Captain Nemo's Origin Story

I’ve been thinking a lot about the immortal Captain Nemo, the central figure in Jules Verne’s work 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and its sequel Mysterious Island.

Ever since I was a kid and read my first young reader’s edition of 20000 Leagues, I have been entranced by the vision of Captain Nemo. Considering how much of the book he appears in and how much he drives that book – the story is about a professor out to discover the truth behind a number of attacks on ships, leading to a journey aboard Nemo’s ship Nautilus— the figure of Nemo is a great mystery.

Nemo comes across in Verne’s book as a driven man who speaks many languages and who doesn’t care to explain himself. He has a tendency to lock up the narrator, Professor Arronax, when he senses that he’ll have to explain his actions too much. He is a master scientist and sailor who has invented an amazing creation in the wondrous 18th-century submarine. He stands up for the abused, rescuing workers and donating fortunes to the downtrodden.

Gradually across the two books we learn Nemo’s origin story.

Chapter 16 of Mysterious Island gives us most of it: “Nemo” is of course an adopted name—originally, the man who would be Nemo was Prince Dakkar, the son of a Raja in the Bundelkhand region of India.

Educated in Europe from a young age, the young Prince traveled the world and in Verne’s words,

“endowed by Nature with her richest gifts of intellect, accumulated knowledge of every kind, and in science, literature, and art his researches were extensive and profound…. he was ever grave--somber even--devoured by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and cherishing in the recesses of his heart the hope that he might become a great and powerful ruler of a free and enlightened people.”

He married “a noble Indian lady” and had two children, and then was drawn into a violent uprising the British Empire and took to the sea. With a price on his head and his family dead at the hands of the ruling British, Dakkar turned away from the world of men.
Where, then, did he seek that liberty denied him upon the inhabited earth? Under the waves, in the depths of the ocean, where none could follow.

“The warrior became the man of science. Upon a deserted island of the Pacific he established his dockyard, and there a submarine vessel was constructed from his designs. By methods which will at some future day be revealed he had rendered subservient the illimitable forces of electricity, which, extracted from inexhaustible sources, was employed for all the requirements of his floating equipage, as a moving, lighting, and heating agent. The sea, with its countless treasures, its myriads of fish, its numberless wrecks, its enormous mammalia, and not only all that nature supplied, but also all that man had lost in its depths, sufficed for every want of the prince and his crew--and thus was his most ardent desire accomplished, never again to hold communication with the earth. He named his submarine vessel the "Nautilus," called himself simply Captain Nemo, and disappeared beneath the seas.”

I mean... what a story! To an American reader like me this was straight out of a Marvel Comic, or better yet Aquaman. Witness this amazing speech when he destroys a ship in 20,000 Leagues:

I’m the law, I’m the tribunal!  I’m the oppressed, and there are my oppressors! Thanks to them, I’ve witnessed the destruction of everything I loved, cherished, and venerated–homeland, wife, children, father, and mother! There lies everything I hate! Not another word out of you!

So naturally I started seeking out Nemo wherever I could find him, especially in movies. There are a few really great movie Nemos:

1. James Mason in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Although Mason is Irish rather than Indian, he really captures the cold arrogance of Nemo in ever line of dialogue. It’s a great part.
   
   
2. Herbert Lom in Mysterious Island (1961). One of my favorites is this, Herbert Lom's turn as Nemo in the exciting 1961 Mysterious Island. This might be the performance that first made me aware of the mysteries of Nemo. Still not Indian, though.
   
3. “Mark Nemo” in The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo. This educational children’s show from Canada was actually a lot of fun, though the Indian Nemo was transformed into the blond, blue-eyed ocean adventurer Mark Nemo. As with Young Captain Nemo, the goal was to teach ocean lessons in every episode. A lot of Americans will remember the show from Captain Kangaroo.
   
4. Robert Ryan in Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969). American Robert Ryan is a strange Captain Nemo-- Ryan plays the mysterious captain as a somewhat surly, militaristic American (probably) expatriate. It's a very natural performance, far different from the poetic soul James Mason portrayed. I like Ryan a lot.
   
   
5. Naseeruddin Shah in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). Western Audiences got their first wide-release Indian Nemo in the film based on Alan Moore’s amazing comic, which posits a sort of all-star band of famous literary characters (Tom Sawyer, Mina Harker of Dracula, etc). Fans of the comic weren’t thrilled by the movie with all the liberties it took, but Nemo is played with great seriousness. I feel he gets lost in the shuffle, mainly because he’s supporting player. 
   

I can’t say which one I actually carried with me—in my head Nemo became a mish-mash of all the versions I’d seen and that amazing character in the books.

Getting into Nemo’s world with my own work wasn't just something that I kind of wanted to do, it was something that I burned to do. To create a submarine and go off on adventures with my friends. And because I don't live in the world of my books, I live in the world where I type them, that dream translated into Young Captain Nemo, the story of Gabriel Nemo and his mysterious ship, the Nemoship Obscure. Gabriel, a twelve-year-old descendent, is from a family that has grown to include members from India and throughout Europe isn’t the only active Nemo: he has an older sister, a tough, brilliant strategist who commands a much larger and much more dangerous ship than Gabriel’s—Nerissa Nemo’s Nemoship Nebula with its hundreds of crew. I hope you’ll check it out.

"Armed with his wits, his friends, and his Nemotech submarine, a twelve-year-old descendant of Jules Verne’s famous antihero is determined to help make the ocean a safer place one adventure at a time in Jason Henderson's Young Captain Nemo, first in a new middle-grade series."