Clipper ship captain turned literary titan
Of all the sailors turned writers, few enjoyed such an intimate relationship with the sea as Joseph Conrad. For him, sailing was more than just a distraction, it provided both his sole income during 20 years of wandering the globe and the framework around which his itinerant life hung. Between Conrad embarking on a career as a sailor in 1874 and when he finally turned his back on the ocean in 1893, he sailed immense distances, rounded the dreaded Cape Horn twice, meandered along thousands of miles of coast spanning the China Seas to the Mediterranean, and had worked his way up the ladder from apprentice to captain. Even this he did with a flourish, for his first command was a beautiful clipper ship, a craft that was the most perfect evolution of commercial sail. Having set the bar high as a sailor, he then proceeded to master the art of writing novels with even greater élan, producing a number of seminal works in addition to many beautifully crafted short stories. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon: these are books that have long outlived their writer and endure in the memory.
Yet all of this achievement came from a most unpromising start, and things never looked darker than on a February evening in 1878 when the young sailor retired to his hotel room, a grubby little hovel in the back streets of Marseille, pressed a gun to his chest and tried to end his life. He had just lost a fortune at the card table and his life simply didn’t seem worth living. He was utterly alone, a stranger in a strange land and at this dark moment the role of perpetual outsider didn’t seem one worth playing any more. He fired a bullet deep into his breast. How different the literary world would be if he had succeeded in this rather clumsy attempt at suicide. He would also have deprived himself of some of the most remarkable adventures that were later recorded, embroidered and interwoven into some of the most compelling seafaring literature ever written.
Yet, in old sailors’ parlance, we are guilty of clapping on our topsails before our anchor is out of the ground, and the tale is in danger of running away with itself. This unpromising youth was 17 years old when he attempted suicide, and the act was the culmination of a tumult of catastrophes that had propelled him across Europe and landed him penniless and desperate on the streets of Marseille. Joseph Conrad was born in Poland in 1857, the only son of Apollo and Evelina Korzeniowski. Back then he was known as Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski and was relatively wealthy, for both of his parents were from the landed gentry. Although the Korzeniowskis would certainly have classed themselves as Polish, they were technically Russian, as Poland had been plundered and divided between the Austrians, the Prussians and the Russians. Despite this, Poland had managed to maintain a strong national identity and during the nineteenth century the cry for freedom from imperialist rule rang strong and true through the region. Apollo Korzeniowski was a dreamer, a romantic and a man blessed with almost no business acumen. He managed to fritter away most of his own money and also his wife’s substantial dowry on a number of ill thought-out projects. At this point he turned himself solely to the cause célèbre of patriotic Polish men at the time; freedom for Poland. This led to some serious errors of judgement, which resulted in the family being arrested and exiled to northern Russia in 1861. It took two years in these unforgiving climates to kill off Evelina and six years later, when Joseph was 11, Apollo followed suit. These few bald sentences encompass a world of suffering that Joseph had to endure as a child, and which perhaps explain his brooding nature in later years. He was fortunate in one respect, however; his uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski, was a firm friend of Apollo and took it upon himself to care for his nephew. Thaddeus had none of Apollo’s rashness and wilfulness and was a pragmatic and eminently sensible man. His affection for his wayward brother-in-law endured and was transferred to Joseph and at the same time he tried to instil some of his own values into his nephew. He was the perfect foil for Joseph, who was already displaying a tendency toward the kind of unthinking romanticism that had landed Apollo in such straits. In later years, Conrad would always speak of his uncle and guardian with the greatest affection and respect.
It must have come as something of a blow to Thaddeus when his young charge began to insist that he must go to sea. Given that he had never even seen the sea, and that a mariner’s life was almost universally acknowledged at the time to be a dangerous and poorly paid one, this must have been viewed with some concern by Thaddeus. He saw all of Apollo’s foolhardy wilfulness in the demand. Yet there seemed no stemming the youngster’s desire to escape his landlocked existence, and in 1874 Thaddeus granted Joseph his wish. Using some contacts he had in Marseille Thaddeus secured him a berth as passenger aboard the Mont Blanc, an elderly wooden sailing vessel built in 1853. She was embarking on a round voyage to the West Indies and back and it is likely that Thaddeus hoped that the monotony and hardship of a long voyage would cure his charge of any sea fever and make him eager to return to more gainful employment.
