French corvette Alecton off "lest the creature damage or injure the ship and the crew", but in an interview Roper laments "How dangerous is a giant squid full of cannon balls going to be?" The "Alecton" encounter was the inspiration for the giant squids attacking the submarine in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, published in 1870. Notes References French corvette Alecton The French corvette Alecton was a ship in the French Navy in the 19th century. She is most famous for being one of the first surface vessels recorded to have encountered
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea the book are greatly exaggerated. No less significant, though more rarely commented on, is the very bold political vision, which was revolutionary for its time, represented by the character of Captain Nemo. As revealed in the later Verne book "The Mysterious Island", Captain Nemo is a descendant of Tipu Sultan, a Muslim ruler of Mysore who resisted the expansionism of the British East India Company. Nemo took to the underwater life after the suppression of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, in which his close family members were killed by the British. This change was made at the request of Verne's