CHAPTER 7

The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours

THE MEDITERRANEAN, your ideal blue sea: to Greeks simply “the sea,” to

Hebrews “the great sea,” to Romans mare nostrum.* Bordered by orange

trees, aloes, cactus, and maritime pine trees, perfumed with the scent

of myrtle, framed by rugged mountains, saturated with clean,

transparent air but continuously under construction by fires in the

earth, this sea is a genuine battlefield where Neptune and Pluto still

struggle for world domination. Here on these beaches and waters, says

the French historian Michelet, a man is revived by one of the most

invigorating climates in the world.

*Latin: “our sea.” Ed.

But as beautiful as it was, I could get only a quick look at this

basin whose surface area comprises 2,000,000 square kilometers. Even

Captain Nemo’s personal insights were denied me, because that

mystifying individual didn’t appear one single time during our

high-speed crossing. I estimate that the Nautilus covered a track of

some 600 leagues under the waves of this sea, and this voyage was

accomplished in just twenty-four hours times two. Departing from the

waterways of Greece on the morning of February 16, we cleared the

Strait of Gibraltar by sunrise on the 18th.

It was obvious to me that this Mediterranean, pinned in the middle of

those shores he wanted to avoid, gave Captain Nemo no pleasure. Its

waves and breezes brought back too many memories, if not too many

regrets. Here he no longer had the ease of movement and freedom of

maneuver that the oceans allowed him, and his Nautilus felt cramped so

close to the coasts of both Africa and Europe.

Accordingly, our speed was twenty-five miles (that is, twelve

four-kilometer leagues) per hour. Needless to say, Ned Land had to

give up his escape plans, much to his distress. Swept along at the

rate of twelve to thirteen meters per second, he could hardly make use

of the skiff. Leaving the Nautilus under these conditions would have

been like jumping off a train racing at this speed, a rash move if

there ever was one. Moreover, to renew our air supply, the submersible

rose to the surface of the waves only at night, and relying solely on

compass and log, it steered by dead reckoning.

Inside the Mediterranean, then, I could catch no more of its

fast-passing scenery than a traveler might see from an express train;

in other words, I could view only the distant horizons because the

foregrounds flashed by like lightning. But Conseil and I were able to

observe those Mediterranean fish whose powerful fins kept pace for a

while in the Nautilus’s waters. We stayed on watch before the lounge

windows, and our notes enable me to reconstruct, in a few words, the

ichthyology of this sea.

Among the various fish inhabiting it, some I viewed, others I

glimpsed, and the rest I missed completely because of the Nautilus’s

speed. Kindly allow me to sort them out using this whimsical system of

classification. It will at least convey the quickness of my

observations.

In the midst of the watery mass, brightly lit by our electric beams,

there snaked past those one-meter lampreys that are common to nearly

every clime. A type of ray from the genus Oxyrhynchus, five feet wide,

had a white belly with a spotted, ash-gray back and was carried along

by the currents like a huge, wide-open shawl. Other rays passed by so

quickly I couldn’t tell if they deserved that name “eagle ray” coined

by the ancient Greeks, or those designations of “rat ray,” “bat ray,”

and “toad ray” that modern fishermen have inflicted on them. Dogfish

known as topes, twelve feet long and especially feared by divers, were

racing with each other. Looking like big bluish shadows, thresher

sharks went by, eight feet long and gifted with an extremely acute

sense of smell. Dorados from the genus Sparus, some measuring up to

thirteen decimeters, appeared in silver and azure costumes encircled

with ribbons, which contrasted with the dark color of their fins; fish

sacred to the goddess Venus, their eyes set in brows of gold; a

valuable species that patronizes all waters fresh or salt, equally at

home in rivers, lakes, and oceans, living in every clime, tolerating

any temperature, their line dating back to prehistoric times on this

earth yet preserving all its beauty from those far-off

days. Magnificent sturgeons, nine to ten meters long and extremely

fast, banged their powerful tails against the glass of our panels,

showing bluish backs with small brown spots; they resemble sharks,

without equaling their strength, and are encountered in every sea; in

the spring they delight in swimming up the great rivers, fighting the

currents of the Volga, Danube, Po, Rhine, Loire, and Oder, while

feeding on herring, mackerel, salmon, and codfish; although they

belong to the class of cartilaginous fish, they rate as a delicacy;

they’re eaten fresh, dried, marinated, or salt-preserved, and in olden

times they were borne in triumph to the table of the Roman epicure

Lucullus.

