Captain Nemo's assumed name recalls Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus encounters the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus in the course of his wanderings. Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, and Odysseus replies that it is Outis (Οὖτις) 'no one', translated into Latin as "Nemo". Like Captain Nemo, Odysseus wanders the seas in exile (though only for 10 years) and similarly grieves the tragic deaths of his crewmen.
The novel repeatedly mentions the U.S. Naval Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, an oceanographer who investigated the winds, seas, and currents, collected samples from the depths, and charted the world's oceans. Maury was internationally famous, and Verne may have known of his French ancestry.
The novel alludes to other Frenchmen, including Lapérouse, the celebrated explorer whose two sloops of war vanished during a voyage of global circumnavigation; Dumont d'Urville, a later explorer who found the remains of one of Lapérouse's ships; and Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal and nephew of the sole survivor of Lapérouse's ill-fated expedition. The Nautilus follows in the footsteps of these men: she visits the waters where Lapérouse's vessels disappeared; she enters Torres Strait and becomes stranded there, as did d'Urville's ship, the Astrolabe; and she passes beneath the Suez Canal via a fictitious underwater tunnel joining the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.
In possibly the novel's most famous episode, the above-described battle with a school of giant squid, one of the monsters captures a crew member. Reflecting on the battle in the next chapter, Aronnax writes: "To convey such sights, it would take the pen of our most renowned poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea." A bestselling novel in Verne's day, The Toilers of the Sea also features a threatening cephalopod: a laborer battles with an octopus, believed by critics to be symbolic of the Industrial Revolution. Certainly, Verne was influenced by Hugo's novel, and, in penning this variation on its octopus encounter, he may have intended the symbol to also take in the Revolutions of 1848.
Other symbols and themes pique modern critics. Margaret Drabble, for instance, argues that Verne's masterwork also anticipated the ecology movement and influenced French avant-garde imagery.[9] As for additional motifs in the novel, Captain Nemo repeatedly champions the world's persecuted and downtrodden. While in Mediterranean waters, the captain provides financial support to rebels resisting Ottoman rule during the Cretan Revolt of 1866–1869, proving to Professor Aronnax that he had not severed all relations with terrestrial mankind. In another episode, Nemo rescues an Indian pearl diver from a shark attack, then gives the fellow a pouch full of pearls, more than the man could have gathered after years of his hazardous work. When asked why he would help a "representative of that race from which he'd fled under the seas", Nemo responds that the diver, as an "East Indian", "lives in the land of the oppressed".[10]
Indeed, the novel has an under-the-counter political vision, hinted at in the character and background of Captain Nemo himself. In the book's final form, Nemo says to professor Aronnax, "That Indian, sir, is an inhabitant of an oppressed country; and I am still, and shall be, to my last breath, one of them!"[11] In the novel's initial drafts, the mysterious captain was a Polish nobleman, whose family and homeland were slaughtered by Russian forces during the Polish January Uprising of 1863. However, these specifics were suppressed during the editing stages at the insistence of Verne's publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, believed responsible by today's scholars for many modifications of Verne's original manuscripts. At the time France was a putative ally of the Russian Empire, hence Hetzel demanded that Verne suppress the identity of Nemo's enemy, not only to avoid political complications but also to avert lower sales should the novel appear in Russian translation. Hence Professor Aronnax never discovers Nemo's origins.
Even so, a trace remains of the novel's initial concept, a detail that may have eluded Hetzel: its allusion to an unsuccessful rebellion under a Polish hero, Tadeusz Kościuszko, leader of the uprising against Russian and Prussian control in 1794;[12] Kościuszko mourned his country's prior defeat with the Latin exclamation "Finis Poloniae!" ("Poland is no more!").
Five years later, and again at Hetzel's insistence, Captain Nemo was revived and revamped for another Verne novel, The Mysterious Island. The novel changes the captain's nationality from Polish to Indian; in the book's final chapters, Nemo reveals that he is an Indian prince named Dakkar who was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, a prominent ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, and participated in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, an ultimately unsuccessful uprising against Company rule in India. After the rebellion, which led to the death of his family, Nemo fled beneath the seas, then made a final reappearance in the later novel's concluding pages.
Model of the 1863 French Navy submarine Plongeur at the Musée de la Marine, ParisIllustration of the Nautilus by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard RiouVerne took the name "Nautilus" from one of the earliest successful submarines, built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, who also invented the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton named his submarine after a marine mollusk, the chambered nautilus. As noted above, Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which guided him in his development of the novel's Nautilus.[6]
The diving gear used by passengers on the Nautilus is presented as a combination of two existing systems: 1) the surface-supplied[13] hardhat suit, which was fed oxygen from the shore through tubes; 2) a later, self-contained apparatus designed by Benoit Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze in 1865. Their invention featured tanks fastened to the back, which supplied air to a facial mask via the first-known demand regulator.[13][14][15] The diver didn't swim but walked upright across the seafloor. This device was called an aérophore (Greek for "air-carrier"). Its air tanks could hold only thirty atmospheres, but Nemo claims that his futuristic adaptation could do far better: "The Nautilus's pumps allow me to store air under considerable pressure ... my diving equipment can supply breathable air for nine or ten hours."
