Introduction

What if the Nautilus and its famous captain wasn’t fiction?
Every legend has a beginning. Every man has a name. But none as dark and mysterious as the depths of the seas he stalked. The world in time would come to know him as Captain Nemo and his fabulous submarine the Nautilus. Here, for the first time, the tale is told in his own words of how he came to be: I, Nemo

Born Jonathan de Chevalier Mason, he had it all: a prestigious position as chief naval engineer to Queen Victoria, a beautiful wife and children, and a bright future, but he was betrayed by the very people he served and loved because he would not divulge the secret of a weapon so terrible that whoever possessed it would rule the world. Thus begins a sordid and shocking ordeal unsurpassed in history. Arrested on false charges and tried in the Star Chamber, a secret court, he is convicted and sent to Belial Island to toil endlessly in its steaming tropical jungles. Then fortune smiles on him in the guise of a frail elderly French priest and his little band of followers. Together the two men hatch a plot to escape and forever be free of tyrannical governments that cast them aside like trash. But Jonathan has a score to settle and soon his betrayers will feel his wrath.
I, Nemo is a steampunk novel written in Dharma and Deanna's signature style, historical fact blending seamlessly with fiction, it is an action packed, gut wrenching roller coaster ride of torrential proportions. Starting with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, J. Dharma & Deanna Windham have added greater depth and vibrancy to this time honored classic, creating something altogether unique and different.

Editorial Review

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Excerpt

Chapter 1

In My Mind’s Eye

Let this chronicle serve as the true and unvarnished tale of my life irrespective of any nonsense penned by that rascal—the so-called professor Pierre Arronax. If ever I have rued an act of clemency or allowed the cold tempered steel of my inner core to be self magnetized toward the nobler metals of the human condition—I say this: mark me well, Sirs, it was this one thing. Nothing do I regret more than ignoring my better judgment and not opening the valves to my beloved Nautilus’ ballast tanks and sinking beneath the waves to let that scrofulous Frenchman drown like a rat. So, as I have already declared, these pages will serve as my representative in the all-too-likely event I am unable to speak for myself, in order that the true account of my life may be passed along to posterity.

Captain Nemo

The Nautilus

1873

Even now I hold it a grave offence withal to put down in writing the grief I feel; for words, like the sea, half reveal and half conceal the pain within. Yet, I have cast my line for better or worse. When I embarked upon my career as a naval architect and mechanical engineer in my youth, I was wide-eyed with the first peach-fuzz blush of innocence and felt that I had been tasked by the Creator to accomplish something important and meaningful. Foolishly, I believed that my work for Her Majesty’s navy would be the means for doing so. How wrong those early assumptions of my life were.

How desolate of spirit once I perceived the true state of affairs. What a blind fool I had been, a fact I discerned soon enough to the accompaniment of much bitter grief. But all that was well beyond the pale of the horizon. All was yet clear sailing in those days, with no intimation of the storms bearing down on me—and us: my beloved Lavinia and I, our daughters Elspeth and Prudence, and my dear bosom companion Harrison.

Aye, there was aught but full-on joy in the spring of my life.

And not a squall line on the horizon.

On the day of what until then was my greatest triumph, I had no inkling of what cruel fate had in store for me. How I have gnashed my teeth and torn my hair in grief over my misfortune since then. Betrayed! Betrayed by my best friend, my country, and the one person most dear to me—even now every fiber of my being cries out in white hot anguish at the memory of what transpired so soon after my triumph. It burns in the pit of my stomach; yea, scalds my flesh with its dreadful scenes ever unfolding in my mind’s eye—some events so horrible I can scarcely bear to summon their recollection.

All I had wished to do was render good service to my fellow man. To that end I had conceived of a warship of such formidable qualities and technological innovation that war would become too terrible to contemplate by rational men. For I had lost my father Jonathan Mason Senior at Trafalgar, and my beloved elder brother Sean William, a captain of a frigate in Her Majesty’s service had also gone the way of his father during the war with that estimable American Republic in the year eighteen and twelve, only I and my dear mother, Rosalinda Edith Mason, remained to carry on as best as we could in our modest home. But I digress….perhaps from the effects of the creeping years…perhaps from my long self-imposed exile beneath the sea’s waves I have lost the gift for cogent interlocution with my fellow mortals. And so, gently laying my hands on the spokes of the free-wheeling helm of my mind, I turn it thus and so to regain the truer heading this tale calls for. Aye, true north toward showy Polaris and not a rhumb line but straight on.

