Invasion of the Sea

**Invasion of the Sea** (French: *L'Invasion de la mer*) is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published posthumously in 1905. It was the last of his works released before his death. The story follows Berber nomads and European travelers in Saharan Africa, focusing on a plan to flood a low-lying part of the desert to create an inland sea and open the region to trade. By the novel’s end, the characters’ confidence in humanity’s ability to control nature is undercut when a massive earthquake naturally creates such a sea.

**Plot summary** Set in the contemporary late 19th/early 20th century, the novel centers on European engineers and their military escort who aim to revive a real 19th-century proposal: channeling Mediterranean waters into the Sahara to form an inland “Sahara Sea” for commercial and military use. The French escort, commanded by Captain Hardigan, clashes with Tuareg Berber tribes who fear the sea will destroy their nomadic lifestyle. Led by the warlord Hadjar, the Berbers launch an insurgency to stop the project. Hardigan tries to retaliate and capture Hadjar. But a devastating earthquake strikes, flooding the Sahara beyond even the engineers’ plans and drowning the insurgent Tuaregs.

**Historical background** The novel and its characters’ plans draw on the real work of Captain François Élie Roudaire, a French military officer and geographer. In the late 1800s, Roudaire surveyed parts of Tunisia and found large Saharan areas below sea level. He proposed digging a canal from the Mediterranean to these basins to create an inland sea. Similar proposals existed at the time, and canal building was a popular geopolitical trend in the early 1900s, when Verne wrote the book. Some readers have noted that the Berber raiders opposing the Europeans foreshadow the rise of Islamic terrorism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

**Translation history** Parts of the novel appeared in *The American Weekly* (a Sunday supplement to a Boston newspaper) on August 6 and August 13, 1905, under the title *Captain Hardizan*, translated by Oswald Mathew. The first complete English translation, by I. O. Evans, was published in the 1960s. A later translation by Edward Baxter was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2001, intended as the first in a series of early science fiction reprints. It included many illustrations from the original French edition.