The Thing in the Sea

Part One of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne

Jules Verne published Vingt mille lieues sous les mers in 1870, and it reached English readers in 1873. Verne had never been to the bottom of the sea — nobody had — so he read everything the scientists of his day had written about it and imagined the rest. He guessed remarkably well. Real submarines were tiny, dangerous and slow when he wrote about a great electric one that could cross an ocean. This reader is the first of two episodes and tells the beginning of the story, when nobody yet knows what the thing in the sea really is.

Band

Purple · Pre-readers and first readers, about 4 to 5

Length

short · about 345 words in 5 sections · 4 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 (6 questions) with answer key
• · Read-aloud script
• · Colouring page

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.