It was on the day of the launch of my creation, HMS Warrior that all my hopes and desires seemed providentially to be fulfilled. It was a sere gray day on the morning of the twenty ninth of eighteen sixty of Our Lord, when all the most elect of Her Majesty’s government: the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and his cabinet, the First Naval Lord, Sir John Pakingham, and the most renowned members of the Admiralty and the Lords and Ladies of the court descended in coaches and railway cars to Leamouth Wharf at the confluence of the Thames and Bowcreek to witness the launch of England’s warship. It was a chill gray day and I was happy for the new woolen scarf, knitted by my wife Lavinia Cotswold Mason, and my greatcoat.

Today the air was not filled as it usually was with the staccato rattle of rivet setting machines, and the sooty fumes from the foundries that turned out the iron plating and cast in viscous white yellow steel the parts for the engines or the whine of the great lathes that carved the propeller drive shafts from blocks of steel. Today the air was filled with band music and the joyful buzz of an excited crowd gathered to see the launch of the then greatest warship ever built. Tens of thousands of people had converged on the Thames Ironworks, most arriving before dawn. Yard workers and schools had been given the day off. Foreign dignitaries had come with their entourages to witness the great event: ambassadors from the European nations, exotic envoys from the countries of the Levant and the Orient. The Americans were there too, of course, despite their looming troubles.

It was an exciting time to be an engineer. We were witness to the most profound developments in naval design and construction as sail began to give way to the more reliable motive power of steam. The bang and clash of steel and iron being fashioned into the components of iron hulled ships had replaced the thud of hammers driving nail into wood and the whine of adzes shaping planks. The sulfurous smell of furnaces and red hot iron had superseded the sweet smell of kiln and air dried oak and pine. A good thing as England’s forests were by then nearly depleted, after centuries of shipbuilding—and we no longer had free access to the New World’s rich store of lumber. In my lifetime I had witnessed the arrival of the paddle wheel steamer which in turn was now being rapidly supplanted by the more efficient screw propeller. To be sure, both still required the use of a full suite of sails, with steam laid on for the chase or for escape as the case may be.

My wife’s soft voice interrupted my ruminations. “Oh Jonathan! What a lovely, lovely ship you have designed!” she said, her breath like smoke in the freezing air. Her grip on my arm tightened and her smile was as sweet in my eyes as a summer evening.

I smiled down into her honest open face with its clear green eyes, her nose delicate and upswept with a beauty mark beside it, lips full and pink as a rose blossom, framed by hair as fiery as an autumn dusk beneath her bonnet. “Thank you, My Dear,” I replied. The color mounted to her face in one of her easy blushes. I smiled gently at her and pressed her hand. We were standing in the tall review stand on the shipyard’s concrete wharf, our view blocked by the long high black hull with its two tall buff colored funnels and soaring bare masts since she was not yet fully rigged. As I said, the stand was filled with dignitaries and the surrounding shipyard and the streets leading to it were filled to overflowing with the proud workmen and mechanics who had labored these past twenty months to build Her Majesty’s newest and greatest warship, along with the curious who had come from the City to witness its launch.

“You must be so proud,” Lavinia said, beaming at me.

I frowned, and my wife looked at me in earnest. “What has made your handsome face go all cloudy, My Love?” she asked in her lilting voice.

Slowly, so slowly as if testing each syllable for the truth it contained, I said, “Every engineer struggles to bridge the gulf between what he sees in his mind’s eyes and what his hands have actually wrought. This vessel before us is no different, Lavinia. She falls far short of what was in my mind’s eye when I first envisioned her.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see my best friend, Captain Harrison Randolph Barrington, standing in his finest dress uniform smiling at me. “Lavinia is right, Jon, she is as fine a ship as was ever built. You ought to be very proud of her.”

I inclined my head, but said nothing, being too modest to say anything in reply to such a compliment from my dear friend. Harrison and I, and Lavinia, too, had been close friends since childhood. And Harrison had been the Best Man at my wedding. He pressed his point. “You say she is not exactly what you envisioned, but she will be better than anything afloat. What then have you to berate yourself about?”

