nl:De Nautilus fr:Nautilus (Jules Verne)

The Nautilus was the fictional submarine featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. Like the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), 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, seperated in water-tight compartments. Her top speed is 50 knots. Her displacement is 1356.48 French freight tons immerged (1507 submerged).

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

Her pieces 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.

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.

See also

• Ships named Nautilus
• Nautilus, a mollusc

External links

• Verne's Nautilus (http://home.att.net/~karen.crisafulli/nautilus.html). Models and speculation from the book data.
• Nautilus Models (http://www.julesverne.ca/jvnautil.html). Commercial models of the Nautilus.