海底两万里-英文版.txt
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1、THE YEAR 1866 was marked by a bizarre development, an unexplained and downright inexplicable phenomenon that surely no one has forgotten. Without getting into those rumors that upset civilians in the seaports and deranged the public mind even far inland, it must be said that professional seamen were
2、 especially alarmed. Traders, shipowners, captains of vessels, skippers, and master mariners from Europe and America, naval officers from every country, and at their heels the various national governments on these two continents, were all extremely disturbed by the business. In essence, over a perio
3、d of time several ships had encountered an enormous thing at sea, a long spindle-shaped object, sometimes giving off a phosphorescent glow, infinitely bigger and faster than any whale. The relevant data on this apparition, as recorded in various logbooks, agreed pretty closely as to the structure of
4、 the object or creature in question, its unprecedented speed of movement, its startling locomotive power, and the unique vitality with which it seemed to be gifted. If it was a cetacean, it exceeded in bulk any whale previously classified by science. No naturalist, neither Cuvier nor Lacpde, neither
5、 Professor Dumeril nor Professor de Quatrefages, would have accepted the existence of such a monster sight unseen- specifically, unseen by their own scientific eyes. Striking an average of observations taken at different times- rejecting those timid estimates that gave the object a length of 200 fee
6、t, and ignoring those exaggerated views that saw it as a mile wide and three long-you could still assert that this phenomenal creature greatly exceeded the dimensions of anything then known to ichthyologists, if it existed at all. Now then, it did exist, this was an undeniable fact; and since the hu
7、man mind dotes on objects of wonder, you can understand the worldwide excitement caused by this unearthly apparition. As for relegating it to the realm of fiction, that charge had to be dropped.In essence, on July 20, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, from the Calcutta & Burnach Steam Navigation
8、 Co., encountered this moving mass five miles off the eastern shores of Australia. Captain Baker at first thought he was in the presence of an unknown reef; he was even about to fix its exact position when two waterspouts shot out of this inexplicable object and sprang hissing into the air some 150
9、feet. So, unless this reef was subject to the intermittent eruptions of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had fair and honest dealings with some aquatic mammal, until then unknown, that could spurt from its blowholes waterspouts mixed with air and steam. Similar events were likewise observed in Pacif
10、ic seas, on July 23 of the same year, by the Christopher Columbus from the West India & Pacific Steam Navigation Co. Consequently, this extraordinary cetacean could transfer itself from one locality to another with startling swiftness, since within an interval of just three days, the Governor Higgin
11、son and the Christopher Columbus had observed it at two positions on the charts separated by a distance of more than 700 nautical leagues. Fifteen days later and 2,000 leagues farther, the Helvetia from the Compagnie Nationale and the Shannon from the Royal Mail line, running on opposite tacks in th
12、at part of the Atlantic lying between the United States and Europe, respectively signaled each other that the monster had been sighted in latitude 42 degrees 15 north and longitude 60 degrees 35 west of the meridian of Greenwich. From their simultaneous observations, they were able to estimate the m
13、ammals minimum length at more than 350 English feet;* this was because both the Shannon and the Helvetia were of smaller dimensions, although each measured 100 meters stem to stern. Now then, the biggest whales, those rorqual whales that frequent the waterways of the Aleutian Islands, have never exc
14、eeded a length of 56 meters-if they reach even that. *Authors Note: About 106 meters. An English foot is only 30.4 centimeters. One after another, reports arrived that would profoundly affect public opinion: new observations taken by the transatlantic liner Pereire, the Inman lines Etna running afou
15、l of the monster, an official report drawn up by officers on the French frigate Normandy, dead-earnest reckonings obtained by the general staff of Commodore Fitz-James aboard the Lord Clyde. In lighthearted countries, people joked about this phenomenon, but such serious, practical countries as Engla
16、nd, America, and Germany were deeply concerned. In every big city the monster was the latest rage; they sang about it in the coffee houses, they ridiculed it in the newspapers, they dramatized it in the theaters. The tabloids found it a fine opportunity for hatching all sorts of hoaxes. In those new
17、spapers short of copy, you saw the reappearance of every gigantic imaginary creature, from Moby Dick, that dreadful white whale from the High Arctic regions, to the stupendous kraken whose tentacles could entwine a 500-ton craft and drag it into the ocean depths. They even reprinted reports from anc
18、ient times: the views of Aristotle and Pliny accepting the existence of such monsters, then the Norwegian stories of Bishop Pontoppidan, the narratives of Paul Egede, and finally the reports of Captain Harrington- whose good faith is above suspicion-in which he claims he saw, while aboard the Castil
19、ian in 1857, one of those enormous serpents that, until then, had frequented only the seas of Frances old extremist newspaper, The Constitutionalist. An interminable debate then broke out between believers and skeptics in the scholarly societies and scientific journals. The monster question inflamed
20、 all minds. During this memorable campaign, journalists making a profession of science battled with those making a profession of wit, spilling waves of ink and some of them even two or three drops of blood, since they went from sea serpents to the most offensive personal remarks. For six months the
21、war seesawed. With inexhaustible zest, the popular press took potshots at feature articles from the Geographic Institute of Brazil, the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., at discussions in The Indian Archipelago, in Cosmos pu
22、blished by Father Moigno, in Petermanns Mittheilungen,* and at scientific chronicles in the great French and foreign newspapers. When the monsters detractors cited a saying by the botanist Linnaeus that nature doesnt make leaps, witty writers in the popular periodicals parodied it, maintaining in es
23、sence that nature doesnt make lunatics, and ordering their contemporaries never to give the lie to nature by believing in krakens, sea serpents, Moby Dicks, and other all-out efforts from drunken seamen. Finally, in a much-feared satirical journal, an article by its most popular columnist finished o
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