A challenge to all Jules Verne scholars… how come I am the only person ever to attempt to answer this perfectly valid question by Jules Verne?...
John Lamb
Here is Verne's question that should inspire and challenge all Verne scholars to answer.
At that moment my attention was caught by a few etchings on the walls that I had not noticed on my first visit. They were portraits of those great men of history whose lives were entirely devoted to a great human idea; Kosciusko, the hero who fell with the cry Finis Poloniae, Bozzaris, the Leoidas of modern Greece, O’Connell, the defender of Ireland, Washington the founder of the American Union, Manin, the Italian patriot, Lincoln, who fell shot by a supporter of slavery, and finally John Brown, that martyr to the freeing of the black race, hanging from the gallows and so terribly drawn by Victor Hugo.
What link existed between these heroic souls and the soul of Captain Nemo? Could I finally solve the mystery of his existence by this collection of portraits? Was he a champion of downtrodden peoples, a liberator of enslaved races? Had he taken part in the political and social upheaveals that had recently marked the century? Had he been one of the heroes of that terrible American Civil War, that frightful but forever glorious battle….?
Jules Verne ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ (1869). (William Butcher translation).
… the answer is quite easy really, because I relate it to both the American Civil war and slavery…a reasonable reflection of contemporary world events in the 1860’s and the two topics identified by Verne’s grandson, Jean Jules Verne as being Jules Verne’s main influences and passion.
I look forward to other Verne scholars such as Butcher, Dehs, Evans, de Fries, Matthias (who?) relating their alternative hypotheses to Scotland, Vigo Bay, Arthur’s seat, Paris, Amiens, Iceland, Rio de Janeiro, Bognor Regis and Sydenham.
My answer.
While Raphael Semmes has portraits of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E Lee in his cabin, Nemo has portraits of their Civil War counterparts Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist insurrectionist John Brown in his cabin, drawn by Verne’s contemporary Victor Hugo. Hugo had written to the London News arguing the case for Brown to be spared the hangman’s noose for violently inciting a slave revolt at Harper’s Ferry stating “Assuredly, if insurrection is ever a sacred duty, it must be when it is directed against Slavery” (Victor Hugo The London News 2nd Dec 1859). .
Nemo (Latin for nobody) may be inspired by the seafaring life of Raphael Semmes, but he has the abolitionist morals of Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and Daniel O’Connell sailing on a ‘false Alabama’. The names Kosciusko, Bozzaris and O’Connell were included in William Seward’s eulogy to the slavery abolitionist Daniel O’Connell in 1847 (Seward 1847) after O’Connell’s body lay on public display in Birkenhead (Illustrated London News Aug 4th 1847) prior to his burial in Dublin, Ireland four days later. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward was Raphael Semmes’ greatest adversary and is mentioned numerous times in Semmes’s memoirs. Kosciusko and Bozzaris may thus serve an alternative purpose to Verne in alluding to William Seward and further references to the American Civil War rather than to any revolutionary link with Poland and Greece.
Nemo does not have the superb navigational skills of Semmes outlined by Wade G Dudley (2017). In 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, Nemo first accidentally rams the Etna of the (Birkenhead owned) Inman shipping line (Verne 1870 p6), the Etna being the name of the first Mersey steam ferry from Liverpool to Birkenhead (Baines 1852 p576). Nemo later accidentally rams the Liverpool bound and registered ship Scotia, he runs aground in the Torres Strait, he gets stuck in the Antarctic ice, he enters a hallucinogenic trance on deck during a storm and finally he endangers the Nautilus by sailing towards a freak whirlpool. Nemo needlessly endangers the life of himself, his crew and his prisoners – something Raphael Semmes would only do when, perhaps fatigued by two years at sea, he decided to fight the Kearsarge at Cherbourg. The Alabama too was consumed by a ‘freak whirlpool’, but only after she had been sunk in battle by the USS Kearsarge and created her own maelstrom (Sinclair 1895 p375).
Nemo has perfected the use of a steel ram to terrorise shipping, whereas Semmes hated the concept of both ironclad monitors and the underhand steel ram.
Alas! alas! there will be no more Nelsons, and Collingwoods, and no more such venerable “bulwarks upon the deep,” as the Victory, and the Royal Sovereign. In future wars upon the ocean, all combatants will be on the dead level of impenetrable iron walls, with regard to dash, and courage, and with regard to seamanship, and evolutions, all the knowledge that will be required of them, will be to know how to steer a nondescript box toward their enemy. (Semmes 1869 p150).
In using both humour and the irony of Semmes’ brief stewardship of the Virginia II, Jules Verne will make Captain Nemo the captain of a nondescript box steered toward their enemy.
In his memoirs Raphael Semmes praises the brutal putdown of an insurrection on the island of Jamaica, whereas Captain Nemo, as his alter ego, fuels an insurrection on the island of Crete (Semmes p555. Verne p253) giving erroneous links to Gustave Flourens.
In a final satirical vein and insult to Semmes, Verne seems to eventually choose Nemo’s nationality in the sequel 1873 novel The Mysterious Island based on Semmes’s attitude towards India and its people. Raphael Semmes wrote in his memoirs that India should never be free of British rule after the 1857 Sepoy rebellion, and so Jules Verne makes Captain Nemo, an Indian who fought to be free of British rule and who led the 1857 Sepoy rebellion.
