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Nautilus is the fictional submarine belonging to Captain Nemo featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875).
DescriptionEdit
Nautilus is described by Verne as "a masterpiece containing masterpieces".<ref>Template:Cite wikisource</ref> It is designed and commanded by Captain Nemo. Electricity provided by sodium/mercury electric batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction from seawater) is the craft's primary power source for propulsion and other services. The energy needed to extract the sodium is provided by coal mined from the sea floor.<ref name="Leagues 12">Template:Cite wikisource</ref>
Nautilus is double-hulled,<ref name="Leagues 13">Template:Cite wikisource</ref> and is further separated into water-tight compartments. Its top speed is Template:Convert.<ref name="Leagues 12" /> In Captain Nemo's own words:
Nautilus uses floodable tanks in order to adjust buoyancy and so control its depth. The pumps that evacuate these tanks of water are so powerful that they produce large jets of water when the vessel emerges rapidly from the surface of the water. This leads many early observers of Nautilus to believe that the vessel is some species of marine mammal, or perhaps a sea monster not yet known to science. To submerge deeply in a short time, Nautilus uses a technique called "hydroplaning", in which the vessel dives down at a steep angle.<ref name="Leagues 13" />
Nautilus supports a crew that gathers food from the sea.<ref name="Leagues 10">Template:Cite wikisource</ref> Nautilus includes a galley for preparing these foods, which includes a machine that makes drinking water from seawater through distillation.<ref name="Leagues 12" /> Nautilus is not able to refresh its air supply, so Captain Nemo designed it to do this by surfacing and exchanging stale air for fresh, much like a whale.<ref name="Leagues 12" /> Nautilus is capable of extended voyages without refueling or otherwise restocking supplies. Its maximum dive time is around five days.
Much of the ship is decorated to standards of luxury that are unequalled in a seagoing vessel of the time. These include a library containing about twelve thousand books, with boxed collections of valuable oceanic specimens. The library is also filled with expensive paintings and other works of art.<ref name="Leagues 11">Template:Cite wikisource</ref> Nautilus also features a lavish dining room<ref name="Leagues 10" /> and even an organ that Captain Nemo uses to entertain himself in the evening. By comparison, Nemo's personal quarters are very sparsely furnished but do feature duplicates of the bridge instruments so that the captain can keep track of the vessel without being present on the bridge.<ref name="Leagues 11" /> These amenities however, are only available to Nemo, Professor Aronnax, and his companions.
From her attacks on ships, using a ramming prow to puncture target vessels below the waterline, the world thinks it a sea monster, but later identifies it as an underwater vessel capable of great destructive power, after Abraham Lincoln is attacked and Ned Land strikes the metallic surface of Nautilus with his harpoon.
Its parts were built to order by companies including Creusot and Cail & Co. in France, Pen & Co. and Laird's in England, Scott's in Scotland, Krupp in Prussia, the Motala workshops in Sweden, and Hart Bros. in the United States. Each part was ordered by Nemo anonymously under a different address. Then they were assembled by Nemo's men on a desert island.<ref name="Leagues 13" /> Nautilus returned to this island, where Nemo later helped castaways in the novel The Mysterious Island. After Nemo dies on board, the volcanic island erupts, entombing the Captain and Nautilus for eternity.
InspirationsEdit
Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton's real-life submarine Nautilus (1800).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> For the design of the Nautilus, Verne was inspired by the French Navy submarine Plongeur, a model of which he had seen at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, three years before writing his novel.<ref>Notice at the Musée de la Marine, Rochefort</ref>
A number of authors have identified a possible link between the Birkenhead, England built CSS Alabama and Captain Nemo's Nautilus.<ref name="jules2">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The CSS Alabama was a warship built in secrecy for the Confederate States by Lairds shipyard of Birkenhead, England in the American Civil War. Butcher stated, "The Alabama, which claimed to have sunk 75 merchantmen, was destroyed by the Unionist Kearsarge off Cherbourg on 11 June 1864... This battle has clear connections with Nemo's final attack, also in the English Channel."<ref>William Butcher Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - Jules Verne - Google Books Explanatory Notes Page 422 Template:ISBN</ref> Jules Verne had himself made a previous comparison between the Birkenhead built CSS Alabama and the Nautilus in a letter to his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in March 1869.<ref>Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - Jules Verne - Google Books Explanatory Notes Page 422 Template:ISBN</ref>
Other appearancesEdit
Beside their original appearances in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and The Mysterious Island, Nautilus and Captain Nemo have appeared in numerous other works.
In the 1954 film adaptation of the first novel and in The Return of Captain Nemo, it is suggested that Nautilus is powered by nuclear energy (discovered by Nemo himself), and that Nemo uses the same energy to destroy Vulcania, Nautilus's base island.
In the 1969 film Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, Nautilus and its sister ship Nautilus II are depicted as industrialised stingray-like vessels, flattened with pronounced tumblehomes supporting rounded deckhouses. Each has a heavy girderwork tail, at the tip of which twin rudders and diving planes are mounted.
In Kevin J. Anderson's Captain Nemo: The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius, Nautilus appears as a real submarine, apparently cigar-shaped like the one from the novel, built by Nemo for the Ottoman Empire.
In Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Nautilus features with a squid-like appearance in the graphic novel and a more traditional – albeit extremely tall – submarine in the film. Toward the closing stages of the film, antagonist "The Fantom" has stolen Nemo's design and begun construction of multiple submarines dubbed "Nautili" by Skinner. In the film adaptation, the Nautilus is called the sword of the ocean by Nemo.
The Nautilus appears in Rick Riordan's 2021 novel Daughter of the Deep. This novel is a continuation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, taking place over a century later and featuring a descendant of Captain Nemo as a main character.
Other Verne submarinesEdit
Submarines feature in some other of Verne's works. In the 1896 novel Facing the Flag, the pirate Ker Karraje uses an unnamed submarine that acts both as a tug to his schooner Ebba and for ramming and destroying ships which are the targets of his piracy. The same book also features HMS Sword, a small Royal Navy experimental submarine which is sunk after a valiant but unequal struggle with the pirate submarine. In the 1904 book The Master of the World, Robur's secondary vehicle, Terror, is a strange flying machine with submarine, automobile and speedboat capabilities. It briefly eludes naval forces on the Great Lakes by diving.
ImagesEdit
- 20000 Nemo Aronnax plans.jpg
Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax discussing the plans of Nautilus
- 20000 Nautilus Salon.jpg
The Grand Salon of Nautilus
- 20000 Nautilus Nemo room.jpg
Captain Nemo's room aboard Nautilus
- 20000 Nautilus Library Nemo Aronnax.jpg
The library of Nautilus
- 20000 Nautilus engines.jpg
Engine room of Nautilus
- Nemo Aronax viewbay diver.jpg
Main window of Nautilus
- Nautilus wrecks.jpg
The silhouette of Nautilus in the distance
See alsoEdit
NotesEdit
External linksEdit
- Jules Verne's text in 20,000 Leagues under the Seas provides a great deal of information about Nautilus as discussed on this page: Jules Verne's Nautilus. Many artists and ordinary folk have envisioned over the decades their own interpretations of Nautilus: A Catalog of Nautilus Designs
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