Nautilus (Verne) from seawater) is the craft's primary power source for propulsion and other services. "Nautilus" is double-hulled, and is further separated into water-tight compartments. Its top speed is . Its displacement is submerged. In Captain Nemo's own words: "Nautilus" uses floodable tanks in order to adjust buoyancy and so control its depth. The pumps that evacuate these tanks of water are so powerful that they produce large jets of water when the vessel emerges rapidly from the surface of the water. This leads many early observers of "Nautilus" to believe that the vessel is some species of whale, or perhaps a
Cultural influence of Jules Verne Long have both written that the parallels between "The Hobbit" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" are likely too extensive to have arisen simply by chance (both include a hidden runic message and a celestial alignment directing the adventurers to their goal, among other parallels), and the Verne scholar William Butcher has noted similar narrative parallels between "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras". In an introduction to a biography of Verne, Arthur C. Clarke wrote: "Jules Verne had already been dead for a dozen years when I was born. Yet I feel strongly