Made of Iron

Episode Two of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne (‘At a Venture’ to ‘An Unknown Species of Whale’)

This is the second of two episodes from Jules Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870), in Lewis Mercier's 1873 English, a good deal of which stands here as he wrote it. The episode is worth reading twice. On a first pass it is a sea chase; on a second it is a detective story whose solution is sitting in the numbers from the moment the creature matches the frigate's speed to the decimal. Verne's narrator misses it, and the harpooner does not. The line the professor reaches at the end — that a machine built by a person is a more astonishing phenomenon than any monster — is the hinge of the whole novel, and the reason the remaining four hundred pages are about a man rather than a fish. The illustrations are Alphonse de Neuville's and Edouard Riou's for the 1871 Hetzel edition; the grey-bearded gunner is engraved at this point in the original.

Band

Blue · Independent readers, confident, about 10 to 12

Length

long · about 1040 words in 4 sections · 2 pictures

Source

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Verne, Jules · Project Gutenberg

First published

see the About page in the reader

Regions

Canada · United States

Included formats

• · Web reader and PDF
• · EPUB for e-readers
• · Home-print sheet
• · Folded booklet
• · Binder edition (8.5 × 11)
• · Worksheet
• · Quick Check (10 questions) with answer key
• · Read-aloud script

Readers are engineered from the original public-domain text with AI under HummingRead’s published canon and Content Philosophy, checked by automated audit and sampled by a person. Pictures are made with AI to HummingRead’s brief for each story. How a reader is made.