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I . The Monster of the Seas The year 1866 was marked by a strange event which nobody has forgotten yet . For some months ships at sea had been meeting “ an enormous thing ” , a long object shaped like a spindle . It was much larger than a whale and much faster , and at night it sometimes shone with a strange light . On the twentieth of July , 1866 , the steamer Governor Higginson met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia . At first Captain Baker thought that it was an unknown rock , but then two columns of water shot from it a hundred and fifty feet into the air , and he knew that it was alive . Three days later another ship saw the same animal in the Pacific , more than seven hundred leagues away . Two weeks after that , two steamers saw it in the Atlantic , between America and Europe . They said that it was more than three hundred and fifty feet long . The largest whales ever seen had never been longer than sixty yards . In every big city the monster became the fashion , and people sang about it in cafés and laughed at it in the newspapers . Then , early in 1867 , the question stopped being a joke and became a real danger . On the thirteenth of April , 1867 , the Scotia , a large steamer of the Cunard line , was crossing the Atlantic in calm weather . At seventeen minutes past four , while the passengers were having lunch , they felt a small shock . Nobody was afraid until the ship’s carpenter ran up shouting , “ We are sinking ! We are sinking ! ” The sea was pouring into one of the ship’s seven sections . Luckily the walls between the sections were strong , and the Scotia reached Liverpool three days later . In the dry dock the engineers could hardly believe their eyes : below the waterline there was a hole in the iron plates , two yards wide . It had the shape of a perfect triangle , as if someone had cut it with a tool . Something very hard had been driven through the thick iron with great force , and then it had pulled itself out again . After that , every ship that was lost at sea was blamed on the monster . The public demanded that the seas should be cleared of this terrible animal at any price . At that time I had just come back from a scientific journey in the wild lands of Nebraska . I should explain that my name is Pierre Aronnax , and that I was then an assistant professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris . The French government had sent me to Nebraska for six months , and at the end of March I arrived in New York with a large collection of plants , animals and stones . I was going to sail home to France at the beginning of May .
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