Captain Nemo

Book excerpt: Most readers know Capain Nemo only as the enigmatic protagonist of Jules Verne's classic novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But what if Nemo was a real man, whose actual life was more fantastic and adventurous than all the fictions it inspired? Here is the epic tale of Andre Nemo, the man behind the myth. The free-spirited and inventive son of a French shipbuilder, Nemo goes to sea as a cabin boy, faces marauding pirates and bloodthirsty sharks, is marooned for years on a mysterious island, battles prehistoric monsters long believed extinct, journeys to the center of the Earth, balloons across Africa, escapes from Arab slavers, discovers the fabled city of Timbuktu, endures a plague of locusts, survives the Charge of the Light Brigade, tends to the wounded with Florence Nightingale, is pressed into service by the ruthless Robert the Conqueror, and, ultimately, wages war on War itself as the captain of his greatest creation: the legendary underwater vessel known as the "Nautilus. "Captain Nemo is also the story of Nemo's childhood friend, Jules Verne, who would bestow immortality upon the captain's exploits, and of the remar