Royal Academy of Science in Berlin

The Royal Academy of Science in Berlin appears in the narrative of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as one of the foremost European scholarly institutions drawn into the great public controversy over the mysterious sea phenomenon of 1866–1867. Its mention situates the monster debate within the broader context of organized scientific inquiry across the continent, alongside other learned bodies such as the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Geographic Institute of Brazil.

Role in the Monster Controversy

During the six-month period when the "monster question" inflamed public opinion, the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin was among the institutions whose discussions and publications became targets of the popular press. The newspapers of the day, with inexhaustible zest, took potshots at feature articles from the Academy, along with those from the Geographic Institute of Brazil, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution, and other scientific chronicles in major French and foreign newspapers. The Academy's involvement placed it squarely in the crossfire between believers and skeptics, as journalists who made a profession of science battled with those who made a profession of wit, spilling waves of ink and even a few drops of blood as they went from sea serpents to personal remarks.

Institutional Context and Significance

The Academy's participation in this debate reflects the broader European scientific establishment's struggle to account for the unexplained phenomenon that had alarmed professional seamen, shipowners, and naval officers from every country. The monster's detractors cited the botanist Linnaeus's dictum that "nature doesn't make leaps," a principle that the Academy and similar bodies would have been expected to uphold. Yet the accumulating evidence—the sightings by the Governor Higginson, the Christopher Columbus, the Helvetia, and the Shannon, and especially the collision with the Cunard liner Scotia—forced even the most skeptical institutions to confront the possibility that some unknown creature or mechanism existed. The Academy's position in Berlin, as one of the leading scientific societies of the German states, placed it at the center of a transnational network of inquiry that ultimately failed to resolve the mystery before the Abraham Lincoln set sail to hunt the creature down.