Captain Nemo

by Kevin J. Anderson

  He cracked open the two crates and separated out the items he could use. With care, he unknotted the lashing rope, knowing it might be one of his most valuable possessions until he could weave cords of his own. From his shirt, he removed the waterlogged and cutlass-scarred journal that Verne had given him.

  From the first crate he set out a few bolts of cloth to dry in the sun, a magnifying glass, a sewing kit with four needles and two spools of thread, a thin dagger (better suited as a letter opener), and a set of silverware, engraved and obviously intended as someone’s dining set. Nemo could use the utensils for cutting and carving other items he would need. Next to them he set the small keg of black powder, which might yet be of some value to him. In the back of his mind he was already formulating plans, considering options.

  It was a start.

  At times, he felt suddenly overwhelmed as the immensity of the problem raised itself before him. But he took a deep breath and focused his thoughts, getting back to the task at hand.

  In the second crate he found a tortoiseshell comb, a lady’s mirror, two bottles of brandy, a shoehorn, one black leather boot, whalebone stays for a corset, and a perfumed sachet that now smelled more of fish than flower blossoms. He had no idea how he would make use of these items, but he didn’t dare throw anything away. He might be on this island for a long, long time.

  Nemo could see a curl of smoke rising from the volcanic crater, as if it slumbered uneasily. Girdling the central volcano, lush jungles covered the island. He assumed he could find edible fruits and wild game there. He might even be able to trap fish in the lagoon.

  He could pound the fibers of vines and make them into rope or twine. He could fashion snares, weave baskets. It would be difficult, but he would manage. He concentrated on the possibilities, rather than the overwhelming problems.

  As gulls and albatrosses screamed overhead, Nemo remembered how glad he’d been to see the birds when he was lost and adrift. Now he studied the cliffs and the fallen rocks on the beach. Most of the stones were black lava rock, but he recognized several chunks of flint. An excellent find indeed.

  Now he could get down to the next order of business.

  Nemo gathered a pile of dry driftwood from high on the beach, then struck the steel dagger against a lump of flint. He worked for half an hour until his arms and fingers ached, but finally he struck a spark that caught on a wad of dried seaweed. Soon he had a smoky, foul-smelling fire crackling against the dunes. The first step of civilization.

  The flames cheered Nemo’s heart. He sat staring into the burning driftwood, thinking of his circumstances and trying to decide how he should proceed next. Once he had a plan, he could see things improving. He had the power of his imagination.

  At the moment, however, his stomach was knotted in agonized hunger. After days with almost nothing to eat, he wasn’t sure he had the strength to forge a path through dense foliage in search of coconuts or breadfruit. Instead, he waded into the lagoon and secured handfuls of mussels that clung to the rocks. He used the dagger to pry open the black shells and, though their flesh was bitter, he swallowed each morsel. Next, he tried rinsing and chewing some of the seaweed. Despite the strange, salty taste and stringy texture, it provided some substance for his digestive system.

  He slept on the sand in the shelter of the rocky overhang, hunched against repeated stomach cramps. He must have derived some nourishment from the food, though, because the next morning Nemo awoke feeling much stronger. Curious and alert, he set out into the jungle to explore his new world. . . .

  It didn’t take him long to locate coconut palms, papayas, mangoes, and sweet berries. As he had hoped, he also found thin vines and made plans to cut them. Using pieces of flint from the beach cliffs, he could, with some effort, fashion stone knives or axes.

  His initial exploration continued for days. He spent several nights in tree branches, always careful to keep track of the way back to his initial camp down on the beach. At night he heard wild boars rooting through the undergrowth and sensed the slithering rustle of snakes through the branches above.

  As he climbed up the slopes of the volcano to get a vantage on his surroundings, the ground became rockier. Nemo discovered several hot springs. In a warm mineral pool, he took a long bath, reveling in the tingle of his aching muscles and the luxurious sensation of being clean again. His imagination began working again, deciding how best to use this new discovery.

