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 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