Still, it is a classic, and therefore it must explore universal and enduring facets of the human condition. Regarding the weaknesses of 20,000 Leagues, I know it’s unfair to judge a Nineteenth Century French novel by the standards of Twenty First Century America. Poseidon’s Scribe Jules Verne, Nautilus, setting, Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Science Fiction, Setting, Submarines Please exit quickly if Captain Nemo found out I’d brought you aboard, I’m not sure what he’d do to. Watch your step on the ladder and don’t hit your head on the hatchway. Subs against the standard of the Nautilus. Novels since have been set aboard submarines, but we must measure all fictional I don’t go that far, but this submarine makes for a remarkable setting. Some literary scholars consider it a character in its own Vast oceans, they could not pass beyond the Nautilus’ steel hull.

The scenes played out between metal bulkheads withĬharacters caught in an odd dichotomy. Before the phrase ‘gilded cage’ came in vogue, Verne trapped

Their lives in the ocean, never making land, eating only seafood, and beingĪronnax, and especially Ned Land, the Nautilus was also an iron prison from whichĮscape seemed impossible. For the sailors of the Nautilus, the sea wasn’t Window to the sea, making this submarine a vessel of exploration, too. Vessel, with a vast library and a relaxing parlor or salon with paintings, busts,Īnd display cases. A landmark that Jules Verne, the science fiction novelist who wrote about the mysterious Captain Nemo aboard the submarine Nautilus, would have surely applauded.Nautilus had another side, as Pierre Aronnax learned. In 1957, when the Nautilus required its first refueling of uranium, there was a party of sorts on board.īy then the sub had traveled 20,000 leagues - or some 60,000 miles, under the sea. Its nuclear reactor allowed the Nautilus to remain submerged for as long as provisions for its 110 officers and crew members lasted. It’s just a little more advanced today - and a lot more capable obviously.” They’re the same type of things that we get into now. We have the same types of missions, the same types of shenanigans that they talk about from her early history. “What surprises me,” Sutton added, “is how similar the stories told by old veterans are to the stories that we have now. “She is the foundation on which the entire nuclear Navy is built,’’ Sutton said. Groton became known as the Submarine Capital of the World when Electric Boat delivered 74 diesel submarines to the Navy in World War II.Īnd if you stand alongside the Nautilus on the shores of the Thames River as I did the other day, that oceangoing history is as real and as current as the great ship that now serves as a museum to American might and ingenuity. “People don’t appreciate yet how much the Nautilus changed the world.”īut here, where the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics has been designing and building subs since 1899, beginning with the USS Holland, the Navy’s first commissioned undersea warship, they have some idea.ĭuring World War I, the Navy Yard on the Thames River was officially commissioned as a submarine base. “We’ve never had a nuclear accident in the Navy and he installed a system with zero accidents. “Rickover understood that safety was paramount,” said Dave Oliver, a retired two-star admiral who served as the engineer officer aboard the Nautilus from 1969 to 1972. Louis, worthy of membership in the elite world vessel club with Henry Ford’s Model T and NASA’s moonshot Eagle.Īnd that applause you’re hearing is coming from those who sailed aboard the submarine when it represented the cutting edge of maritime military might - the ship for which President Harry Truman laid the keel in 1952 and which launched two years later, with Mamie Eisenhower presiding. In other words, the Nautilus is preparing for posterity, securing its rightful place alongside the Mayflower and Lindbergh’s Spirit of St.

She was the first vessel to reach the North Pole. “As soon as she hit the water, she was immediately setting submerged depth records. “Here we have the first complete example of nuclear power.

Submarine cartoon nautilus