, a few miles from the narrows to Upper New York Bay. I’m able to describe this struggle of the elements because Captain Nemo didn’t flee into the ocean depths, instead, from some inexplicable whim, he decided to brave it out on the surface.
The wind was blowing from the southwest, initially a stiff breeze, in other words, with a speed of fifteen metres per second, which built to twenty-five metres near three o’clock in the afternoon. This is the figure for major storms.
Unshaken by these squalls, Captain Nemo stationed himself on the platform. He was lashed around the waist to withstand the monstrous breakers foaming over the deck. I hoisted and attached myself to the same place, dividing my wonderment between the storm and this incomparable man who faced it head-on.
The raging sea was swept with huge tattered clouds drenched by the waves. I saw no more of the small intervening billows that form in the troughs of the big crests. Just long, soot-coloured undulations with crests so compact they didn’t foam. They kept growing taller.
They were spurring each other on. The Nautilus, sometimes lying on its side, sometimes standing on end like a mast, rolled and pitched frightfully.
Near five o’clock a torrential rain fell, but it lulled neither wind nor sea. The hurricane was unleashed at a speed of forty-five metres per second, hence almost forty leagues per hour. Under these conditions houses topple, roof tiles puncture doors, iron railings snap in two, and twenty-four-pounder cannons relocate. And yet in the midst of this turmoil, the Nautilus lived up to that saying of an expert engineer, “A well-constructed hull can defy any sea.” This submersible was no resisting rock that waves could demolish, it was a steel spindle, obediently in motion, without rigging or masting, and able to brave their fury with impunity.
Meanwhile I was carefully examining these unleashed breakers. They measured up to fifteen metres in height over a length of one-hundred and fifty to one-hundred and seventy-five metres, and the speed of their propagation—half that of the wind—was fifteen metres per second. Their volume and power increased with the depth of the waters. I then understood the role played by these waves, which trap air in their flanks and release it in the depths of the sea where its oxygen brings life. Their utmost pressure—it has been calculated—can build to three-thousand kilograms on every square foot of surface they strike. It was such waves in the Hebrides that repositioned a stone block weighing eighty-four thousand pounds. It was their relatives in the tidal wave on December 23, 1854, that toppled part of the Japanese city of Tokyo, then went that same day at seven-hundred kilometres per hour to break on the beaches of America.
After nightfall the storm grew in intensity. As in the 1860 cyclone on Réunion Island, the barometer fell to seven-hundred and ten millimetres. At the close of day, I saw a big ship passing on the horizon, struggling painfully. It lay to at half steam in an effort to hold steady on the waves. It must have been a steamer on one of those lines out of New York to Liverpool or Le Havre. It soon vanished into the shadows.
At ten o’clock in the evening, the skies caught on fire. The air was streaked with violent flashes of lightning. I couldn’t stand this brightness, but Captain Nemo stared straight at it, as if to inhale the spirit of the storm. A dreadful noise filled the air, a complicated noise made up of the roar of crashing breakers, the howl of the wind, claps of thunder. The wind shifted to every point of the horizon, and the cyclone left the east to return there after passing through north, west, and south, moving in the opposite direction of revolving storms in the southern hemisphere.
Oh, that Gulf Stream. It truly lives up to its nickname, the Lord of Storms. All by itself it creates these fearsome cyclones through the difference in temperature between its currents and the superimposed layers of air.
The rain was followed by a downpour of fire. Droplets of water changed into exploding tufts. You would have thought Captain Nemo was courting a death worthy of himself, seeking to be struck by lightning. In one hideous pitching movement, the Nautilus reared its steel spur into the air like a lightning rod, and I saw long sparks shoot down it.
Shattered, at the end of my strength, I slid flat on my belly to the hatch. I opened it and went below to the lounge. By then the storm had reached its maximum intensity. It was impossible to stand upright inside the Nautilus.
Captain Nemo re-entered near midnight. I could hear the ballast tanks filling little by little, and the Nautilus sank gently beneath the surface of the waves.
Through the lounge’s open windows, I saw large, frightened fish passing like phantoms in the fiery waters. Some were struck by lightning right before my eyes.
The Nautilus kept descending. I thought it would find calm again at fifteen metres down. No. The upper strata were too violently agitated. It needed to sink to fifty metres, searching for a resting place in the bowels of the sea.
But once there, what tranquillity we found, what silence, what peace all around us.
Who would have known that a dreadful hurricane was then unleashed on the surface of this ocean?
Chapter Twenty
In Latitude 47 degrees 24’ and Longitude 17 degrees 28’
In the aftermath of this storm, we were thrown back to the east. Away went any hope of escaping to the landing places of New York or the St. Lawrence. In despair, poor Ned went into seclusion like Captain Nemo. I was resigned to his mood swings at this point. Although there was little I could do to console him, I also knew better than to be wounded. He loved me. He would return when he was able. I turned instead to my constant companion, Conseil.