I looked at Harrison then. He was tall, even taller than me (and I am six feet), with wavy dark hair and green eyes, a gentleman by breeding and temperament. “That is an over simplification,” I replied. “This ship, as advanced as she is, has many inherent flaws in her design. For one thing, she requires vast amounts of coal to move her bulk, and the energy conversion from coal is hugely inefficient. She can never be very far from an ample supply of fuel to feed her ever hungry engines. Also, she is limited to movement in two dimensions. She can neither rise above the level of the seas nor willfully sink beneath them. To protect her vulnerable engines from enemy projectiles I had to place them below the waterline. One day, ships will not run on coal and wind. They will travel over the seas at fifty knots or greater and will submerge beneath the waves—only rising to attack a foe, or they will rise high above the waves to launch their attacks from great heights.” I gestured toward the warship. “This is nowhere near what is possible.”

“A ship that flies or sails underwater?” Lavinia asked with a ripple of laughter. She looked from me to Harrison. “I fear my husband is having a jest at our expense.”

Harrison wasn’t laughing, though. His green eyes were locked on my face, hawk-like. “If not coal and wind power, then what motive power would you advocate using?”

“Electricity,” I replied lightly. “Only the dynamic power of electric motors can enable a vessel to do the things I just now enumerated. With a properly designed electric motor, one could drive a screw type propeller that would turn at thousands of revolutions per minute and pump life sustaining oxygen into tanks to maintain the crew, as well as fill and empty ballast tanks at will that would allow a vessel to sink and rise as need be.”

“Have you designed such a vessel, Jonathan?” Harrison asked evenly, staring at me. His eyes were sharp as two shards of green glass. This was the turning point in my life, but I had not the hard-won wisdom to understand the significance of this moment or of that look. Alas, I stumbled into my demise.

I gave him an easy smile then and tapped the side of my head with my forefinger. “Only in here, but I doubt not the soundness of my design.”

Harrison looked away briefly then his gaze returned to my face. “You must put your design to paper and submit it to the Admiralty—through me of course, so that I can see that it gets the proper attention.”

I shook my head. “That design shall never see the light of day, my friend. The country that possesses such a vessel, an undersea ship, would be too tempted to use it for evil intent, gaining unheard of and unjust advantage over the peoples of other nations. No, just because a thing can be done by engineers and men of science is no reason to do it if it results in harm to mankind.”

Harrison’s hawk-like eyes scanned my face. “So you will not provide Her Majesty’s navy with this design you just spoke of?”

“No, no I will not,” I replied baldly. Overhead an ominous dark sky billowed and a chill wind blew in from the Thames. Out on the river the pennants of the yachts and warships that had arrived to witness the launch of the great ironclad were snapping angrily in the breeze. A chill ran down my spine, but I attributed it to the cold winter day.

Harrison nodded toward the great iron warship’s armored gun ports, tersely changing the subject. “It was wise to use the new Armstrong breech-loading guns. Her rate of fire will be superior to anything afloat, especially that of France’s Gloire.”

I gestured toward my creation resting in its stocks. “As this ship was to be provided with iron armor plating, multiple gun decks were out of the question. My design called for a broadside of seventeen guns with fifteen feet between gun ports, with the bow and stern added on, I ended up with a vessel of three hundred and eighty feet.”

Harrison nodded. “A hundred feet bigger than anything ever launched.”

“Quite so,” I replied matter-of-factly, “but her hull’s design with sail laid on and her trunk steam engine will render her faster than even the swiftest clipper ship.”

Lavinia looked at me, her eyes gleaming with pride. “Please forgive my ignorance, but I can scarcely credit how such a conglomeration of iron can float.”

I gave the easy laugh of a boy finding his first painted egg on an Easter egg hunt. “It’s really quite simple, my dear. If one takes a tin pie pan and places it in a sink full of water it will float, will it not?” Lavinia nodded, conceding the point, and I went on. “If one attempts to push down on the pie pan, especially in the center of it, the pie pan will push back. It doesn’t want to sink. That is what we marine engineers call buoyant force. It has to do with the volume of the hull and the volume of the water it displaces.”

“Very same in principle to hot air balloons,” Harrison interjected.

I turned to him in surprise. Although he is a military man he is highly intelligent and very well read. “Well done, Harrison,” I replied with a smile. He was my best and oldest friend. How many hours had we passed over the years, boon companions? He was the brother I had lost. Our likes and dislikes were so identical—we often finished each other’s sentences because our minds were of similar casts—that we were more like twin siblings than mere friends. How could I know that this scion of one of England’s leading families harbored a deep envy of everything that brought me joy? He came from wealth, I came from the middling class; he was a rising star in the Admiralty and was recently promoted to a high position in that organization’s intelligence department with nearly unlimited power and prestige, all I had were my nautical designs. But even so, there was more than a little prestige to be apprehended thus, and I was content.

