Rectifying the timescale differences between the translations of Raphael Semmes's Memoirs and Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas

[John Lamb]

Again cut and pasted from my paper , but I hope it now establishes that Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas after the initial release of the French edition of Semmes's memoirs but crucially  after the expanded Jan 1869 edition of his memoirs and that Semmes may not have known about the satire perpetrated in his name (this is a major  step down by myself from where I insisted to Alex Kirstusis that Semmes and Verne where cooperating together... I now withdraw that opinion. )

Best John

This separate study specifically compares 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas with two editions of Raphael Semmes’s memoirs, the first is the general work The Cruise of the Alabama and Sumter and released in France as Croisières De L'Alabama Et Du Sumter just a few months after the June 19^th, 1864, sinking of the Alabama. The English, American and French editions of this book were sanctioned by Captain Raphael Semmes who loaned his journals to the publishers and the French translated form was thus freely available to Jules Verne nearly five years before 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas was released. The second book is the far more detailed and lavishly embellished My Adventures Afloat: A Personal Memoir of My Cruises and Services in 'the Sumter' and 'Alabama' by Raphael Semmes and published by Richard Bentley in London around January 1869, some three months before the serialisation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea began in Jules Hetzel’s Magasin d'Education et de Recréation (March 1869-June 1870). This will inspire far more detailed and lavishly embellished reciprocal passages in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. The American title of this book is Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States (1869). ....

.....This article has produced the fullest comparison possible between Raphael Semmes’s French translated journals of 1864, his more comprehensive personal memoirs printed in London in January 1869 and a novel by Jules Verne that was begun in 1865 and began to be serialised on March 20^th, 1869. The near 100 links prove ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ that Jules Verne devised Captain Nemo as the alter ego of Raphael Semmes and that Verne had both the time, the available translations and the potential translators to make this happen. If this is accepted amongst Verne scholars then it will open a literary door, closed for over 160 years in further interpreting the works of Jules Verne and perhaps reinterpreting a neglected part of the American Civil War itself.

Verne’s sequel novel The Mysterious Island will be the subject of a further article and trace the detailed Birkenhead and Wirral Peninsula origins from beginning to end. The knowledge required to reproduce over 60 Birkenhead landmarks in an imaginary landscape and then overlay it by using intense local knowledge of historic events will suggest that Verne did not work alone but had external research and help.