The Nautilus was the fictional submarine featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. The Nautilus was named after Robert Fulton's submarine Nautilus.

The Nautilus was designed and commanded by Captain Nemo, a former Indian prince and engineer. Her engines were powered by electricity from sodium-mercury batteries, and the crew harvest the seas to get all their staples.

The Nautilus is consituted of two hulls, separated in water-tight compartments. Her top speed is 50 knots. Her displacement is 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.

From her attacks on ships, using a ramming prow to puncture target vessels below the waterline, the world thought it a sea monster.

Her 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 in a deserted island.

Nemo and his Nautilus played pivotal roles in Alan Moore's two graphic novels chronicling the exploits of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

At the end of "Twenty Thousand Leagues", the ship is sucked into the Maelstrom. As it later turns out, she survived and found her final end in a cave of the Mysterious Island.

Appearances

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

• the comic book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and its film adaptation)
• The Japanese anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, by Gainax.

See also

• Ships named Nautilus
• Nautilus, a mollusc

External links

• Verne's Nautilus. Models and speculation from the book data.
• A Catalog of Nautilus Designs. Enumeration of the principle designs of the Nautilus

Images

Motto of the Nautilus: "Mobile in mobile element"	Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax discussing the plans of the Nautilus	The Grand Salon of the Nautilus	captain Nemo's room abord the Nautilus
The library of the Nautilus	Engine room of the Nautilus	Main viewbay of the Nautilus	The sillouette of the Nautilus in the distance (though precisely described in the text, she is never pictured very explicitely in the illustrations)