(Lacuna begins)

Note 1: Text here was hopelessly smeared and pages 9 through 16 stuck together.

Note 2: When Nemo’s diary was found it was first assumed that it had escaped water damage. Sadly, this was not the case. Some of the pages are stuck together, and in others the ink has smeared badly in sections rendering it nearly impossible to make out the text. We subjected the manuscript to analysis using a Proton Induced X-ray Emission device, which spared the manuscript itself any physical trauma. We discovered that the first third of the diary is written using a common dip pen ink comprised of ferrous sulfate, gall, gum and water. Nemo, cut off from all contact with civilization, then used an ink that our analysis revealed to be comprised of melanin, and the amino acids tyrosinase, dopamine, et al—this ink is produced as a self-defense mechanism by several species of cephalopods who release the ink to ward off predators.

I should list the salient features of the diary itself: It is in octavo format, and the pages are high quality Whatman Wove paper, the cover is made of sharkskin dyed black with gilt triple ruled gilt border, and a large embossed N in the center. Nemo writes in the Spencerian handwriting style then common among the educated class with his uppercase letters sweeping and ornate, and his lowercase letters oddly modern looking. His letters are well-formed and the words and sentences evenly spaced.

Inside the rear cover is a pocket that was found to contain hand-ruled engineering drawings of the Nautilus. We can now identify the enigmatic captain Nemo with certainty as Jonathan de Chevalier Mason, a highly regarded British naval architect responsible for the design of British ironclads HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince. He rose from relative obscurity to England’s leading designer of cutting-edge warships then suddenly fell out of favor and disappeared from the historical record until now.

James Ramillies Dunham, PhD

Archaeologist

Note 3: There seems to have been some friction between Jonathan Mason and the First Naval Lord. Unfortunately, because of the poor state of the text at this point in the diary, it is not known what the cause of it was.

(Lacuna ends. Text follows)

What happened next could have been predicted by any fool except the fool who was presiding over the launch of the HMS Warrior. After Sir John Pakingham, First Naval Lord, had delivered his florid speech and smashed a bottle of good Madeira against the iron bow, the blocks had been knocked out. The great warship had begun her ponderous descent down the slipways when she suddenly came to a grinding halt. I stood there willing her to move. ‘Move goddamn your eyes…get your black iron ass down into the water where you belong!’ But the HMS Warrior defied my mental urgings.

There was an awkward moment.

An eerie hush had descended over the assembled crowd of spectators.

The warship hung there, suspended between terra and mare. The martial strains of the band music tailed off into a desolate silence and a cold wind blew in from the Thames. I was calm on the outside but my heart was knocking against my Adams apple. I stole a glance at the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty—a pack of war-mongering sons of bitches as ever I set eyes on. Much head wagging and nodding was going on.

Sir John, decidedly not immune to the court of public opinion, turned to me in irritation. “Confound it, man! Your ship is stuck in the slipway!” he said. I had observed over the months that the First Naval Lord had a pronounced knack for stating the obvious. His face had set like stone. “Some might think this ill-omened,” he opined.

My expression did not alter by a flicker. “Only the very ignorant would entertain such a thought, Sir John,” I replied more than a little accusatorily.

He fixed his basilisk gaze on me. “Are you calling me ignorant, Mason?”

“No, I am not. I am referring to the unschooled sailors and workers.” I went on smoothly in the confident tone of a young man who knows his job. “I am not at all surprised this has happened. Fate has not turned her face against us. Nor are we the victims of silly superstition. We have simply and plainly run afoul of the weather.”

Sir John sniffed. “So you say, young Mason. So you say.”

Lavinia looked up at me. “What has happened, Jonathan? Why hasn’t the ship gone into the water?” she asked in an urgent undertone. She had drawn closer to me in that universal protective gesture of devoted wives the world over.

