Nautilus (Verne)

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For other uses see Nautilus (disambiguation)

The Nautilus, as pictured in The Mysterious Island

The Nautilus was the fictional submarine featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874). Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton's real-life submarine Nautilus (1800).

1 Description
2 Appearances
3 Other Verne submarines
4 Images
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Description

The Nautilus was described by Verne as "a masterpiece containing masterpieces." It was designed and commanded by Captain Nemo. Electricity provided by sodium/mercury batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction from seawater) was the craft's primary power source for propulsion and other services.

The Nautilus was double hulled, and was further separated into water-tight compartments. Its top speed was 50 knots. Its displacement was 1356.48 French freight tons immerged (1507 submerged). In Captain Nemo's own words:

"Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 meters, and its maximum breadth is eight meters. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square meters; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic meters; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic meters of water, or 1500.2 metric tons.

The Nautilus used floodable tanks in order to adjust buoyancy and so control its depth. The pumps that evacuate these tanks of water were so powerful that they produced large jets of water when the vessel emerged rapidly from the surface of the water. This led many early observers of the Nautilus to believe that the vessel was some species of whale, or perhaps a sea monster not yet known to science. When needed to submerge deeply in short time, Nautilus uses a technique called Hydroplaning which makes the vessel dive down in warped angles, as found from the talks of Captain Nemo.

The Nautilus supported a crew who gathered or farmed food from the sea to eat. The Nautilus included a galley for preparing these foods, which included a machine that makes drinking water from seawater through distillation. The Nautilus was not able to refresh its air supply except by surfacing and exchanging stale air for fresh. The Nautilus was capable of extended voyages without refuelling or otherwise restocking supplies. Its maximum dive time was around five days.

Much of the ship was decorated to standards of luxury that were unequalled in a seagoing vessel of the time. These included a library with boxed collections of valuable oceanic specimens that were unknown to science at the time, expensive paintings, and several collections of jewels. The Nautilus also featured a lavish dining room and even an organ that Captain Nemo used to entertain himself in the evening. By comparison, Nemo's personal quarters were very sparsely furnished, but did feature duplicates of the bridge instruments, so that the captain could keep track of the vessel without being present on the bridge. These amenities however, were 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 thought it a sea monster, but later identified it as an underwater vessel capable of great destructive power, after the Abraham Lincoln was attacked and Ned Land struck the metallic surface of the Nautilus with his harpoon.

Its parts were built to order in Le Creusot, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Prussia (Krupp), Motala (Sweden), New York, etc. Then the pieces were assembled by Nemo's men on a deserted island.

[edit] Appearances

Beside her original appearance in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, the Nautilus also appears in numerous other works:

The comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and its film adaptation). In the graphic novel, the Nautilus has tentacles that rest along the sides, which can be used to grab objects (such as falling members of the League). In the film, the Nautilus lacks the tentacles, but is unfeasably gigantic, has escape pods and is solar powered ("The solar panels are fully charged; we are about to dive").
The Japanese anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, by Gainax.
Valhalla Rising, a novel by Clive Cussler
A ship called the Nautilus II appears in the webmanga Captain Nemo

[edit] Other Verne submarines

Besides the Nautilus, other submarines figured in Verne books. In the 1896 the pirate Ker Karraje uses an un-named 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.

[edit] Images

Motto of the Nautilus: "mobilis in mobili (moving in a moving thing)"	Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax discussing the plans of the Nautilus	The Grand Salon of the Nautilus	Captain Nemo's room aboard the Nautilus
The library of the Nautilus	Engine room of the Nautilus	Main viewbay of the Nautilus	The silhouette of the Nautilus in the distance (though precisely described in the text, she is never pictured very explicitly in the illustrations)