But whenever the Nautilus drew near the surface, those denizens of the

Mediterranean I could observe most productively belonged to the

sixty-third genus of bony fish. These were tuna from the genus

Scomber, blue-black on top, silver on the belly armor, their dorsal

stripes giving off a golden gleam. They are said to follow ships in

search of refreshing shade from the hot tropical sun, and they did

just that with the Nautilus, as they had once done with the vessels of

the Count de La Pérouse. For long hours they competed in speed with

our submersible. I couldn’t stop marveling at these animals so

perfectly cut out for racing, their heads small, their bodies sleek,

spindle-shaped, and in some cases over three meters long, their

pectoral fins gifted with remarkable strength, their caudal fins

forked. Like certain flocks of birds, whose speed they equal, these

tuna swim in triangle formation, which prompted the ancients to say

they’d boned up on geometry and military strategy. And yet they can’t

escape the Provençal fishermen, who prize them as highly as did the

ancient inhabitants of Turkey and Italy; and these valuable animals,

as oblivious as if they were deaf and blind, leap right into the

Marseilles tuna nets and perish by the thousands.

Just for the record, I’ll mention those Mediterranean fish that

Conseil and I barely glimpsed. There were whitish eels of the species

Gymnotus fasciatus that passed like elusive wisps of steam, conger

eels three to four meters long that were tricked out in green, blue,

and yellow, three-foot hake with a liver that makes a dainty morsel,

wormfish drifting like thin seaweed, sea robins that poets call

lyrefish and seamen pipers and whose snouts have two jagged triangular

plates shaped like old Homer’s lyre, swallowfish swimming as fast as

the bird they’re named after, redheaded groupers whose dorsal fins are

trimmed with filaments, some shad (spotted with black, gray, brown,

blue, yellow, and green) that actually respond to tinkling handbells,

splendid diamond-shaped turbot that were like aquatic pheasants with

yellowish fins stippled in brown and the left topside mostly marbled

in brown and yellow, finally schools of wonderful red mullet, real

oceanic birds of paradise that ancient Romans bought for as much as

10,000 sesterces apiece, and which they killed at the table, so they

could heartlessly watch it change color from cinnabar red when alive

to pallid white when dead.

And as for other fish common to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, I was

unable to observe miralets, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses,

jewelfish, trumpetfish, blennies, gray mullet, wrasse, smelt, flying

fish, anchovies, sea bream, porgies, garfish, or any of the chief

representatives of the order Pleuronecta, such as sole, flounder,

plaice, dab, and brill, simply because of the dizzying speed with

which the Nautilus hustled through these opulent waters.

As for marine mammals, on passing by the mouth of the Adriatic Sea, I

thought I recognized two or three sperm whales equipped with the

single dorsal fin denoting the genus Physeter, some pilot whales from

the genus Globicephalus exclusive to the Mediterranean, the forepart

of the head striped with small distinct lines, and also a dozen seals

with white bellies and black coats, known by the name monk seals and

just as solemn as if they were three-meter Dominicans.

For his part, Conseil thought he spotted a turtle six feet wide and

adorned with three protruding ridges that ran lengthwise. I was sorry

to miss this reptile, because from Conseil’s description, I believe I

recognized the leatherback turtle, a pretty rare species. For my part,

I noted only some loggerhead turtles with long carapaces.

As for zoophytes, for a few moments I was able to marvel at a

wonderful, orange-hued hydra from the genus Galeolaria that clung to

the glass of our port panel; it consisted of a long, lean filament

that spread out into countless branches and ended in the most delicate

lace ever spun by the followers of Arachne. Unfortunately I couldn’t

fish up this wonderful specimen, and surely no other Mediterranean

zoophytes would have been offered to my gaze, if, on the evening of

the 16th, the Nautilus hadn’t slowed down in an odd fashion. This was

the situation.

By then we were passing between Sicily and the coast of Tunisia. In

the cramped space between Cape Bon and the Strait of Messina, the sea

bottom rises almost all at once. It forms an actual ridge with only

seventeen meters of water remaining above it, while the depth on

either side is 170 meters. Consequently, the Nautilus had to maneuver

with caution so as not to bump into this underwater barrier.

I showed Conseil the position of this long reef on our chart of the

Mediterranean.

“But with all due respect to master,” Conseil ventured to observe,

“it’s like an actual isthmus connecting Europe to Africa.”

“Yes, my boy,” I replied, “it cuts across the whole Strait of Sicily,

and Smith’s soundings prove that in the past, these two continents

were genuinely connected between Cape Boeo and Cape Farina.”

“I can easily believe it,” Conseil said.

“I might add,” I went on, “that there’s a similar barrier between

Gibraltar and Ceuta, and in prehistoric times it closed off the

Mediterranean completely.”

“Gracious!” Conseil put in. “Suppose one day some volcanic upheaval

raises these two barriers back above the waves!”

“That’s most unlikely, Conseil.”

“If master will allow me to finish, I mean that if this phenomenon

occurs, it might prove distressing to Mr. de Lesseps, who has gone to

such pains to cut through his isthmus!”

