Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

by Jules Verne

the sort of person who, in spite of having a name meaning “Advice,” never gave any even when asked.

“Complaining doesn’t have to do any good—it’s enough all by itself.

This precious carnivore, hunted and tracked by fishermen, is becoming extremely rare, and it has taken refuge mainly in the north Pacific, from which it will probably soon disappear completely.

1870!

“Salts,” he said, “exist in large quantities in the ocean, and if you removed all those it contained you would have a mass of 121,500,000 cubic miles, which if it were spread out over the earth would form a layer about thirty-five feet thick. And don’t think that the presence of these salts is merely due to some whim of nature. No, they make the waters of the sea less susceptible to evaporation and prevent the winds from taking off too much of this water vapor, which upon turning back into water would submerge the temperate zones of the earth. These salts play an immense, stabilizing role in the general functioning of the globe!”

Captain Nemo pointed to this enormous mass of pearl oysters, and I realized that here there was a literally inexhaustible supply, for nature’s creative force was stronger than man’s destructive instinct.

The captain told me that large herds of seals used to inhabit these islands, but that English and American whalers, in their rage for destruction, had massacred the adult males and pregnant females, and left behind them the silence of death.

As a result, walruses have been hunted so indiscriminately that they will soon become extinct, for hunters kill about four thousand a year, including pregnant females and the young.