Sadly I don't own anything written by Jules Verne, and 20,000 leagues under the Sea is one of my all-time favourite novels even if I find the way they say 'Friend Ned' to be idiotic.
Captain Nemo here is portrayed by Patrick Stewart in Mysterious Island 2005.
Please let me know what you think.
I didn't understand the consequences.
"…the men I killed…I did them when I was a young man. I didn't understand the consequences," Nemo looked inward for a minute away from Captain Cyrus Smith whom his old friend and valet and the only other surviving member of the Nautilus crew Joseph, hearing the sounds of battle in his mind, seeing the people who were allied to him dying.
"You didn't answer my question, Captain," Smith broke through his thoughts and Nemo looked up into Smith's face. The American soldier was definitely proving to be interesting, but he had a way of annoying Nemo in ways that he hadn't expected… "Would you do it all over again?"
Nemo looked down as he became lost in thought. His family had moved to India in order to find a new life in that country while they aided in the exploitation of the Indian people. Nemo had grown up in privilege, but he had been surrounded by Indian people and Indian culture, and he had been young, impressionable enough to see the Indians as his people in spite of his English heritage. His family were not happy about it, but as the years passed it quickly became simple enough for Nemo to not care about it.
When his family recognised his above-average intelligence and sent him off, to a school in England it didn't take long for him to realise his family wanted him to become fully English once again, but he didn't yield. But he escaped and he used his family's fortune to good use to travel to other countries instead; he didn't want to be educated in a country and brainwashed, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity to see more of the world and learn more of what was out there than what his parents dreamt of in their barren philosophies. He returned to India a decade later, but rather than be the man their parents expected, a man dressed in a smart British suit and spouting British arrogance and propaganda, he arrived dressed in an Indian style suit with Nehru jacket and turban.
His return was bad enough and his parents had virtually disowned him, but Nemo had married an Indian girl which made their decision to call him a traitor to England even easier but their loyalty to their home country proved to be wrong later on. Nemo return to India coincided with the mutiny against the British, but he arrived with the Nautilus, a submarine vessel inspired by vessels constructed in the past but infinitely more advanced and armed with torpedoes. Using his diving suit technology, Nemo also came with the sunken treasures from dozens of wrecks to fuel the mutiny. With Nemo's support, the Indians had believed they were invulnerable, and even when Nemo launched his attacks against the British Navy and even plotted attacking ports in England later on, they had believed that they would win and India would become free.
And so he had fought.
He had fought on the surface and from the ocean depths in his submarine. He had sunk several warships with the Nautilus's torpedo weapon, and he even travelled to Britain itself, using the Arabian tunnel, a natural submarine tunnel which linked the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to shorten the time to Britain that he'd found with his deep-sea diving suit which he had built after he had discovered certain species of fish travelled between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and then later explored with the Nautilus. The people of Britain were hearing about the Indian mutiny, but it was half a world away and therefore unlikely to really worry them. But Captain Nemo and the Nautilus made sure that it was with the attacks on London and in Portsmouth. In the Thames, he destroyed a number of ships and he used a large missile launcher to level a number of buildings and ships before he moved up the coast and attacked Newcastle, sinking more ships before he attacked the navy in Portsmouth and set half of the harbour alight before he mined the channel. The British lost many warships because of that.
While the British predictably acted like a nest of wasps or hornets he had poked and destroyed with a large stick, Nemo continued his efforts to liberate India now he had proven that the English were just as vulnerable as others. At this time, Nemo's reputation spread across the globe. Many people now realised that their naval defences, which had relied for so long on 'invincible' surface warships were nothing to a submarine vessel.
The British were having trouble avoiding the mines which were really close to the surface and detonated when their engine voice became too loud for the hydrophone sensors to ignore, resulting in detonations. The troubles with the Navy were shared by the army in India; the soldiers in India were having trouble getting new men, new supplies, but Nemo had anticipated that. He had mined Portsmouth for that reason, knowing the British would send the ships from there and with more ships being destroyed the British could not supply their forces in other countries with arms and new soldiers.
But as Nemo continued his campaign, he fell into the same trap like some other warlords in the past.
He had plans to transform India into a technologically strong country to prevent the British from ever returning, and he had plans for the construction of future types of submarines and submersible boats and even underwater cities to colonise the ocean depths.
Worse, Nemo was beginning to believe in his own reputation, and as he did he started making new plans for India - he would not realise until much later he was starting to become as bad as the English whom he was fighting, but at the time he continued forming plans to make India into a stronger nation.
But it never happened.
It seemed the British had a stronger hold on India than Nemo had anticipated, many assassins and spies were sent in to the organisation to discover Nemo's whereabouts. They found his wife and daughter instead after discovering his true name and identity, afterwards, it was simplicity in itself for them to discover who his loved ones were. The British interrogated them, but later they became overzealous and they started torturing them both to discover where he was. The British became so overzealous and enraged by the lack of answers to their questions, his wife and daughter were both raped by those savages.
Captain Nemo had made many mistakes in his life. When he had started his campaign against his fellow Englishmen who were oppressing the Indians he had believed to be his true people, he had never realised how much regret he would show behind the scenes, the nightmares he had of people reaching out of hell for him to pay for killing them all. He had named himself Captain Nemo, knowing that his enemies would be tracking down anyone who was linked to him, but his security became lax as he became too arrogant, too believing in his own reputation to see the danger he was putting his family into. In the end, they paid for his arrogance and he was forced to leave.
He was a young, foolish man at the time of the mutiny, he hadn't understood the consequences. But now he knew. He knew that war was the root of evils on Earth. When he had discovered Thorium deposits on the island, he had planned to make use of the radioactive material to create a superweapon capable of stopping war in general.
As for Captain Smith's question, would he do it all over again? Nemo knew the answer.
He would.
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