I smiled at her suddenly concerned face. “The cold has caused the hull to be stuck on the slipway. It is nothing that can’t be easily remedied.” It was the coldest winter in fifty years. A thick blanket of snow covered the wharf, the shipyard’s offices, foundries, and workshops. The Thames and Bowcreek rivers were hidden in places by a silvery white rime of ice. I had taken the precaution of placing braziers along the slipway to ensure the grease did not freeze. Tugboats waited offshore and hydraulic rams were standing nearby in case my ship (Yes, I thought of her as ‘my ship’) failed to slide down the ways. It sometimes happened that a ship would not smoothly slide down the slipways. History was full of examples of this. On the other side of the Atlantic the Americans’ famous frigate USS Constitution had become stuck in her slipway. Of course, most of the time, this had to do with poor planning and an imperfect understanding of geometry. I was certain that my calculations were correct. I had tested them on a model.

I summoned a vice admiral, and quietly gave orders to him. He in turn spoke to an aide who spoke to an aide who spoke to a subaltern who gave orders to a captain who in turn spoke to the yardmaster. Within minutes, blunt bowed steam tugs came chugging toward the warship belching clouds of sooty black smoke from their stubby red funnels. Hawsers were thrown to the warship and made fast to her stern bitts. Then while the band played, the tugs backed away from the warship until the hawsers were tight as overdrawn bowstrings. On my instructions, a couple hundred sailors and dockyard workers ran back and forth on her spar deck to rock the ship.

“Now watch,” I said to my wife.

Harrison, standing at my elbow, was staring at the HMS Warrior. He leaned toward me and whispered so that Sir John couldn’t hear and said, “This will be a black eye for you if she fails to launch.” I think that somewhere in the back of my mind at the time, I thought I detected an ominously dark undertone of what our Teutonic brethren call schadenfruede, a secret pleasure at my misfortune.

I dismissed it as an unworthy thought.

Harrison was my friend.

“Never fear. She’ll launch,” I said confidently. “I daresay that unless the grease on the slipway has turned to some type of super glue, the tugs will get her going.”

“You are so calm,” Lavinia said wonderingly.

“I have science on my side,” I replied.

And as it turned out I was not wrong. So slowly at first it was imperceptible, she began to inch backward then gathering momentum she slid into the Thames with a great splash that nearly swamped several of the tugboats. A great cheer rose from thousands of throats. I drew a deep sigh of relief and thought that that night I would sleep in peace.

(Lacuna begins)

Note: Above, Mason is not referring to the modern adhesive Super Glue but to any glue with superior adhesive qualities to anything then known. Again, a large block of text has been hopelessly destroyed through exposure to moisture so we do not know what passed between the launching of the HMS Warrior and the celebratory dinner at the Douglas Hotel in London.

(Lacuna ends. Text resumes)

Years later that celebratory dinner ball seems as if it were a pensive dream.

“Jonathan de Chevalier Mason and Mrs. Lavinia Mason,” announced the doorman in a stentorian voice. The entire room rose from their seats at their tables and clapped as we entered the glittering dining room. Lavinia and I looked at each other for a brief magical moment, then Harrison came up, and the spell was broken.

My friend was all smiles. “I have it on good authority that you are to be knighted.” What a far cry from being told that Warrior’s interrupted launch would constitute a black eye on my spotless career to hearing that I was a shoe-in for a title.

I summoned my smoothest smile. “Indeed?”

Harrison, oblivious to my utter disinterest, nodded toward the prime minister sitting at the table at the head of the dining room. “I heard it from the old boy myself.”

The dinner was elegant and fine in all respects. Our table was graced with several famous personages: Among others there was Sir John and his bosomy wife, an American naval officer named Captain Mathew Maury, and the celebrated author Charles Dickens.

The writer was holding forth. “A black vicious ugly customer as ever I saw, whale like in size and with as terrible a row of incisor teeth as ever chomped down on a French frigate,” he said.

A Frenchman, his name escapes me, sitting beside Mr. Dickens took a sip from his glass of wine. “As our countries are at peace, it is my fervent hope that that boast may never be put to the test. Enough blood was spilled in the last war between our countries.”

A cloud of ‘here here’ rose from the table. Not the least from your humble scribe who even then abhorred war and tyranny in all its forms.

The American, a southerner from his accent said, “It is almost magical that your warship contains an apparatus that can convert ordinary seawater to potable water for the sustenance of her officers and crew. It’s a strange alchemy almost like lead to gold.”

I twisted the slender stem of my wineglass and looked at the garnet hued liquid in the bowl. “Any new technology if sufficiently advanced will appear as magic,” I replied.

