Nautilus (Verne) ordinary folk have envisioned over the decades their own interpretations of "Nautilus": A Catalog of "Nautilus" Designs Nautilus (Verne) Nautilus is the fictional submarine captained by Nemo 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). 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. "Nautilus" is described by Verne as "a masterpiece containing masterpieces". It is
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea like D'Urville's ship, the "Astrolabe"; and she passes through an underwater tunnel from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. The most famous part of the novel, the battle against a school of giant squid, begins when a crewman opens the hatch of the boat and gets caught by one of the monsters. As the tentacle that has grabbed him pulls him away, he yells "Help!" in French. At the beginning of the next chapter, concerning the battle, Aronnax states, "To convey such sights, one would take the pen of our most famous poet, Victor Hugo, author of "The Toilers of