"From now on I will travel only in my imagination." So said an embarrassed eleven-year-old to his mother after being returned home after a failed runaway attempt. The year was 1839; the boy had crept from his bedroom and through the dark streets of Nantes, a French port on the Loire River, dreaming of life on the high seas. After meeting up with a less adventurous child already serving as cabin boy on the Coralie, a grand three-masted schooner, the two switched places. But the runaway's father snatched him from the vessel just as it was about to head off into the open waters of the Atlantic, bound for the West Indies. Although his parents put an end to his naval daydreams, they may have unwittingly started their son on a journey of another kind, a journey that would make life on a schooner tame in comparison. Hovering over...