Part 2 · Chapter 1The Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean. Okay, so here’s the second part of our underwater journey. The first ended with that super emotional scene in the coral graveyard, which really stuck with me.

Basically, Captain Nemo’s life was winding down, even heading toward his own grave, which he’s prepared way down in one of the ocean’s deepest spots. No ocean monster could mess with the last sleep of the crew of the Nautilus, those friends bonded together in death just like they were in life.

"And definitely no humans," the Captain added.

Still that same intense, unwavering defiance of society!

I just couldn't go with Conseil’s theory anymore.

That good guy kept insisting the Commander of the Nautilus was one of those mysterious geniuses who just doesn’t care about what people think.

For him, he was a misunderstood genius who, tired of all the fake stuff on land, had found refuge in this impossible place, where he could just follow his instincts. But to me, that only explained one part of Captain Nemo’s character.

Seriously, the mystery of that last night, when we were locked up, the weird sleep, and the way the Captain was so careful to snatch the binoculars from my hands when I tried to look out - plus that mortal wound to the guy, because of some freak accident with the Nautilus - it all pointed to something else.

No, Captain Nemo wasn’t just avoiding people. His amazing submarine wasn’t just about freedom; it was maybe about plotting some serious payback.

Right now, nothing’s totally clear to me. I just catch glimpses of the truth in all this darkness, and I’m just going to write down what happens as it unfolds.

That day, January twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-eight, at noon, the second officer came to check the sun’s position. I went up to the platform, lit a cigar, and watched him work. I don’t think he understood French; I made a bunch of loud comments, and he didn’t even react, like he didn't hear a thing.

While he was taking measurements with the sextant, one of the sailors from the Nautilus (the strong guy who came with us on our first trip to the Island of Crespo) came to clean the lantern’s lenses.

I checked out the gear, which was incredibly strong - it had these lens rings, like you’d find in a lighthouse, that blasted out light horizontally. The electric lamp was set up to give off its most powerful beam. Seriously, it was created in a vacuum, which made it super stable and bright.

This vacuum saved on the graphite points where the light arc happened - a big deal for Captain Nemo, who couldn’t just replace them whenever he wanted. Under those conditions, the points barely wore down. When the Nautilus was ready to go back underwater, I headed to the saloon.

The panel was closed, and the course was set straight west.

We were slicing through the waters of the Indian Ocean, a massive liquid plain - like, one point two trillion acres! - and the water was so clear and transparent that you'd get dizzy just looking at it. The Nautilus usually floated between fifty and one hundred fathoms deep. We kept going like that for a few days.

Anyone but me would have thought the hours were long and boring, but the daily walks on the platform, breathing in the fresh ocean air, looking at the amazing water through the saloon windows, reading in the library, and writing down my memories - it filled my time and kept me totally engaged.

For a few days, we spotted tons of seabirds - gulls, basically. Some were caught pretty easily and, when prepared a certain way, made a really tasty snack.

Among the big birds, carried far from everywhere and stopping to rest on the waves after long flights, I saw some incredible albatrosses, making loud, weird noises like a donkey. And there were also birds from the long-winged family.

As for the fish, they always blew our minds when we peeked into their underwater lives through the open hatches. I saw so many kinds I’d never seen before.

I’m going to focus mostly on ostracions that are unique to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the part that touches the coast of tropical America. These fish, like tortoises, armadillos, and sea urchins, and crustaceans, are protected by a shell that’s made of real bone, not chalk or stone.

Sometimes it's shaped like a solid triangle, sometimes like a solid square. I saw some triangular ones about an inch and a half long - they had good, tasty meat and I totally recommend adding them to freshwater tanks. A lot of sea-fish can get used to that.

I’d also mention the square-shaped ostracions, with four big bumps on their backs. Some of them have white spots on their bodies and you can even tame them like birds! There were also trigons with spikes formed by their bony shells, and they grunt so strangely that people call them "seapigs."

And then there were dromedaries with big, cone-shaped humps - their meat is super tough and leathery.

Now, I’m pulling some notes from Master Conseil's daily journal.

"There are these fish called petrodons, which are only found in those seas - they have red backs and white chests and are known for three rows of long, stringy things hanging down. And then there are electric fish, about seven inches long, with the brightest colors."

As for other types, there were ovoides that look like dark brown eggs with white bands, and no tails. Then there were diodons, like real sea porcupines, covered in spikes and able to puff up to look like cushions covered in darts. There were also hippocampi, found in every ocean.

Some pegasi have long snouts, and their pectoral fins - which are really long and shaped like wings - let them shoot into the air, if not actually fly. Then there were pigeon spatulae, with tails covered in lots of shell rings.

There were macrognathi with long jaws, an amazing fish about nine inches long, with really cool colors. There were pale-colored calliomores with weird, bumpy heads.

"And there were tons of chaetodons with long, tube-like snouts that catch insects by shooting them with a single drop of water - basically, they're the flycatchers of the sea."

"In the eighty-ninth category of fish, which Lacepede classified, belonging to the second lower group of bony fish, characterized by opercules and bronchial membranes, I noticed the scorpaena. It has spikes on its head and just one dorsal fin."

These creatures are covered in small shells, or not, depending on the group they belong to. The second group gives us didactyles that are fourteen or fifteen inches long, with yellow rays and heads that look totally wild.

And the first group gives us a bunch of those crazy-looking fish called ‘seafrogs. They have big heads - sometimes with holes, sometimes with bumps and spikes, and covered in bumps. They have weird, irregular horns. Their bodies and tails are covered in hard spots.

