![]() "Submarine inventors were keen to sell their products so there would have been none of today's secrecy and technologies would have been keenly scrutinised on both sides of the Atlantic. "If Jules Verne was researching the relatively new world of submersible vessels, he would probably have heard of the Explorer's lock-out system," he said. One of Britain's most noted maritime heritage experts, Wyn Davies, agreed that the Explorer may well have inspired Verne. The Explorer was abandoned after all its crew died of what was reported to be a fever but may well have been the bends. "I realised it was identical to the system used in Nautilus," Col Blashford-Snell said, adding that Verne must have read about the Explorer's lock-out system and used it in his book. It ended up in Panama where the lock-out system made it a useful tool in the pearl trade. The 10-metre long vessel was built by a visionary inventor called Julius Kroehl for the Union forces but it was not used in the war. It was quite an experience because we had an expert with us who said it was much earlier than we had thought and dated from the American civil war." "We waited until high tide so we could dive on it properly and do a full survey. "We were very lucky to find it because at high tide it is totally submerged, but we got there at low tide when about half of it is showing," he said. At first he was told she was a Japanese mini-sub but someone else insisted it was just an old boiler so he forgot about it.īut when he returned to Panama recently looking for ancient ruins, a maritime museum in Canada asked him to examine the object. It was built in 1864, five years before Verne's classic adventure story was published, and it is thought that the French writer would have read about the sub's specifications.Ĭol Blashford-Snell, 67, who runs the Dorset-based Scientific Exploration Society, heard about the object 20 years ago. However, taking into account The Mysterious Island’s retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.Like Nautilus, the craft is cigar-shaped and has a lock-out system, which allows submariners to leave, collect items from the seabed and then return to the vessel. In light of the book’s publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn’t decided that Nemo was Indian yet. The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo’s skin as a potential clue. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he’ll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.) (To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo’s national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo’s accent is frustrated by Nemo’s vast multilingualism. Now here’s the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. Verne’s editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren’t 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since. Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne’s editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book’s writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo’s national origin and precisely which empire he’s pissed off at are left unspecified. Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising.
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