The Sea Raiders sea monsters include Scylla and Charybdis of Greek mythology, and the kraken of medieval times which is thought to have been a giant squid. Previous fictional encounters with giant squids are described in chapter 59 of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" of 1851, and in Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" of 1870. The narrator describes a recent period when a new sort of giant squid, a species named "Haploteuthis ferox", became known. (This fictitious name can be compared with the genus name "Architeuthis" of the giant squid.) As a part of the survey of the period, including early encounters
Captain Nemo the January Uprising; but Verne's editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel feared a book ban in the Russian market and offending a French ally, the Russian Empire, and had Verne obscure Nemo's motivation in the first book. In the second book of "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea", Nemo comes close to revealing his Indian ancestry, though this is not obvious except in retrospect, where he saves a Ceylonese pearl-fisher in the Gulf of Mannar. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was written between 1869 and 1870 and records the voyages of the "Nautilus" between 1866 and 1868. "The Mysterious Island" was written