  Halfway up the steep mountainside, he encountered a grassy, tree-dotted plateau just at the edge of the jungles. Nemo looked out from the top of the plateau to where the rockface dropped off in a sheer cliff. Far below, the sheltered lagoon lay placid against the beach where he had washed ashore. Partway down the cliff, large natural caves peered out like eye sockets.

  Now he decided on the next thing to do. Once he fashioned a sturdy rope, Nemo could secure the line to one of the tree trunks and descend the cliff face to explore the caves.

  High on the plateau edge, he recognized the potential of such a shelter. From there, he would be able to see passing ships, and he could build a large signal fire on the plateau overlooking the sea. His thoughts grew more ambitious—and why not, if he had sufficient time? By using pulleys and vine-fiber ropes, he could set up a counter-weighted elevator system to get him up and down the cliffside, while keeping him safe from the island’s predators.

  He looked around, mentally keeping a tally. When he returned to the beach, he would use a bit of charcoal to scratch his lists and plans inside the blank, waterstained journal Jules Verne had given him. Nemo didn’t want to forget any of his ideas.

  A stream that ran across the meadow would provide fresh water. The volcanic hot springs were also near. With hollowed-out bamboo piping, he could run water from both the stream and the hot springs down into the caves so that he could wash, cook, or even heat a bath if he wished. And no landlord to throw him out, no matter what he did.

  Nemo grew excited at the possibilities. He had much to do.

  He would soon grow tired of coconut and breadfruit supplemented by seaweed and mussels. He would need to make spears for himself, as well as bows and arrows for hunting, nets for fishing. He had seen goats running wild on the grassy meadows; in time, he might build a corral and domesticate the animals, so he could have a supply of meat and milk.

  Nemo paused, still haunted by thoughts of everything he had lost because of the pirate attack and the circling sharks. He missed Captain Grant, not to mention Jules Verne and Caroline Aronnax (he still kept her frayed and faded hair ribbon knotted around his wrist).

  It might be years and years until he saw them again. If ever.

  Back on the beach, Nemo found a broad stream that drained into the ocean. While wading in it, holding a stick for balance, he discovered good sticky clay on the river bottom. Each time he found a new resource such as this, he immediately realized how he might use it. With his hands he scooped out piles of the clay, which he formed into crude bricks. He set them out on the beach to dry hard in the sun.

  But that was only a first step, not good enough for what Nemo had in mind. After two days he stacked the bricks and, using more fresh clay as mortar, built a hollow beehive structure with airholes on top: a kiln.

  Though many of the salvage items from the crates were proving valuable, he needed to make bowls, jugs, even a plate, since he didn’t want to eat on a slab of rough bark all the time. Since simple dried clay would not be durable enough, he built a low-banked fire of green wood inside the kiln. Next, he shaped more clay into a small pot and a bowl, which he dried, then thrust into the heat and baked over the fire all day long. . . .

  Listening to the surf, Nemo crouched at his old beach camp, thinking of how to fix up his new cliffside house. On a wrinkled page from the bound journal, he drew notes and sketches, planning ahead. The beach camp had always been a temporary solution. Now Nemo began to think in a longer term. If he must remain on this island, he wanted a place that would be his home.

  When he remo
ved the still-hot bowl and pot from the kiln, he saw that, although his creations lacked finesse and artistic merit, they would serve their purpose well enough. This was merely the first of many accomplishments he was sure to make. Water, food, fire, a home, now clay utensils. Allowing himself a satisfied smile, Nemo reconsidered his situation.

  Yes, he could survive on the island for as long as necessary. With enough optimism and imagination, life here might not be so terrible after all.

  III

  On a cool morning, Pierre Verne summoned Jules to his law offices, instructing his redheaded son to wait while he finished transcribing a legal document. Two low-paid clerks scribbled in ledgers, transcribing contracts and detailing lists of assets. The sounds of the shipyards drifted through a half-open window, along with an annoying breeze that fluttered documents held down by paperweights.

  Verne had no idea why his father had called him here and expected to be scolded for some act of omission or negligence. Inwardly, he groaned. As Jules grew older, M. Verne often brought him into the offices to do small jobs and learn the intricacies of being a country attorney.

