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For the past few months, Verne and Nemo had made impromptu lunches of bread and cheese and cold meat aboard the Cynthia to listen as the shipbuilders chatted with each other. The men sweated hard and labored from dawn until dusk, but Jacques Nemo enjoyed moments of relaxation with his son. The carpenters told bawdy stories that Verne wouldn’t dare repeat to his family, though he couldn’t help enjoying the yarns.

Verne doubted he’d ever seen his father smile. Certainly, Pierre Verne did not laugh with easy abandon the way Monsieur Nemo did.

“I can’t go to the christening,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve got studies to do, and my family will go to a late Mass.” Nemo did not look surprised.

Some wagging tongues around Ile Feydeau scolded Jacques Nemo for letting his son run wild in the streets, but Verne thought his friend was better adjusted to survival in the world than most of the spoiled residents of Nantes. Once, in a surprising, angry outburst of temper, Nemo had bruised and bloodied a would-be tough who had sneered at him and insulted his father.

Nemo’s grandfather had been a sailor, lost in a typhoon off the China Sea, and his father had also spent his youth aboard tall ships, until he’d married and settled down in Nantes to build the vessels he loved so much. Nemo’s mother, from whom he had gotten his dusky skin, was long in her grave, which forced a tighter bond between father and son.

The two played cards, laughed and sang, they read to each other. Nemo’s father told him stories by firelight, while Nemo did the household work. Though poor, the father and son never seemed to have a moment of unhappiness together. Verne often found himself wishing that he and his own father got along half as well. Since they did not, he contented himself with sharing the warmth and comradeship of the Nemos.

Walking down to the docks where the boats unloaded their cargo, Verne and Nemo saw toothless men with wiry muscles. The old faces were weathered from salt wind and tropical sunlight; many bore scars from badly healed cutlass slashes. The sailors loved to sit on crates and tell stories for their attentive listeners while munching on coarse loaves of bread or overripe fruit.

In front of a weather-beaten barge that had come up the estuary from Paimboeuf, the seaport at the mouth of the Loire, they spotted a veteran with six tattoos on his arm, one for each time he had crossed the equator. Though most of the sailor’s scraggly gray hair had fallen out, he’d tied a few strands into a limp braid like the tail of a wharf rat. His eyes gleamed as he leaned forward, pointing at his eager listeners.

Verne drew back, noting that two of the man’s fingers were gone. The sailor cackled and held up his hand to display the jagged stumps. “‘Twere bitten off by a shark. And a shipmate o’ mine was swallowed whole. Reached down the monster’s gullet, I did, to pull ‘im back out. But them jaws, they clamped shut and gobbled up me mate. Lucky I only lost this much.”

Behind them at the barge, men hauled on hemp ropes to raise crates of animal skins, botanical specimens, and mineralogical samples.

“We sailed down and up the Ivory Coast o’ Africa, the Gold Coast to the Bight o’ Benin, saw men there blacker ‘n coal, with fangs as long as yer fingers. Aye, it’s true. Those demons’ll strike ye dead just by looking at ye -- and then rush up and chew the flesh off yer bones. Cannibals!”

“If they could strike you dead just by looking at you, then how did you see them and survive?” Nemo asked with a skeptical frown.

“Pah! Tweren’t hungry that day.” The old sailor spoke in a rough but convincing voice, waving his three-fingered hand for emphasis. He told them stories about Prester John’s kingdom, with its fountain of youth and a throne cut from an enormous diamond coughed up out of the gullet of a giant whale. Isolated from the rest of Christianity, Prester John defended Europe against Poseidon’s followers, who lived in underwater cities such as sunken Atlantis.

Verne and Nemo soaked up details about colorful lands, fabulous treasures, strange peoples.