Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (51 page)

Marine mammal of the order Cetacea, which includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises.

Scientists who study the natural history of fishes.

Chain of islands off the southern tip of Alaska, still prime whale-watching sites.

Square-rigged warship.

Legendary Scandinavian sea monster.

Le Constitutionnel
was a nineteenth-century liberal daily French newspaper known for its extreme political views.

This well-known London-based insurance company began by offering marine insurance.

Rifles used by the French army in the nineteenth century.

Ironclad warship; the term is derived from the USS
Monitor,
a warship in America’s Union navy and one of the first ironclad warships.

Printed in quarto pages, in which paper is folded in half and in half again to form four sheets.

Weapon consisting of a spear and a battle-ax, used especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Extinct prehistoric relatives of, respectively, the warthog, the horse, the deer, and the raccoon.

Or babirusa; a large wild swine of Indonesia.

Raised deck at the back, or stern, of a ship.

Wharf.

Or mizzenmast; the mast located behind the mainmast on a ship, usually the third mast.

Biblical sea monster (described in the Bible, Job 41:1-34),

That is, a crafty sperm whale.

Downwind; facing the direction toward which the wind is blowing.

In Greek mythology, fire-breathing monsters.

Forecastle:
forward part of a ship’s upper deck;
taffrail:
rail surrounding the stern.

A fathom, used especially for measuring water depth, is equal to 6 feet.

Electric eel.

On alert (French).

Reference to the biblical story of Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale and thus saved from drowning.

Or Scots; people of Scotland.

French scientists Louis-Pierre Gratiolet (1815-1865) and Josef Engel (1816-1874) developed a scientific method for judging character from facial expressions.

Verne was a proponent of Esperanto, a universal language first published in 1887 to help people from different nations communicate.

Mobile within the mobile element (rough Latin).

Potash, or caustic potash, is a potassium compound used in agriculture and industry.

Nemo
is a Latin word meaning “no one” or “nobody.”

Genus name of the sea cucumber, a worm-like invertebrate.

The translator here omits a long paragraph listing authors and titles meant to establish Nemo’s character as a Renaissance man and to display the scope of Nemo’s reading and interests.

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) journeyed six times to the East and published a two-volume work,
Les six voyages de J. B. Tavernier (The Six Voyages of J. B. Tavernier).

Long, wispy cirrus clouds, from which sailors predict impending winds.

Fictional island northwest of Hawaii.

Firm ground (Latin).

Glass bottles coated with metal foil used to accumulate electricity.

Large, web-footed bird; a sailors’ superstition held that killing these birds brought bad luck.

Or Cretan; Candia is an ancient name for the Greek island of Crete.

Tiny, usually microscopic animals.

Jean Macé (1815-1894) worked with Verne’s publisher at the
Magazine of Education and Recreation,
in which
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
was first printed.

Celebration (French).

Made by Bazin (French).

Strait between New Guinea and Australia.

Bitter or troubled dreams (Latin).

Sacred river of the Indian subcontinent.

Luminous nighttime phenomenon appearing in the upper atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere; also known as “northern light.”

Greek geographer (c.63 B.C.-C.A.D. 23) whose
Geographia
was the standard source for geographic and ethnographic knowledge in ancient times.

Summer winds that blow over the Mediterranean for about forty days.

Meaning “red.”

Marine mammal of the western Pacific and Indian Oceans with a long body tapered at both ends and a fluked tail like whales and dolphins; also called a sea cow for its habit of “grazing” on vegetation on the ocean floor.

Much bigger than a Dugong’s actual length, which averages about 8 feet.

Collective name for the lands of the Pacific Ocean, especially when referring to the central and southern Pacific.

There, in King Neptune’s abyss by Kárpathos, his spokesman is azure-hued Proteus (Latin); from book 4 of
Georgica,
by Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.). In classical mythology, Neptune is the god of the sea; Proteus is a minor sea god and Neptune’s servant, who can change his form at will. Kárpathos is a Greek island.

Or Pesce, Italian for “fish.”

Group of Greek islands in the southern Aegean Sea.

Or Thira, an island in the Cyclades; it was nearly destroyed almost 3,000 years ago by a huge volcanic eruption and today is sometimes associated with the fabled civilization of Atlantis (see endnote 36).

Preeminent; the best of a kind (French).

Roman gods of the sea and the underworld, respectively (known to the Greeks as Poseidon and Hades).

Roman goddess of love and beauty (known to the Greeks as Aphrodite).

Ancient name for the Sea of Marmara in northwestern Turkey, which connects the Black Sea and the Aegean.

Peasant of classical mythology who killed herself after angering Minerva (goddess of wisdom) by besting her in a weaving contest; Minerva took pity on her and transformed her into a spider.

Spanish enclave in northern Morocco, opposite Gibraltar on the Strait of Gibraltar; a barrier here would close off the Mediterranean from the Atlantic.

Contemporary estimates are much higher.

That is, the Cape of Good Hope, off South Africa.

Reference to the ascension of the Duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV (king of France, 1643-1715), to the Spanish throne as Philip V in 1700, which precipitated the War of the Spanish Succession.

An acropolis (Greek for “uppermost city”) is the fortified height of an ancient Greek city; crowning the famed Acropolis of Athens is the Parthenon, a Doric temple dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom.

Ancient Roman city destroyed when the volcano Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79; it was preserved by a 20-foot blanket of volcanic ash and debris and has been the site of archaeological excavations since 1748.

Or Pillars of Hercules; two rock promontories at the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar; according to legend, the rocks were placed there by the mythical Greek hero Hercules.

Renowned Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.)

Clogged with seaweed and kelp, the Sargasso Sea, a large body of relatively still water in the North Atlantic Ocean, was feared by early sailors who thought the seaweed was evidence of a shallow bottom or, more spectacularly, that it would stop their ship dead.

Sperm whales.

Verne means March, which is an autumn month in the Southern Hemisphere.

The blue whale, the largest animal in the world, measures more than 100 feet in length.

White pillar or halo in the sky caused by the reflection of light off icebergs.

In 1958 two U.S. nuclear submarines crossed the Northwest Passage (northern sea passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans) by going under the ice. With a nod to Verne’s predictive abilities, one of the submarines was named
Nautilus.

Mount Erebus, on Ross Island, Antarctica, is believed to be the only active volcano in the Antarctic; it was discovered by Sir John Ross in 1841.

Conventionalized iris design associated with heraldry;
fleur de lis is
French for “flower of the lily.”

The disease is actually transmitted by the bite of an infected yellow-fever mosquito.

That is, octopi, or, as Verne probably intended, squids.

1864 is likely a typo. Reference to an earthquake in Japan that caused a wave to hit San Francisco, California, on December 23, 1854.

Or La Manche, French name for the English Channel.

The full name of this French warship was
The People’s Avenger;
it sank after a fight with the British in 1793.

Ceremonial sacrifice of 100 oxen or cattle, an ancient Greek and Roman ritual meant to appease angry gods.

The narwhale was referred to as ‘the unicorn of the sea’ because of its horn.

For an answer to this question, read Verne’s 1874 novel
L‘Île Mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island).

Biblical book that emphasizes the limits of human knowledge.