“Agreed, but I repeat, Conseil: such a phenomenon won’t occur. The

intensity of these underground forces continues to diminish. Volcanoes

were quite numerous in the world’s early days, but they’re going

extinct one by one; the heat inside the earth is growing weaker, the

temperature in the globe’s lower strata is cooling appreciably every

century, and to our globe’s detriment, because its heat is its life.”

“But the sun—”

“The sun isn’t enough, Conseil. Can it restore heat to a corpse?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“Well, my friend, someday the earth will be just such a cold

corpse. Like the moon, which long ago lost its vital heat, our globe

will become lifeless and unlivable.”

“In how many centuries?” Conseil asked.

“In hundreds of thousands of years, my boy.”

“Then we have ample time to finish our voyage,” Conseil replied, “if

Ned Land doesn’t mess things up!”

Thus reassured, Conseil went back to studying the shallows that the

Nautilus was skimming at moderate speed.

On the rocky, volcanic seafloor, there bloomed quite a collection of

moving flora: sponges, sea cucumbers, jellyfish called sea

gooseberries that were adorned with reddish tendrils and gave off a

subtle phosphorescence, members of the genus Beroe that are commonly

known by the name melon jellyfish and are bathed in the shimmer of the

whole solar spectrum, free-swimming crinoids one meter wide that

reddened the waters with their crimson hue, treelike basket stars of

the greatest beauty, sea fans from the genus Pavonacea with long

stems, numerous edible sea urchins of various species, plus green sea

anemones with a grayish trunk and a brown disk lost beneath the

olive-colored tresses of their tentacles.

Conseil kept especially busy observing mollusks and articulates, and

although his catalog is a little dry, I wouldn’t want to wrong the

gallant lad by leaving out his personal observations.

From the branch Mollusca, he mentions numerous comb-shaped scallops,

hooflike spiny oysters piled on top of each other, triangular coquina,

three-pronged glass snails with yellow fins and transparent shells,

orange snails from the genus Pleurobranchus that looked like eggs

spotted or speckled with greenish dots, members of the genus Aplysia

also known by the name sea hares, other sea hares from the genus

Dolabella, plump paper-bubble shells, umbrella shells exclusive to the

Mediterranean, abalone whose shell produces a mother-of-pearl much in

demand, pilgrim scallops, saddle shells that diners in the French

province of Languedoc are said to like better than oysters, some of

those cockleshells so dear to the citizens of Marseilles, fat white

venus shells that are among the clams so abundant off the coasts of

North America and eaten in such quantities by New Yorkers, variously

colored comb shells with gill covers, burrowing date mussels with a

peppery flavor I relish, furrowed heart cockles whose shells have

riblike ridges on their arching summits, triton shells pocked with

scarlet bumps, carniaira snails with backward-curving tips that make

them resemble flimsy gondolas, crowned ferola snails, atlanta snails

with spiral shells, gray nudibranchs from the genus Tethys that were

spotted with white and covered by fringed mantles, nudibranchs from

the suborder Eolidea that looked like small slugs, sea butterflies

crawling on their backs, seashells from the genus Auricula including

the oval-shaped Auricula myosotis, tan wentletrap snails, common

periwinkles, violet snails, cineraira snails, rock borers, ear shells,

cabochon snails, pandora shells, etc.

As for the articulates, in his notes Conseil has very appropriately

divided them into six classes, three of which belong to the marine

world. These classes are the Crustacea, Cirripedia, and Annelida.

Crustaceans are subdivided into nine orders, and the first of these

consists of the decapods, in other words, animals whose head and

thorax are usually fused, whose cheek-and-mouth mechanism is made up

of several pairs of appendages, and whose thorax has four, five, or

six pairs of walking legs. Conseil used the methods of our mentor

Professor Milne-Edwards, who puts the decapods in three divisions:

Brachyura, Macrura, and Anomura. These names may look a tad fierce,

but they’re accurate and appropriate. Among the Brachyura, Conseil

mentions some amanthia crabs whose fronts were armed with two big

diverging tips, those inachus scorpions that—lord knows why—symbolized

wisdom to the ancient Greeks, spider crabs of the massena and

spinimane varieties that had probably gone astray in these shallows

because they usually live in the lower depths, xanthid crabs, pilumna

crabs, rhomboid crabs, granular box crabs (easy on the digestion, as

Conseil ventured to observe), toothless masked crabs, ebalia crabs,

cymopolia crabs, woolly-handed crabs, etc. Among the Macrura (which

are subdivided into five families: hardshells, burrowers, crayfish,

prawns, and ghost crabs) Conseil mentions some common spiny lobsters

whose females supply a meat highly prized, slipper lobsters or common

shrimp, waterside gebia shrimp, and all sorts of edible species, but

he says nothing of the crayfish subdivision that includes the true

lobster, because spiny lobsters are the only type in the

Mediterranean. Finally, among the Anomura, he saw common drocina crabs

dwelling inside whatever abandoned seashells they could take over,

homola crabs with spiny fronts, hermit crabs, hairy porcelain crabs,

etc.

