Seventeen
In the shark-infested Indian Ocean, the ship traveled around Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa. They put ashore several parties to collect colorful specimens of lepidoptera (which Nemo learned was a Latin name for butterflies).
Under Captain Grant’s guidance, the Coralie sailed northeastward to the southern tip of India and the island of Ceylon, where they took on a load of black tea, saffron, and cardamom, which they hoped would remain fresh until the ship returned to the trading ports of Europe.
At dawn after a long night watch, Ned Land stood beside a bleary-eyed Nemo. They watched a purplish-maroon sunrise brighten into a wash of scarlet before full daylight. The muscular quartermaster turned to the cabin boy. “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Aye. Know that much, don’t ye, scamp?”
“I’ve heard the saying, but I don’t know the truth of it.”
“Means a bad storm is coming.” Ned sniffed the wind. “Mark my words.” The sailors on deck flashed knowing looks, and within half an hour, Captain Grant ordered the sails to be trimmed.
By afternoon Nemo found himself scaling the tarred ratlines with bare feet and callused hands to reach the topgallant sail on the foremast and yank ropes to furl it against a devastating wind. The ropes were slippery, and the squall-drenched cotton canvas sails were heavy as wet clay.
In a team effort, the sailors worked the deck ends of the lift lines while Nemo and the younger crewmen stepped into footropes, clinging onto the horizontal yardarms high above the deck and the roiling sea. The ship lurched like a wild horse—and the sway was much more pronounced high on the masts. But Nemo had no fear of falling, no loss of balance. He felt like a sailor, at home even on the frothing seas.
After calling all hands, Captain Grant stood on the quarterdeck and let his men handle the situation. The first and second mates yelled orders, which were sometimes lost in the wind. Rather than riding atop the heavy swells, the brig’s sharp prow cut through them, which brought huge surges over the deck.
From his high vantage, Nemo looked overboard into the foaming waves—and wondered how quiet it must be just a fathom beneath the surface. He recalled da Vinci’s speculative drawings of the boat that could travel under the water, out of the reach of bad weather.
Then the storm took all his attention again.…
When the weather died down, the crew worked through the day to put the Coralie back in order. Exhausted and dripping, Nemo changed into his second set of dry clothes so he wouldn’t catch cold … or get water spots on any of the scientist captain’s precious notebooks.
At the captain’s table they ate cold meat and boiled eggs. “I prefer my food solid and immobile,” Grant said as the ship continued to rock and sway. “’Tis not weather for soup, lad, not if ye want to keep any in your bowl.”
Nemo ate in silence, wrestling with the question in his mind. Finally, he asked, “The notebooks of da Vinci, the drawings you showed me. I keep thinking of that underwater vessel. Do you really think it could be built someday?”
The captain smiled at him, brushing down his trim mustache. During the voyage he had let his brown hair grow longer. “Aye, lad, I’ve heard of schemes to use sealed boats under water. In Year of Our Lord 1620, the court engineer for King James I—a man named Cornelius Drebbel—constructed a ‘sub-marine boat’ and demonstrated it in the Thames River. To maneuver he used oars sealed at the locks with leather gaskets. Alas, it did not prove practical.”
Nemo tried to picture the spectacle in his mind, with the English King and his court dressed in finery, waiting on stands at the riverbank. The court engineer submerged his awkward boat by admitting water into the hull, and rose to the surface again by pumping it out, using a contraption like a blacksmith’s bellows.
“Then, lad, during the American rebellion in 1776, a Yankee named Bushnell built a sealed ship he called the Turtle, barely large enough to hold one occupant. ’Twas driven by two hand-cranked screw propellers, one for vertical movement, one to go forward. Sergeant Ezra Lee took the Turtle underwater toward the loyal British flagship Eagle anchored in New York harbor. He carried an explosive charge to attach to the hull plate. Fortunately for the British, he couldn’t maneuver at all, and got lost. He never did manage to sink our ship.”
Nemo peeled a cold egg. “So no one has made a functional sub-marine boat?”
Captain Grant dipped his knife into a small pot and smeared mustard onto a slice of gray-brown salt beef. “Robert Fulton, the American who invented the steamboat, came close to succeeding at the turn of this century. He journeyed to France in 1797 and your Napoleon Bonaparte granted him funding to build a functional vessel 25 feet long. ’Twas metal and streamlined like a fish, could hold three or four men in its belly, and used inclined diving planes to submerge. Compressed air tanks augmented the oxygen supply. In theory, the vessel could stay underwater for six hours.”
“Six hours?” Nemo remembered his experiment with the bladder helmet and reed breathing tubes in the Loire. “And did it work?”
“Aye, but Napoleon never saw any military potential in underwater ships. Fulton rallied no support from the British or American governments, either, so he abandoned his lovely sub-marine in 1806.”
Nemo, his imagination captivated now, met his mentor’s eyes. “Did Fulton’s sub-marine boat have a name?”
Grant rummaged through his notebooks, confident that he could lay his hands on any bit of information. “Aye, he christened it the Nautilus.”