In this assumption he was wrong, for the charm of deep-sea sailing took hold of Joseph despite the old boat taking quite a beating, as he recalled many years later:
The very first Christmas night I ever spent away from land was employed in running before a Gulf of Lyons gale, which made the old ship groan in every timber as she skipped before it over the short seas until we brought her to, battered and out of breath, under the lee of Majorca, where the smooth water was torn by fierce cat’s-paws under a very stormy sky. We – or, rather, they, for I had hardly had two glimpses of salt water in my life till then – kept her standing off and on all that day, while I listened for the first time with the curiosity of my tender years to the song of the wind in a ship’s rigging. The monotonous and vibrating note was destined to grow into the intimacy of the heart, pass into blood and bone, accompany the thoughts and acts of two full decades, remain to haunt like a reproach the peace of the quiet fireside, and enter into the very texture of respectable dreams dreamed safely under a roof of rafters and tiles. The wind was fair, but that day we ran no more. The thing (I will not call her a ship twice in the same half-hour) leaked. She leaked fully, generously, overflowingly, all over – like a basket.
I took an enthusiastic part in the excitement caused by that last infirmity of noble ships, without concerning myself much with the why or the wherefore. The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam. But at the time I did not know; I knew generally very little, and least of all what I was doing in that galère. I remember that, exactly as in the comedy of Molière, my uncle asked the precise question in the very words – not of my confidential valet, however, but across great distances of land, in a letter whose mocking but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost paternal anxiety. I fancy I tried to convey to him my (utterly unfounded) impression that the West Indies awaited my coming. I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic conviction – something in the nature of a call. But it was difficult to state intelligibly the grounds of this belief to that man of rigorous logic, if of infinite charity.
Clearly Uncle Thaddeus’ plan had come royally unstuck. The sea gave the youngster a real outlet for his thirst for adventure and youthful romanticism. In sending Joseph to the Caribbean, Thaddeus had certainly helped. This was a flying-fish passage as the old salts would say, all deep blue glittering water, great playful swells with feathery billowing whitecaps and steady trade winds that caressed the cheek with warmth and thrummed in the rigging. After two months of this monotonous beauty, Joseph enjoyed the thrill of raising the tropical island of Martinique, with its chattering birds, azure waters and unseen, untold adventure. Joseph was theoretically a passenger on this first trip, but would doubtless have helped with the work of the ship. Life aboard a commercial sailing ship was not an easy one. Much of the work Conrad would have been set would have been dreadfully boring, a daily drudge of cleaning and scrubbing interspersed with moments of real danger when hands were ordered up the masts to furl or set sails. It was usually the novices who were sent high into the upper yards, and death from falling was a constant threat. Yet Conrad evidently took to the work like a duck to water and the comfortable, warm-weather passage would certainly have helped ease him in to a life afloat. The only hardship would have come on the return passage, when the Mont Blanc would have taken a more northerly course and had to contend with slightly chillier conditions. Despite this, Conrad did not hesitate to sign on for a second trip, which again took in Martinique and also Haiti, concluding with an icy cold race up the North Atlantic to Le Havre, ending on a raw December day. It is perhaps telling that on this occasion, Joseph left the ship in Le Havre with unseemly haste, caught a train to Marseille and did not ship again for six full months. Whether he fell in love with the sea is highly debatable, but it did help satisfy Conrad’s wanderlust, and he later summed up the relationship as; ‘The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.’
Still, two lengthy voyages had at least helped to sate some of this restlessness, and he allowed himself the luxury of a six-month break. This may seem pretty decadent, but the fact was that Conrad simply didn’t need to work. He received a yearly allowance from his uncle of 2,000 Francs and this was enough to afford him a life of relative comfort and idleness for extended periods ashore. His uncle may have been pressuring him to progress, but that worthy gentleman was many miles away in Poland and this gave Joseph plenty of freedom to get into scrapes. Idle evenings ashore in Marseille were whiled away in cafes and bars, enjoying the company of intellectuals and revolutionaries in this lively city. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that this young rebel without a cause fell under the thrall of a group of Carlist agitators, sympathisers with Carlos II of Spain, who believed that he had been deprived of his throne. This had led to a number of wars, the second of which had concluded in 1876. Yet the seed of rebellion still burned within Spain and it was the following year that Joseph and his new found comrades became involved in an operation to run guns into Catalonia for the rebels.