The moral conquest of India, by the British people, is even more remarkable and more admirable than its physical conquest. Since their last Indian war, the whole country, from one end of it to the other, has settled down in the most profound peace… She will remain indefinitely a prosperous ward in chancery—the guardian and the ward living amicably together, and each sharing the prosperity of the other. (Semmes 1869 p731).
In 1857, the great Sepoy revolt broke out. Prince Dakkar was its soul. He organized the immense uprising, and he devoted both his talents and his wealth to this cause. He sacrificed himself. He fought in the front lines; he risked his life like the humblest of those heroes who had risen up to free their country; he was wounded ten times in twenty encounters but could not find death when the last soldiers of the fight for independence fell under British bullets. (Jules Verne The Mysterious Island. 1873 p590-591).
Establishing that a New Relationship in Literature is not Coincidence.
Any subjective new claim that a major figure in literature is based on a real-life historical figure must involve the credible elimination of coincidence. Only then can one proceed to examine Verne’s possible motives for representing Raphael Semmes as Captain Nemo in a 19th century geopolitical context. If the evidence so far presented does not satisfy the literary scholar, then it may be useful to summarise the likelihood of coincidence using a simple statistical analogy and crucially combining it with Verne’s ‘form’ as a plagiarist.
Throughout history there have been well over a million real life sea captains across five continents, almost all forgotten, but in a process of elimination how many of those sea captains like Captain Nemo had their vessels built at Lairds of Birkenhead?... about three thousand perhaps? How many of those remaining three thousand captains, like Captain Nemo, achieved worldwide notoriety and were denounced as ‘pirates’ for sinking world shipping in the 1860’s? In addition, how many, like Nemo could trace their emotive origins back to “Mobile”? How many like Nemo, were chased around the oceans by “Abraham Lincoln” and “Commander Farragut” while having a penchant for fake specifically “Havana” cigars? … and the statistical odds quickly fall back to just one other person – Raphael Semmes of the CSS Alabama. If the Nautilus had been an infamous wooden warship mainly built at “Lairds of Liverpool” which had then terrorised world shipping in the 1860’s then comparisons with the CSS Alabama would have been almost immediate. Instead, Verne deceives us all for 160 years with one simple sleight of hand – he turns a wooden warship into a steel submarine.
The fact that Verne mentions Birkenhead, Lairds shipyard, Raphael Semmes and the Alabama Claims in ten novels over a period of forty-four years from 1859 to 1903, is highly significant as it shows that Verne was fully cognisant of the linkages between Lairds, Birkenhead, the Alabama and his Nautilus, and indeed it appears that he is celebrating those Birkenhead links every few years within the pages of his novels, perhaps not surprisingly as the Nautilus firmly cemented Jules Verne’s own worldwide fame.
The multitude of supporting links too should not be dismissed in isolation but be seen as part of a ‘sequential whole’ by Verne, after all it is the sum of all the parts and how they relate to one another that would have tilted the balance in any hypothetical 19th century plagiarism case. If taken to court, Jules Verne (as he did in his real-life plagiarism cases) would have dismissed as simple ‘coincidences’ the comparisons between 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and both Croisières De L'Alabama Et Du Sumter (1864) and My Adventures Afloat (1869) possibly stating the common passages were ‘typical’ to any major sea voyage. However, given the sheer number, preciseness and in many cases the sheer bizarreness of those near 100 ‘coincidences’ outlined in this article this is simply not tenable and would not be to a judge, either in the 1870’s or now. The timescales do not work in Verne’s favour either. He had over four years to study the French translated Croisières De L'Alabama Et Du Sumter and feed it directly into his 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, before the gradual serialisation of his classic novel commenced on March 20th, 1869, running all the way through to June 1870. Similarly, the English printed edition of Semmes’s My Adventures Afloat was available to London reviewers in the first week of February 1869 and quite possibly to Verne some time before that, meaning that all the versions of Semmes’s memoirs preceded rather than were contemporaneous with Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. Verne could easily have obtained rapid French translations from My Adventures Afloat (1869) given how quickly Semmes’s original papers had been translated for Croisières publication in Paris in 1864.
William Butcher (2006) gives numerous examples of plagiarism by Jules Verne during his writing career, including some cases that indeed did go to court. Butcher writes:
Verne purloined considerable parts of his published works, and was twice sued for breach of copyright and libel, escaping conviction only by twisting the truth. (Butcher, 2006, p. 247-8).
Perhaps Verne should have been sued at least one more time. A 19th century judge, in acknowledging Verne’s previous ‘form’ in being accused of plagiarism, would most likely surmise that Verne had purposely inserted these ‘commonalities’ as political satire rather than any direct copying of Semmes’s historical memoirs. Semmes was inspiration not imitation.
William Butcher accepts that Verne ‘twists the truth’ and therefore Jules Verne stands alone as a prime candidate to secretly ‘plagiarise’ the history of the American Civil War in this, the most brilliant way and create a hereto unknown roman à clef named 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. This great relationship in literature is therefore not coincidence, and neither is it plagiarism, it is the brilliant reimagining of historical events and people, sometimes directly, sometimes in metaphor and sometimes in reverse - it is not a new style invented by Verne but follows a proud tradition in French literature.
I await alternative hypotheses.
Best John