The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne [freenovel24 txt] 📗

the service of that cause. He gave himself; he fought in the first rank; he risked his life as the humblest of those heroes who had risen to free their country; he was wounded ten times in twenty battles, and was unable to find death when the last soldiers of independence fell before the English guns.

Never had British rule in India been in such danger; and, had the Sepoys received the assistance from without which they had hoped for, Asia would not today, perhaps, be under the dominion of the United Kingdom.

At that time the name of Prince Dakkar was there illustrious. He never hid himself, and he fought openly. A price was put upon his head, and although he was not delivered up by any traitor, his father, mother, wife, and children suffered for him before he knew of the dangers which they ran on his account.

Once again right fell before might. Civilization never goes backwards, and her laws are like those of necessity. The Sepoys were vanquished, and the country of the ancient rajahs fell again under the strict rule of England.

Prince Dakkar, unable to die, returned again to his mountains in Bundelkund. There, thenceforward alone, he conceived an immense disgust against all who bore the name of man⁠—a hatred and a horror of the civilized world⁠—and wishing to fly from it, he collected the wreck of his fortune, gathered together twenty of his most faithful companions, and one day disappeared.

Where did Prince Dakkar seek for that independence which was refused him upon the inhabited earth? Under the waters, in the depths of the seas, where no one could follow him.

From a man of war he became a man of science. On a desert island of the Pacific he established his workshops, and there he constructed a submarine ship after plans of his own. By means which will someday be known, he utilized electricity, that incommensurable force, for all the necessities of his apparatus as a motor, for lighting and for heat. The sea, with its infinite treasures, its myriads of fishes, its harvests of varech and sargassum, its enormous mammifers, and not only all that nature held, but all that man had lost, amply sufficed for the needs of the Prince and his equipage;⁠—and thus he accomplished his heart’s desire, to have no further communication with the earth. He named his submarine ship the Nautilus, he called himself Captain Nemo, and he disappeared under the seas.

During many years, the Captain visited all the oceans, from one pole to the other. Pariah of the earth, he reaped the treasures of the unknown worlds. The millions lost in Vigo Bay, in 1702, by the Spanish galleons, furnished him with an inexhaustible mine of wealth, which he gave, anonymously, to people fighting for their independence.

For years he had had no communication with his kindred, when, during the night of the 6th of November, 1866, three men were thrown upon his deck. They were a French professor, his servant, and a Canadian fisherman. These men had been thrown overboard by the shock of the collision between the Nautilus and the United States frigate Abraham Lincoln, which had given it chase.

Captain Nemo learned from the Professor that the Nautilus, sometimes taken for a gigantic mammifer of the Cetacean family, sometimes for a submarine apparatus containing a gang of pirates, was hunted in every sea.

Captain Nemo could have thrown these three men, whom chance had thrown across his mysterious life, into the ocean. He did not do it, he kept them prisoners, and, during seven months, they were able to perceive all the marvels of a voyage of 20,000 leagues under the sea.

One day, the 22nd of June, 1867, these three men, who knew nothing of Captain Nemo’s past life, seized the boat belonging to the Nautilus and attempted to escape. But just then the Nautilus was upon the coast of Norway in the eddy of the Maelstrom, and the Captain believed that the fugitives, caught in its terrible vortex, had been swallowed up in the gulf. He was unaware that the Frenchman and his companions had been miraculously thrown upon the coast, that the fishermen of the Loffodin Islands had rescued them, and that the Professor, on his return to France, had published a book in which seven months of this strange and adventurous navigation was narrated.

For a long time Captain Nemo continued this mode of life, traversing the sea. One by one his companions died and found their rest in the coral cemetery at the bottom of the Pacific, and in time Captain Nemo was the last survivor of those who had sought refuge in the depths of the oceans.

He was then sixty years old. As he was alone, it was necessary to take his Nautilus to one of those submarine ports which served him in former days as a harbor.

One of these ports was under Lincoln Island, and was the present asylum of the Nautilus. For six years the Captain had remained there awaiting that death which would reunite him with his companions, when chance made him witness to the fall of the balloon which carried the prisoners. Clothed in his impermeable jacket, he was walking under the water, some cables’ lengths from the shore of the islet, when the engineer was thrown into the sea. A good impulse moved Captain Nemo⁠—and he saved Cyrus Smith.

On the arrival of these five castaways he wished to go from them, but his port of refuge was closed. Some volcanic action had raised up the basalt so that the Nautilus could not cross the entrance to the crypt, although there was still sufficient water for a boat of light draught.

Captain Nemo, therefore, remained and watched these men, thrown without resources upon a desert island, but he did not wish to be seen. Little by little, as he saw their honest, energetic lives, how they were bound together in fraternal amity, he interested himself in