Eh! Captain Bourcart, do you not set out today?...
- No, Monsieur Brunel, and I'm afraid we won't be able to leave tomorrow...or even in a week....
- That is annoying....
- And above all, disturbing, declared M. Bourcart, shaking his head. The Saint-Enoch should be at sea since the end of last month in order to arrive in good season on the fishing grounds.... You will see that it will be left behind by the English and the Americans....
- And it is always these two men that you lack?...
- Always...Monsieur Brunel...one that I cannot do without, the other that I would do without if it were not for the regulations that impose it on me....
- And doubtless that one is not the cooper?... asked M. Brunel.
- No...have the goodness to believe me, no!... On my ship, the cooper is as essential as mast, rudder, or compass, because I have two thousand barrels in my hold....
(My translation.) The Saint-Enoch, a top-notch French whaling ship, needs a cooper, so the captain reluctantly asks Jean-Marie Cabidoulin. Cabidoulin is extraordinarily good at what he does, but he also has a fault: he likes to tell stories, and his stories, about the disasters and the terrors of the seas, are not good morale. Cabidoulin himself darkly suspects that, having seen terrors, this might be the voyage on which he sees the dreaded sea serpent, and that they might not make it back alive, but nonetheless he agrees, and the Saint-Enoch sets sail.
The voyage starts out very well, with unusual success in superabundant waters, although the ship soon finds itself in heated competition with an English whaling ship, the Repton. But as the voyage continues, and the competition with the Repton becomes more serious, strange events begin to mount up. Local fishermen tell stories of a giant sea monster. The whales and even the fish soon become impossible to find. They find an unusual amount of debris from ship-collisions. Then, strangest of all, the Repton is destroyed before their eyes by causes unknown and the Saint-Enoch seems to run aground on a reef where no reefs should be.
Judging by the reviews, most readers of Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin, perhaps misled by the common English title, The Sea Serpent, find it a disappointing tale. It is mostly just the story of a whaling voyage; and, indeed, for about three-quarters of the story the primary interest lies only in the day-to-day business of whaling. And many, I think, expect something like the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues, one of the most memorable scenes in fiction; you will find nothing like it here. We never directly see the sea serpent -- if it is even a sea serpent. This is quite clearly a deliberate choice by Verne, whose narrator keeps insisting (along with the doctor of the ship) that nobody has ever found any scientific evidence of a sea serpent. All we get is one mystery after another. I actually enjoyed this aspect of the tale. We are not privy to a great revealing; we are not given some insight the sailors lack; we are only faced, as they are, with the sea itself. And as Cabidoulin says, it is full of things we do not yet know.