He nodded, conceding the point. The conversation at the table swirled around me while I sipped my wine and said nothing. I was never one for social affairs.

Harrison whispered in my ear. “About that under sea ship of yours….”

I smiled, sweet as sugar. “That will never happen, my friend.”

“I am sorry if I sound impolite,” he said evenly. “But I cannot let pass any new technology that will give Her Majesty’s navy an advantage over its adversaries.”

“Have you forgotten that we are currently in a state of peace on all sides?” I reminded him.

Harrison nodded toward Captain Maury. “That may not be for long. Our American cousins are on the verge of war with each other. Lord Palmerston intends to declare support for the southern states should they succeed from the Union.”

I shrugged. “What has that to do with me?”

“You are Her Majesty’s chief naval architect.”

“What of it?” I looked at him then. “By the by, I always understood Lord Palmerston to be an opponent of the slave trade.”

“Don’t be so naïve Jonathan. Surely you know that our mills rely heavily on cotton from America’s southern states. Moreover, Lord Palmerston harbors a deep animosity toward the United States. He refers to them as upstart crows. In his a view, British power would be enhanced by a dissolution of the Union of the United States, and a southern confederacy would be a ready and willing market for British goods.”

I drained my wine glass to its dregs then held it up. An African servant in white wig glided forward and refilled it, then I turned to my friend. “For my part, I hope the new American president when he is inaugurated is able to preserve that noble Union. I also hope that if there is a contest between the North and South that the north prevails and that the human beings held in thrall by the south are given their freedom.”

The American spoke up. “I personally abhor the practice of slavery but I believe the problem must be solved by the states themselves and not by the federal government. Many of us believe that Mr. Lincoln plans to interfere in our personal affairs.”

“It is wrong for one human being to oppress another,” I said forthrightly.

“On that we agree, Sir,” Captain Maury replied, in a drawl that betrayed his Virginian birth.

“I am an admirer of your oceanographic studies,” I said with a smile and a deep unwillingness to ruin the occasion—hence I had passed on to a safe subject. What man of science is ever unwilling to hold forth about his work?

“Thank you, Mr. Mason,” the American drawled. “Your ship would make the prefect research vessel. Instead of guns though, I would fill her with scientific devices and scientists.”

“Sadly, that is not likely to happen,” I said.

“What do you do, Captain Maury?” Lavinia asked.

“I am the superintendent of my country’s Naval Observatory,” he replied, “in charge of the chronometers, charts, and other navigational equipment.”

“Captain Maury is being overly modest,” I said, smiling at him over the rim of my wineglass. “His work on ocean currents has all but proven the existence of a northwest passage across the polar circle to the pacific—that there is an area near the North Pole that is occasionally free of ice.”

Lavinia smiled at the American. “Really? How so?”

Captain Maury leaned back in his chair. “A whale is a mammal and it must have air to breathe. Logs of old whaling vessels often listed the very individualistic markings of their harpoons. In my research I discovered that Harpoons found in captured whales in the Atlantic had been shot by whalers in the Pacific and visa versa so I deduced the whales must migrate from one sea to another at the top of the globe.”

“I own a copy of your Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, and Sailing Directions and Physical Geography of the Seas and Its Meteorology, is in a drawer of my bed stand. It is a masterful work, Captain Maury. Right up there with the works of the French naturalist Pierre Arronax.”

“Another commonality of great minds!” Captain Maury said, “We are both admirers of Monsieur Pierre Arronax! Let us raise our glasses to the sea.”

“To the sea, our mother, giver of life to our planet,” I said before draining my wineglass.

Harrison murmured tightly. “We need that undersea boat, Jonathan.”

I set down my glass and turned to him and said, matching him tone for tone. “Never while the sun shines will I turn over the design to such a hellish weapon to any government. Men are not ready for such technology. It would be as if some scientist were to devise a bomb that could obliterate an entire city. Men would not hesitate to use it. I will not be a party to such evil. Do not speak to me of this again.”

And that should have been the end of it.

But it wasn’t. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

• What specific themes do the authors emphasize throughout the novel? What do you think he or she is trying to get across to the reader?

• What significance does the Nautilus have in the book? Is she more than just a ship? Or not?

• What drives Nemo? How does he develop into a person who has the capacity for horrible crimes? And does that make him an inherently bad person?

• Compare your ideas of Nemo’s origin with those presented in the book. Does the book give you a sense of understanding the character better? In what way?

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