  Finally, Pierre Verne looked up across his mahogany desk. “I have news for you, Jules.” He took out some recently arrived sheets of paper on which shipping lists had been printed. “Look here.” He pointed to the name of a three-masted brig on the sheet—the Coralie.

  Verne’s heart sank when he saw the heading of the column: Vessels Lost at Sea. Since the Coralie was a British-registered ship and had not originated from Nantes, news of her fate had taken two full years to reach France.

  “No known survivors. Since only a few vagrant dockhands signed aboard from our docks, it’s doubtful anyone we know will file for damages against Captain Grant’s heirs or the shipping company.”

  Verne read and reread the printed letters, hoping he had misunderstood. But there was no mistaking the stark words: Lost with all hands.

  “Now, son, are you not glad I withdrew you from your foolish venture? You would be dead now, sunk by a storm or some enemy attack, just like that Nemo boy.”

  But Verne, with a leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach, only mumbled, “All hands lost.” The words swam before his eyes.

  “Yes, you’d be at the bottom of the ocean. And I’d be training your brother Paul to carry on my practice.”

  “Thank you . . . for letting me know, Father.” Verne walked away on rigid legs, barely able to restrain himself from galloping out of the office. With his long legs and big feet, he’d probably trip and fall on his face. He left the door wide open as he staggered into the bright sunlight.

  Caroline . . . he had to find Caroline. Nemo dead?

  When he told her the news, standing without ceremony on the doorstep of M. Aronnax’s row house, she wept bitterly. Her father would no doubt bring her the same message when he returned from his merchant offices. After all, he had recommended Captain Grant, had arranged for Nemo to be taken aboard as a cabin boy.

  The stricken look on her heart-shaped face told him how much she had been waiting and hoping for Nemo’s return. He caught at her hands. “I’ll be here, Caroline. I’ll take care of you. I . . . I’ll always love you.”

  “Ah, poor André!” She pulled away, blinking in shock. “Nothing will ever be the same.”

  “I just want—” he said.

  “Please, Jules. I need to be alone now.” Fresh tears ran unchecked from her beautiful eyes as she closed the door softly in his face.

  IV

  Inside the completed cave dwelling—which he called Granite House—Nemo sat in the dim light of goat-tallow candles and listened to the winter storm outside. He had called this place home for two years now. The comfortable wicker chair, painstakingly woven from cane, reeds, and grasses, creaked under his weight as he sat pondering at the driftwood writing table.

  He had done everything by himself, thinking up ideas, designing the pieces, and implementing them. When a concept failed, sometimes disastrously, Nemo went back to his ruminations, his scrawled plans, and refigured the math and the engineering. Captain Grant had taught him the fundamentals, and Nemo had learned the rest by trial and error. Luckily, he had lived through the errors. . . .

  He opened his weathered journal and smoothed down the central cut made by the noseless pirate captain’s cutlass. He glanced over the pages of densely written words that documented his time marooned on the island, his schemes, his failures. Nemo had lived through storms, earthquakes from the restless volcano, attacks from wild animals, even a lightning-sparked forest fire that had raged across a section of the island.

  Now he dipped the sharpened end of a quill feather (from an albatross he’d shot with a hand-made arrow) into a baked-clay pot of ink (made from the distilled excretions of certain shellfish). He kept the record for his own sanity. Every day seemed so much the same, week after week, month after month. . . .

  Because he didn’t know how many blurry days he had been cast adrift from the Coralie, Nemo was no longer sure of the exact date. He had, however, come up with a close approximation by making his own instruments and using pebbles and shadows on the beach to mark the sun’s passage along the ecliptic. Thus, he had determined the summer and winter solstices, and by measuring the angle of the Southern Cross in the sky, he had derived an estimate of his latitude, not that it did him any good. He had no charts and could not pinpoint where the mysterious island might lie in the South China Sea, though he must be far from any well-traveled shipping lanes.