There Conseil’s work came to a halt. He didn’t have time to finish off

the class Crustacea through an examination of its stomatopods,

amphipods, homopods, isopods, trilobites, branchiopods, ostracods, and

entomostraceans. And in order to complete his study of marine

articulates, he needed to mention the class Cirripedia, which contains

water fleas and carp lice, plus the class Annelida, which he would

have divided without fail into tubifex worms and dorsibranchian

worms. But having gone past the shallows of the Strait of Sicily, the

Nautilus resumed its usual deep-water speed. From then on, no more

mollusks, no more zoophytes, no more articulates. Just a few large

fish sweeping by like shadows.

During the night of February 16-17, we entered the second

Mediterranean basin, whose maximum depth we found at 3,000 meters. The

Nautilus, driven downward by its propeller and slanting fins,

descended to the lowest strata of this sea.

There, in place of natural wonders, the watery mass offered some

thrilling and dreadful scenes to my eyes. In essence, we were then

crossing that part of the whole Mediterranean so fertile in

casualties. From the coast of Algiers to the beaches of Provence, how

many ships have wrecked, how many vessels have vanished! Compared to

the vast liquid plains of the Pacific, the Mediterranean is a mere

lake, but it’s an unpredictable lake with fickle waves, today kindly

and affectionate to those frail single-masters drifting between a

double ultramarine of sky and water, tomorrow bad-tempered and

turbulent, agitated by the winds, demolishing the strongest ships

beneath sudden waves that smash down with a headlong wallop.

So, in our swift cruise through these deep strata, how many vessels I

saw lying on the seafloor, some already caked with coral, others clad

only in a layer of rust, plus anchors, cannons, shells, iron fittings,

propeller blades, parts of engines, cracked cylinders, staved-in

boilers, then hulls floating in midwater, here upright, there

overturned.

Some of these wrecked ships had perished in collisions, others from

hitting granite reefs. I saw a few that had sunk straight down, their

masting still upright, their rigging stiffened by the water. They

looked like they were at anchor by some immense, open, offshore

mooring where they were waiting for their departure time. When the

Nautilus passed between them, covering them with sheets of

electricity, they seemed ready to salute us with their colors and send

us their serial numbers! But no, nothing but silence and death filled

this field of catastrophes!

I observed that these Mediterranean depths became more and more

cluttered with such gruesome wreckage as the Nautilus drew nearer to

the Strait of Gibraltar. By then the shores of Africa and Europe were

converging, and in this narrow space collisions were

commonplace. There I saw numerous iron undersides, the phantasmagoric

ruins of steamers, some lying down, others rearing up like fearsome

animals. One of these boats made a dreadful first impression: sides

torn open, funnel bent, paddle wheels stripped to the mountings,

rudder separated from the sternpost and still hanging from an iron

chain, the board on its stern eaten away by marine salts! How many

lives were dashed in this shipwreck! How many victims were swept under

the waves! Had some sailor on board lived to tell the story of this

dreadful disaster, or do the waves still keep this casualty a secret?

It occurred to me, lord knows why, that this boat buried under the sea

might have been the Atlas, lost with all hands some twenty years ago

and never heard from again! Oh, what a gruesome tale these

Mediterranean depths could tell, this huge boneyard where so much

wealth has been lost, where so many victims have met their deaths!

Meanwhile, briskly unconcerned, the Nautilus ran at full propeller

through the midst of these ruins. On February 18, near three o’clock

in the morning, it hove before the entrance to the Strait of

Gibraltar.

There are two currents here: an upper current, long known to exist,

that carries the ocean’s waters into the Mediterranean basin; then a

lower countercurrent, the only present-day proof of its existence

being logic. In essence, the Mediterranean receives a continual influx

of water not only from the Atlantic but from rivers emptying into it;

since local evaporation isn’t enough to restore the balance, the total

amount of added water should make this sea’s level higher every

year. Yet this isn’t the case, and we’re naturally forced to believe

in the existence of some lower current that carries the

Mediterranean’s surplus through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the

Atlantic basin.

And so it turned out. The Nautilus took full advantage of this

countercurrent. It advanced swiftly through this narrow

passageway. For an instant I could glimpse the wonderful ruins of the

Temple of Hercules, buried undersea, as Pliny and Avianus have

mentioned, together with the flat island they stand on; and a few

minutes later, we were floating on the waves of the Atlantic.