He and I no longer left each other.
As I said, the Nautilus veered to the east. To be more accurate, I should have said to the northeast. Sometimes on the surface of the waves, sometimes beneath them, the ship wandered for days amid these mists so feared by navigators. These are caused chiefly by melting ice, which keeps the air extremely damp. How many ships have perished in these waterways as they tried to get directions from the hazy lights on the coast. How many casualties have been caused by these opaque mists? How many collisions have occurred with these reefs, where the breaking surf is covered by the noise of the wind? How many vessels have rammed each other, despite their running lights, despite the warnings given by their bosun’s pipes and alarm bells?
So the floor of this sea had the appearance of a battlefield where every ship defeated by the ocean still lay, some already old and encrusted, others newer and reflecting our beacon light on their ironwork and copper undersides. Among these vessels, how many went down with all hands, with their crews and hosts of immigrants, at these trouble spots so prominent in the statistics??
?Cape Race, St. Paul Island, the Strait of Belle Isle, the St. Lawrence estuary.
And in only a few years, how many victims have been furnished to the obituary notices by the Royal Mail, Inman, and Montreal lines, by vessels named the Solway, the Isis, the Paramatta, the Hungarian, the Canadian, the Anglo-Saxon, the Humboldt, and the United States, all run aground, by the Arctic and the Lyonnais, sunk in collisions, by the President, the Pacific, and the City of Glasgow, lost for reasons unknown, in the midst of their gloomy rubble, the Nautilus navigated as if passing the dead in review.
By May 15 we were off the southern tip of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. These banks are the result of marine sedimentation, an extensive accumulation of organic waste brought either from the equator by the Gulf Stream’s current, or from the North Pole by the countercurrent of cold water that skirts the American coast. Here, too, erratically drifting chunks collect from the ice breakup. Here a huge boneyard forms from fish, molluscs, and zoophytes dying over it by the billions.
The sea is of no great depth at the Grand Banks. A few hundred fathoms at best. But to the south there is a deep, suddenly occurring depression, a three-thousand metre pit. Here the Gulf Stream widens. Its waters come to full bloom. It loses its speed and temperature, but it turns into a sea.
Because Newfoundland is simply an underwater peak, you could call these cod mountain fish. While the Nautilus was clearing a path through their tight ranks, Conseil couldn’t refrain from making this comment, “Mercy, look at these cod,” he said. “Why, I thought cod were flat, like dab or sole.”
“Innocent boy,” I exclaimed. “Cod are flat only at the grocery store, where they’re cut open and spread out on display. But in the water they’re like mullet, spindle-shaped and perfectly built for speed.”
“I can easily believe master,” Conseil replied. “But what crowds of them. What swarms.”
“Bah. My friend, there’d be many more without their enemies, scorpionfish and human beings. Do you know how many eggs have been counted in a single female?”
“I’ll go all out,” Conseil replied. “five-hundred thousand.”
“Eleven million, my friend.”
“Eleven million? I refuse to accept that until I count them myself.”
“So count them, Conseil. But it would be less work to believe me. Besides, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, Danes, and Norwegians catch these cod by the thousands. They’re eaten in prodigious quantities, and without the astonishing fertility of these fish, the seas would soon be depopulated of them. Accordingly, in England and America alone, five-thousand ships manned by seventy-five thousand seamen go after cod. Each ship brings back an average catch of four-thousand, four-hundred fish, making twenty-two million. Off the coast of Norway, the total is the same.”
“Fine,” Conseil replied, “I’ll take master’s word for it. I won’t count them.”
“Count what?”
“Those eleven million eggs. But I’ll make one comment.”
“What’s that?”
“If all their eggs hatched, just four codfish could feed England, America, and Norway.”
As we skimmed the depths of the Grand Banks, I could see perfectly those long fishing lines, each armed with two-hundred hooks, that every boat dangled by the dozens. The lower end of each line dragged the bottom by means of a small grappling iron, and at the surface it was secured to the buoy-rope of a cork float. The Nautilus had to manoeuvre shrewdly in the midst of this underwater spiderweb.
But the ship didn’t stay long in these heavily travelled waterways. It went up to about latitude 42 degrees. This brought it abreast of St. John’s in Newfoundland and Heart’s Content, where the Atlantic Cable reaches its end point.
Instead of continuing north, the Nautilus took an easterly heading, as if to go along this plateau on which the telegraph cable rests, where multiple soundings have given the contours of the terrain with the utmost accuracy.
It was on May 17, about five-hundred miles from Heart’s Content and two-thousand, eight-hundred metres down, that I spotted this cable lying on the seafloor. Conseil, whom I hadn’t alerted, mistook it at first for a gigantic sea snake and was gearing up to classify it in his best manner. But I enlightened the fine lad and let him down gently by giving him various details on the laying of this cable.