  Now the wind howled past the cave opening on the cliff face. Rain lashed down, pelting the rocks and filling Nemo’s cisterns out on the plateau. Stray gusts made the candle flames flicker, but a roaring fire in the natural chimney at the back of the main grotto, as well as the steaming gurgle from the hot springs he piped in from the thermal area, kept Granite House cozy throughout the worst of winter.

  Like a genuine home, with every necessity, every amenity made by his own hands.

  During the first months of his island sojourn, Nemo had built a hut of branches and deadfall in the lowlands as a place to store supplies and sleep while he worked on the permanent and defensible home inside the cliff. The effort had taught him much about the practicalities of construction, which he applied to his more permanent cliff dwelling. Though the rock face looked sheer and solid, Nemo had found it to be riddled with passages and steam vents.

  Though the volcano appeared dormant, the ground often trembled and the crater belched forth plumes of dark smoke in fits of geological indigestion. But Granite House seemed solid enough, and Nemo was quite proud of what he had accomplished during his years of isolation.

  He had created a showcase of primitive technology that even Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson would have envied. Using charcoal on the cave floor, along with makeshift geometrical devices, he had drawn up plans for his complex ideas, much like the ones he had seen in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

  He built a pulley-driven pair of wooden cages that served as elevators, taking him up and down the cliff. He piped in hot and cold water. He’d erected lookout towers so he could keep watch for any passing ship, though after so much time, Nemo began to lose hope.

  He maintained mounds of tinder, grasses, and dry branches, ready to be set ablaze as signal bonfires. But so far he’d had no reason to do so, and the volcano smoke would be seen much farther away than any signal he could make himself.

  His original clothes from the Coralie had tattered and split, and now he wore garments cut and stitched together from the bolts of cloth he’d salvaged from his crates or from hides he tanned using bark distillations. Moccasins made of cured seal hide protected his feet. Caroline’s old hair ribbon, long since fallen into threads, lay in a hollow in the rock wall, where he could look at it.

  He confined eighteen goats within a crude stockade on the grassy plateau, using the animals mainly for milk or a thin cheese. Out of the goats’ reach, he had planted a vegetable garden with squash, wild onions, and other herbs and roots he�
��d transplanted from elsewhere on the island.

  Now, after so much hard living, Nemo was more muscular and able to withstand the adversities of his solitary island. He ate fresh fish, mussels, and oysters from the sea, game and fowl that he hunted in the forests. A month’s supply of smoked meats hung in the cave-cooled alcoves.

  Nemo diligently wrote down even the most monotonous events in his journal as he struggled with knowing that in all likelihood no one would ever read the account. Hardest of all was simply learning how to be alone.

  V

  During the breezy days of spring, Nemo worked up enough nerve to test his glider. Using scraps of old sailcloth stretched tight over a framework of lightweight bamboo, he had constructed a kitelike contraption, based on designs he’d seen in da Vinci’s sketchbooks, a lifetime ago in Captain Grant’s cabin.

  The concept seemed simple enough. One time on Ile Feydeau, Nemo, Verne, and Caroline, all together, had flown kites up over the river. They’d run along the riverbank and watched their colorful paper constructions dance at the ends of their tethers, trying to keep them from becoming entangled.

  But this enormous glider kite would have no tether, and Nemo could only hope it would hold his body aloft. He did not know his exact weight, since he had grown while stranded on the island; instead, he had constructed a clever balance on a fulcrum, using stones to approximate his weight. Then, using those same stones lashed together into a wicker framework to simulate his body, Nemo had tested his glider, making sure it would stay airborne long enough. More trial and error, which entailed frequent wild pursuits along the island’s coast, chasing down the glider as it drifted along.

  Now, he hoped he had it right. He could think of no other way to explore his island so quickly, or thoroughly.

  Judging from how hard the wind tugged on the broad frame, as if impatient to be off, Nemo decided the glider-wings should be sufficient to hold his weight aloft. Ocean winds whipped around the high plateau above the cliffs of Granite House. He prayed that a crossbreeze wouldn’t slam him back against the sheer rock face.