"Their sting makes a dangerous wound. They're just creepy and horrible to look at."

From January twenty-first to the twenty-third, the Nautilus covered an insane two hundred and fifty leagues - that’s about five hundred and forty miles, or twenty-two miles an hour. We saw so many different kinds of fish because they were drawn to the electric light and tried to keep up with us.

Most couldnn't handle our speed, but some stuck around in the Nautilus’s wake for a bit. On the twenty-fourth, at twelve° five' South latitude and ninety-four° thirty-three' longitude, we spotted Keeling Island, a coral formation covered in amazing coconut trees. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy had visited it before.

The Nautilus cruised along the island's shoreline for a while. The nets brought up tons of polyp specimens and some really weird shells.

Some cool stuff from delphinulae - a type of dolphin - added to Captain Nemo's collection, and I grabbed an astraea punctifera, a parasitic polyp that often clings to shells.

Soon, Keeling Island vanished over the horizon, and our course headed northwest, toward the Indian Peninsula.

From Keeling Island, we slowed down and our route became more unpredictable, often taking us way down deep. A few times, they used slanted ramps, powered by internal levers that tilted to the water line.

We covered about two miles that way, but never reached the deepest parts of the Indian Sea - soundings have never even gotten close to seven thousand fathoms down there. The temperature of the water way down below was always four° above zero.

I did notice that the water was always colder higher up than at the surface of the sea.

On January twenty-fifth, the ocean was totally empty. The Nautilus spent the day skimming across the waves, with its powerful propeller sending water shooting up high. Who wouldn’t mistake it for a giant whale? I spent most of the day on the platform, watching the sea.

Nothing on the horizon until around four o’clock - a steamer heading west, crossing our path. We caught a glimpse of its masts for a second, but it couldn't see the Nautilus; we were too low in the water.

I thought it might be a P. O. Company ship, the ones that run from Ceylon to Sydney, stopping at King George’s Point and Melbourne.

At five o’clock in the evening, during that brief twilight that blends night and day in the tropics, Conseil and I were totally stunned by something we saw.

It was a huge group of argonauts - hundreds of them - traveling across the ocean's surface. They were the bumpy kind, which are common in the Indian Sea.

These graceful molluscs moved backward using their long, tube-like body, pushing water through it. Six of their eight tentacles were stretched out, floating on the water, while the other two were rolled up and spread out like a lightweight sail.

I could see their spiral, ridged shells, which Cuvier rightly compared to an elegant little boat. A boat indeed! It’s created by the creature that doesn’t even stick to it.

For almost an hour, the Nautilus floated among this group of molluscs. Then, I don’t know what spooked them. But as if on cue, every sail folded down, the arms retracted, the bodies pulled in, the shells flipped over, shifting their balance, and the whole fleet vanished beneath the waves.

The ships in a squadron couldn't have maneuvered with more precision.

Just then, night fell suddenly, and the reeds, barely stirred by the breeze, lay peacefully against the sides of the Nautilus.

The next day, January twenty-sixth, we crossed the equator at the eighty-second meridian and entered the northern hemisphere. During the day, a huge group of sharks followed us - seriously scary creatures that multiply in these waters and make them really dangerous.

They were "cestracio philippi" sharks, with brown backs and white bellies, armed with eleven rows of teeth - eyed sharks - their throats marked with a big black spot surrounded by white, like an eye. We also saw some Isabella sharks, with rounded snouts covered in dark spots.

These powerful sharks often slammed themselves against the saloon windows with so much force that we felt really unsafe. Ned Land totally lost it at times.

He wanted to rush to the surface and harpoon the monsters, especially the smooth-hound sharks, whose mouths were packed with teeth like a mosaic; and huge tiger-sharks almost six yards long - those last ones seemed to freak him out the most.

But the Nautilus sped up, easily leaving even the fastest ones behind.

January twenty-seventh, as we entered the huge Bay of Bengal, we kept seeing a pretty disturbing sight: dead bodies floating on the water's surface.

They were people from Indian villages, carried out by the Ganges River and ending up at sea, and the vultures - the only ones doing burial duty around here - hadn’t been able to eat them all. But the sharks definitely helped out with the grim work.

Around seven o’clock that evening, the Nautilus, half-submerged, was sailing in a sea of milk. At first glance, the ocean looked like it had been turned to milk. Was it the moon's effect? Nope; because the moon, only a couple of days old, was still hidden below the horizon, bathed in sunlight.

The whole sky, though lit by starlight, seemed dark compared to the whiteness of the water.

Conseil couldn’t believe what he was seeing and asked me what was going on. Luckily, I could explain it.

"It’s called a milk sea," I said.

"You can often see huge areas of white wavelets on the coasts of Amboyna, and in these parts of the sea."

"But, sir," said Conseil, "can you tell me what causes that? Because I don’t think the water’s actually turned into milk, right?"

"No, my boy; and the whiteness that’s surprising you is caused only by millions of tiny creatures called infusoria, a kind of luminous little worm, gelatinous and colorless, about as thick as a hair, and only seven-thousandths of an inch long."

These little guys stick together, sometimes for miles. Miles! exclaimed Conseil.

"Yep, my boy; and don’t even try to count them. You won’t be able to, because if I’m not mistaken, ships have sailed on these milk seas for over forty miles."

Around midnight, the sea suddenly went back to its normal color; but behind us, even to the horizon, the sky reflected the white waves, and for a long time seemed filled with the faint glow of an aurora borealis.