When Aronnax finds himself trapped in an unknown submarine and handled roughly by masked men (who turn out to be part of Captain Nemo’s crew), he uses a simile to express his outrage:
“By the pluck!” he fumed. “Here are people as badly off as the Scotch for hospitality. They are gentle as cannibals. And I shouldn’t be surprised if they were man-eaters. But I’ll be right there when they start to swallow me.”
By comparing the men to “cannibals,” Aronnax shows how flustered and frustrated he is by this situation. His comment that they are “as gentle as cannibals” is also an example of verbal irony—he is sarcastically commenting on how they are the very opposite of gentle.
This language also highlights Aronnax’s familiarity with the ideology of colonizers. At this period in time, Europeans would justify their imperialist inclinations by perpetuating the idea that indigenous people around the globe were nothing more than “cannibals” and “savages” (language that Aronnax goes on to use to describe the Papuan people with whom he comes in contact). With this simile Aronnax displays a lack of self-reflection—it was he and his crewmates who hunted down the Nautilus, after all, and attacked it first. If anyone could be compared to cannibals (or other violent descriptions), it should be them.
