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
Jules Verne writer Adam Roberts, in an essay for "The Guardian" titled "Jules Verne deserves a better translation service", commented: "I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation." Similarly, the American novelist Michael Crichton observed: Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the highly criticized