![]() ![]() ![]() The producers may have surmised correctly the Captain’s Masonic affiliation, but the issue of Nemo’s nationality is more complex. The 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (where Captain Nemo is a hero rather than a villain) depicts Nemo as a wealthy Indian aristocrat (Prince Dakar), and the visually stunning interiors of his Nautilus submarine are replete with Masonic imagery (square and compasses, various working tools, and lodge furniture). Hollywood has a long tradition of assigning Masonic symbols to fanciful villains. The lodge members are clad in innovative diving suits, and the underwater illumination is provided by Ruhmkorff light generators, cutting-edge technology in Verne’s time and early precursors to today’s florescent lights and electronic camera flash units. This scene also takes place under 300 meters of water, in 1867, in Jules Verne’s pioneering novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It is a scene any Freemason would recognize, the event evoking universal elements of the ancient Fraternity paying last respects. The grave sealed, the mourners stand and approach the mound, sink again on bended knee, and extend their hands in a sign of final farewell. The body is interred, and the Master, arms crossed over his chest, kneels in a posture of prayer, followed by those assembled. Their leader calls a halt, the mourners form a semicircle around him and, at his signal, one of the men prepares the grave. Twelve mourners, four serving as pall bearers carrying their sorrowful burden upon their shoulders, march behind their Master to the middle of a clearing, in the center of which stands a pedestal of rough blocks surmounted by a rosy cross. Description of a Funeral on the Ocean Floor, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1916 translation published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York) “In the midst of the glade, on a pedestal of rocks roughly piled up, stood a cross of coral, that extended its long arms that one might have thought were made of petrified blood.” However, taking into account The Mysterious Island’s retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.Scottish Rite - March/April 2022 Jules Verne, Master Nemo, And The Nautilus: A Clandestine Travel Lodge? 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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