Philip Jose Farmer (29 page)

Many more such instances may be piled up, but I think the conclusion is too obvious for us to cite them. The Mysterious Island is a work of fiction turned out by a professional novelist who, after some editing of the manuscript of Professor Aronnax to ensure its popular sale, decided to capitalize on its success by writing an entirely imaginary sequel and, in doing so, to rehabilitate a rather brutal man by painting him as a Byronic hero with a heart of gold—a procedure thoroughly compatible with the literary fashion of the day. We must dismiss it, and with this dismissal must also vanish any and all reliance upon this later volume’s account of Captain Nemo’s character, moral values, and life as “Prince Dakkar.”

Having disposed of The Mysterious Island as a source of information, let us now turn our attention to Twenty Thousand Leagues. Since this volume appears to be a novelist’s rewriting or editing of Professor Aronnax’s memoirs, we may put some faith in matters of fact observed by the professor. However, we should be more cautious in acceptance of matters of interpretation, for here the romantic Byronic aura which Aronnax and Verne saw surrounding the captain may mislead us. Consider the concept of Captain Nemo as the half-noble, half-ruthless, golden-hearted, disillusioned idealist, who loves the oppressed in general, his crew in particular, and who has provided an “Ark of Refuge” for a selected few to whom he is bound by ties of mutual devotion. Just how does the man Nemo really treat this crew of his? First of all, we should estimate how many men are on the Nautilus. From various bits of information it is clear that he cannot have had fewer than twenty-four crewmen in the original group and he may have had thirty or more. The living quarters provided for these men are very interesting. The description of the berth-room in which they seem to have spent practically all of their existence when not engaged in their duties indicates that the room could not have measured more than 22 feet by 16 feet. If we line this room with tripledecker berths, we can just fit twenty-four men (the smallest possible number) into these quarters, generously leaving clear in the center a floor space of 10 feet by 16 feet, in which they may dress, store their clothes, eat, lounge, and otherwise amuse themselves. These are slum conditions of the foulest sort. But perhaps Captain Nemo, whose bedroom is described as “severe almost... monkish,” lived under equally Spartan conditions? Well, his private suite, into which the crew never intruded, consisted of the following apartments in addition to his fifteen foot bedroom; a dining room (15 feet long) equipped, among other articles, with “exquisite paintings” and with oak and ebony sideboards bearing “china, porcelain, and crystal glass of inestimable value” (p. 81); a library (also 15 feet in length and running like the former room, the width of the ship) containing overstuffed divans upholstered in brown Morocco, movable desks, a huge table for periodicals, cigars, a bronze brazier for a cigar lighter, and a private collection of 12,000 books (pp. 85–87); a magnificent museum-drawing room (30 feet by 18 feet) provided with an arabesques ceiling, pictures “of great value” by Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Rubens, etc. (“the greater part of which” Professor Aronnax “had admired in the galleries of Europe”), statues of bronze and marble, a large piano-organ, an invaluable collection of marine life in “splendid glass cases,” and pearls some of which were “larger than a pigeon’s egg” and which surpassed the most valuable pearl hitherto known. With this at his disposal, I think that one can see how Captain Nemo managed to survive the hardships of that severe, almost monkish bedroom.

In any event, the account does not fit the concept of a loving master served by an admiring group of acolytes. It does, however, fit the picture of the sybaritic commander of an old-fashioned warship living in luxurious quarters and ruling with an iron hand a crew of tough fighting men whose fear of their captain and expectation of high financial gain may make them willing to put up with physical discomfort.

One or two puzzling events are reported by the professor. The events we can accept, but his interpretation is less reliable. On a very rough day when the captain, the mate, and the professor are on deck, the two officers observe through a telescope an object so distant that the professor (whose vision seems normal) is unable to see even a speck with his naked eye. The officers are greatly excited, the professor and company are heaved into the brig again, doped, and a ship is sunk by the Nautilus (pp. 216–220). These are the facts; the interpretations that we are given is this: Captain Nemo on first sighting the ship immediately recognized it—necessarily by its flag—as belonging to that unidentified nation which he so loathed, and consequently rammed it with the ship spur mounted on the bow of his submarine. Yet a little thought shows us that this cannot be entirely correct: if the ship was so far away that Professor Aronnax was unable to distinguish it at all with the naked eye, how could the man Nemo even with a telescope possibly recognize its colors? The conclusion, therefore, is that the one way Nemo could know that here was the ship upon which he had designs was by being given information that at this date and in this location, just one particular vessel could be expected. Yet our saline recluse could possess up-to-date information concerning shipping only from some source external to the Nautilus. And of this supposition we have confirmation. He appears to have devoted considerable effort to scooping up the treasure from the sunken ships in the Bay of Vigo. About a million dollars in gold (pp. 300–01) he sent ashore in the pinnace after his intermediary, one Nicholas Pesca (an amphibious individual who appears to have devoted most of his time to swimming from one island of the Cyclades to another), had, during an evening dip, swum out to the Nautilus (p. 299). The interpretation which Captain Nemo skillfully plants in the professor’s mind (pp. 326–27) is that he, as a friend to all oppressed groups, has devoted his wealth to the Cretans, who at this time were in revolt against Turkish rule. The facts are that he is in the habit of sending part of his takings ashore and that he does have certain connections with civilization which might supply him with data concerning shipping and cargo schedules.

Now, following Watson’s method (since we dare not arrogate to ourselves the techniques of the Master), let us see what conclusions we can come to concerning the puzzling character of the man Nemo:

1. He had a wide educational background—especially in biology, music, sculpture, painting, and history.

2. He must have been a genius of breathtaking stature in the fields of mathematics, physics, and theoretical engineering to have designed such a submersible as the Nautilus.