The first cable was put down during the years 1857-1858, but after transmitting about four-hundred telegrams, it went dead. In 1863 engineers built a new cable that measured three-thousand, four-hundred kilometres, weighed four-thousand, five-hundred metric tons, and was shipped aboard the Great Eastern. This attempt also failed.
Now then, on May 25 while submerged to a depth of three-thousand, eight hundred and thirty-six metres, the Nautilus lay in precisely the locality where this second cable suffered the rupture that ruined the undertaking. It happened six-hundred and thirty-eight miles from the coast of Ireland. At around two o’clock in the afternoon, all contact with Europe broke off. The electricians on board decided to cut the cable before fishing it up, and by eleven o’clock that evening they had retrieved the damaged part. They repaired the joint and its splice, then the cable was resubmerged. But a few days later it snapped again and couldn’t be recovered from the ocean depths.
These Americans refused to give up. The daring Cyrus Field, who had risked his whole fortune to promote this undertaking, called for a new bond issue. It sold out immediately.
Another cable was put down under better conditions. Its sheaves of conducting wire were insulated within a gutta-percha covering, which was protected by a padding of textile material enclosed in a metal sheath. The Great Eastern put back to sea on July 13, 1866.
The operation proceeded apace. Yet there was one hitch. As they gradually unrolled this third cable, the electricians observed on several occasions that someone had recently driven nails into it, trying to damage its core. Captain Anderson, his officers, and the engineers put their heads together, then posted a warning that if the culprit were detected, he would be thrown overboard without a trial. After that, these villainous attempts were not repeated.
By July 23 the Great Eastern was lying no farther than eight-hundred kilometres from Newfoundland when it received telegraphed news from Ireland of an armistice signed between Prussia and Austria after the Battle of Sadova. Through the mists on the 27th, it sighted the port of Heart’s Content. The undertaking had ended happily, and in its first dispatch, young America addressed old Europe with these wise words so rarely understood,
“Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will.”
I didn’t expect to find this electric cable in mint condition, as it looked on leaving its place of manufacture. The long snake was covered with seashell rubble and bristling with foraminifera, a crust of caked gravel protected it from any molluscs that might bore into it. It rested serenely, sheltered from the sea’s motions, under a pressure favourable to the transmission of that electric spark that goes from America to Europe in 32/100 of a second.
This cable will no doubt last indefinitely because, as observers note, its gutta-percha casing is improved by a stay in salt water.
Besides, on this well-chosen plateau, the cable never lies at depths that could cause a break. The Nautilus followed it to its lowest reaches, located four-thousand, four-hundred and thirty-one metres down, and even there it rested without any stress or strain. Then we returned to the locality where the 1863 accident had taken place.
There the ocean floor formed a valley one-hundred and twenty kilometres wide, into which you could fit Mt. Blanc without its summit poking above the surface of the waves.
This valley is closed off to the east by a sheer wall two-thousand metres high. We arrived there on May 28, and the Nautilus lay no farther than one-hundred and fifty kilometres from Ireland.
Would Captain Nemo head up north and beach us on the British Isles? No. Much to my surprise, he went back down south and returned to European seas. As we swung around the Emerald Isle, I spotted C
ape Clear for an instant, plus the lighthouse on Fastnet Rock that guides all those thousands of ships setting out from Glasgow or Liverpool.
An important question then popped into my head. Would the Nautilus dare to tackle the English Channel? Ned Land—who promptly reappeared after we hugged shore—never stopped questioning me. What could I answer him? Captain Nemo remained invisible. After giving the Canadian a glimpse of American shores, was he about to show me the coast of France?
But the Nautilus kept gravitating southward. On May 30, in sight of Land’s End, it passed between the lowermost tip of England and the Scilly Islands, which it left behind to starboard.
If it was going to enter the English Channel, it clearly needed to head east. It did not.
All day long on May 31, the Nautilus swept around the sea in a series of circles that had me deeply puzzled. It seemed to be searching for a locality that it had some trouble finding.
At noon Captain Nemo himself came to take our bearings. He didn’t address a word to me.
He looked gloomier than ever. What was filling him with such sadness? Was it our proximity to these European shores? Was he reliving his memories of that country he had left behind?
If so, what did he feel? Remorse or regret? For a good while these thoughts occupied my mind, and I had a hunch that fate would soon give away the captain’s secrets.
The next day, June 1, the Nautilus kept to the same tack. It was obviously trying to locate some precise spot in the ocean. Just as on the day before, Captain Nemo came to take the altitude of the sun. The sea was smooth, the skies clear. Eight miles to the east, a big steamship was visible on the horizon line. No flag was flapping from the gaff of its fore-and-aft sail, and I couldn’t tell its nationality.
A few minutes before the sun passed its zenith, Captain Nemo raised his sextant and took his sights with the utmost precision. The absolute calm of the waves facilitated this operation. The Nautilus lay motionless, neither rolling nor pitching.