I'm not sure Jules Verne ("French writer who is considered the father
of science fiction (1828-1905)") would agree with the author on the
basis for writing "20,000 Leagues Under tthe Sea": Wkipedia: "One of
his teachers may have been the French inventor Brutus de Villeroi,
professor of drawing and mathematics at the college in 1842, and who
later became famous for creating the US Navy's first submarine, the
USS Alligator. De Villeroi may have inspired Verne's conceptual design
for the Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although no
direct exchanges between the two men have been recorded. Also lost of
Cape Hatteras and the US NOAA has an ongoing expedition to try to
relocate it which could be see online.

The Appomattox River was too shallow to deploy it upriver and perhaps
how the un-named became thus named, built as it were in Philadelphia,
PA. Jules Verne also used the "West Point Foundry" to create the
cannon that fired the "From Earth To The Moon" in 1865 I often felt he
maybe had visited that site which I worked on relocating the R.P.
Parrott "gun platform" used to create the then hence named "Swamp
Angel" in incendiary bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina from a
swamp, in 1862 that Melville also wrote about. We found either "it" or
its prototype and over 680 used brass friction primers atop a wooden
"grillage" in the Foundry Cove adjacent to the West Point Foundry and
nearby Constitution Island in an EPA National Priority Superfund site
in Cold Spring, NY on the Hudson River.

I'm currently reading Melville's "White-Jacket or The World in a
Man-of-War (1850)" about life aboard a man-o-war of which copies were
placed on the desk of every member of the US Congress by the publisher
and is said to have stopped the practice of flogging or whipping of
seaman aboard US ships. "Moby-Dick" was published the following year.

On 3/10/07, geoff carver <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/arts/design/10cent.html
>