3. Yet, strange to say, although Nemo surely had a reasonable acquaintance with the handling of ships by the time Professor Aronnax met him, we cannot be quite so certain that his practical maritime experience is very extensive. There seem to be curious lapses here. As a sailor the worthy captain is constantly—and accidentally—bumping into things: three passenger ships (not to be confused with the deliberate rammings), one iceberg, the Maelstrom, and the island of Gilboa. Furthermore, wonderful though the design of the vessel is, it has features which an experienced marine engineer would hardly incorporate into its design. For example, quite unlike almost all large vessels of the last thousand years or more—submarine or surface—it has no cutwater unless the very slight elevation of the deck provided a most inadequate one, for the bow is completely conical as it tapers to a sharply pointed spur. Since the deck elevation is only about a yard above water level, this means that in anything but a dead calm at any speed above the barest crawl tons of water would be constantly deluging the pilot’s cage whenever the Nautilus traveled on the surface. Walking on deck when the vessel was under way must have been a singularly damp—not to say hazardous—procedure. Indeed, the design of the Nautilus is amazing in its total subordination of the everyday needs of navigation to sheer military utility. It is an armored ram, but such a ram as could never be found in any classical trireme, Venetian war gallery, or nineteenth-century ram. It is a cigar shaped cylinder with pointed ends, one surmounted with a spur, retractable pilot and lantern cages, and collapsible railing—streamlined, in fact, so that the entire submarine may pass completely in needlelike fashion through a hostile vessel. So extreme a design is hardly necessary merely to sink a ship, and it reveals an appalling savagery of purpose in the designer which ill consorts with a bitter and disillusioned yet golden-hearted friend to the oppressed.

4. He is clearly a man of commanding and domineering personality, a man who rigidly draws the caste line. This combination of an arrogant personality and a marked distinction between groups is of course to be observed in many walks of life, but it is particularly noticeable in those who follow two professions: officers in military organizations and teachers. Nemo, however, repeatedly shows an extreme aversion to the human race in general, a quality not exceptionally common in military men, but one which is frequently to be found in members of the pedagogical profession after several years spent in the refreshing experience of purveying sweetness and light to large quantities of Youth.

5. Finally, the captain is definitely a man of somewhat dubious ethics. No matter how romantic a light is cast over his activities, he is guilty of destruction of shipping, murder, and possibly theft. To put it bluntly, he is simply a pirate, a pirate who has turned to financial advantage his extraordinary scientific skill and who maintains on land perhaps a small but necessarily a widely distributed network of secret agents, who at prearranged meetings provide him with essential information concerning the shipment of valuable cargoes.

On the basis of these conclusions I think that we can now advance the hypothesis which has already occurred to the reader: It is not likely that the portrait of Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is a portrayal of a sinister figure well known to us—Professor James Moriarty? Let us examine some of the resemblances—or apparent lack of resemblances:

(a) Physical appearance: At first glance Nemo and Moriarty seem to have little in common save their high foreheads and stature, but consideration of their respective ages will modify this assumption. When first encountered in 1867 Captain Nemo is described as between thirty-five and fifty years of age, but when one realizes his strength, endurance, and agility, it is evident that between thirty-five and forty would be a much more accurate estimate. There seem to be no differences that the passage of twenty-five years will not account for. (In passing we may note that the Nemo-Moriarty identification here solves a problem which must have puzzled many Sherlockians: no matter how enraged Moriarty was, how willing to die, and how tricky the footing at Reichenbach may have been, he never would have hoped that a stooped, sedentary, elderly ex-mathematics professor could succeed, without even employing the element of surprise, in a physical assault upon a thirty-eight year old, six-foot athlete well known for his boxing, wrestling, and single-stick ability. Those of us in the teaching profession have often eyed the athletes infesting the rear row with thoughts of homicide drifting through our minds; yet we would only dream of a bare handed assault. If Moriarty were Nemo, though, the picture changes: a former athlete at the age of sixty or so may still possess great physical strength, and the consciousness of his youthful prowess and experience in violent conflict gives him the mental attitude which in a moment of desperation would make such an attack possible.

Captain Nemo could hardly have been born later than 1831; Mr. Edgar Smith has speculated that Moriarty was born about 1846, but so late a date seems improbable. It would make Moriarty about forty-six years old at the time of his death; yet the descriptions of his physical appearance in the “Final Problem” (pp. 544–45) and the Valley of Fear (p. 910) are more appropriate to a man in the sixties or even in the seventies than to a man in the forties. If we placed his birth about 1830 he would be around sixty-two at the time of his death, an age which agrees with the physical descriptions and with the approximate birth-date of Nemo.

(b) Educational level: Mr. Smith indicates that Moriarty came from a cultured background, as Nemo did. Both men were fond of art. Nemo had thirty old masters and Moriarty kept, at considerable risk, a very expensive Greuze in his study (Valley of Fear, pp. 910–11).

(c) Manner: Moriarty was a teacher, a member of a family with some military tradition (his brother, we know, was a colonel), and of so forceful and dominant a personality that the unhappy Porlock wobbled in his dishonest boots at a mere glance from the Napoleon of Crime. He obviously had little devotion to humanity in general. All are traits we have noted in Nemo.

(d) Biographical data: We know surprisingly little about Moriarty’s life, Certainly it would have been possible for him to drop out of sight for three or four years during his thirties without Holmes’ taking any particular notice of it. So brilliant a criminal could have buried all tracks so effectively that even the master could not uncover the Nemo episode after a quarter of a century.