To this end a syndicate of four was formed, including a mysterious lady by the name of Dona Rita, who may well have been Conrad’s first love – it is certainly hinted at in some of his later works. Perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this book, there was a boat involved and he certainly fell in love with this vessel. She was the Tremolino, a balancelle, which is an Italian derivative of the lateen-rigged dhows. Conrad later described her as follows:
Two short masts raking forward and two curved yards, each as long as her hull; a true child of the Latin lake, with a spread of two enormous sails resembling the pointed wings on a sea-bird’s slender body, and herself, like a bird indeed, skimming rather than sailing the seas.
Her name was the Tremolino. How is this to be translated? The Quiverer? What a name to give the pluckiest little craft that ever dipped her sides in angry foam! I had felt her, it is true, trembling for nights and days together under my feet, but it was with the high-strung tenseness of her faithful courage. In her short, but brilliant, career she has taught me nothing, but she has given me everything. I owe to her the awakened love for the sea that, with the quivering of her swift little body and the humming of the wind under the foot of her lateen sails, stole into my heart with a sort of gentle violence, and brought my imagination under its despotic sway. The Tremolino! To this day I cannot utter or even write that name without a strange tightening of the breast and the gasp of mingled delight and dread of one’s first passionate experience.
Joseph was to be the active member of the syndicate, meaning that he actually took the risk of being aboard while the guns were being run. The captain was a Corsican by the name of Dominic Cervoni, a flamboyant moustachioed man who appeared to fear very little:
He was perfect. On board the Tremolino, wrapped up in a black caban, the picturesque cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those massive moustaches and his remorseless eyes set off by the shadow of the deep hood, he looked piratical and monkish and darkly initiated into the most awful mysteries of the sea.
Several successful runs lined the syndicate up perfectly for the catastrophe that followed. For this fateful voyage, Conrad had borrowed about 3,000 Francs from his uncle, and all of this was stored in gold pieces in his money belt, which fatefully, he hid in a locker. The crew featured Cervoni’s own nephew Cesar, and it was this shifty individual who betrayed the conspirators, forewarning the authorities of their plans. Running along the coast of Spain, a Spanish coastguard vessel was spotted and the crew pushed the Tremolino hard in order to evade it until they could make good their escape under cover of darkness. The little Tremolino flew like a bird before the rising gale and all were hopeful of escape until her great mainsail was unexpectedly torn from its yard by a heavy gust of wind. Close inspection revealed that this had been weakened by tampering. With the Tremolino disabled, Cervoni opted to run the vessel close inshore and destroy her by ramming her on to the rocks. Once ashore they would then easily be able to escape the coastguard. It was at this point that Joseph went to retrieve his Uncle’s 3,000 Francs from the locker, only to discover that they had been stolen. There was no time for recriminations and the Tremolino was duly shattered on the unyielding rocks of the Spanish coastline. The crew took to the dinghy, but not before Cesar had been knocked into the water. To everyone’s surprise, the unpopular crewmember sank like a stone and did not resurface. The rest of the crew survived and were able to escape, but it was soon abundantly clear that Cesar had stolen the money belt and it had been his own duplicity and the weight of the gold that had drowned him.
Conrad was left to return to Marseille with all the makings of a truly marvellous novel. Many of the elements of the tale were used in one of his last books, The Arrow of Gold. Of course, this was scant consolation to a shipwrecked 20 year old, who now found himself very heavily in debt to his uncle. Ashamed of his misadventures, he returned to Marseille and dug himself deeper into trouble by borrowing a further 800 Francs and gambling it away in an attempt to recoup the loss. After a night at the card table, he returned to his hotel room at rock bottom; utterly alone, penniless, and hopeless. He couldn’t bring himself to admit his errors to his uncle, as they all too closely resembled those of his father before him. His attempt on his own life was driven by despair. There is some speculation that the wound to his chest was actually inflicted during a duel over the mysterious Dona Rita, but if this is so, we will never know, for Conrad took the exact details to his grave. All we can fully establish is that Uncle Thaddeus was duly informed of his nephew’s troubles and headed to Marseille to sort them out. In a later correspondence with a close friend, he wrote that Joseph had been injured in a suicide attempt and that they had opted to cover up the embarrassing truth by fabricating the story of a duel.
Conrad was to fully repent his Carlist adventures, and in a later recollection, he couched them in much less colourful words:
All this gun-running was a very dull if dangerous business. As to intrigues, if there were any, I didn’t know anything of them. But in truth, the Carlist invasion was a very straightforward adventure conducted with inconceivable stupidity and a foredoomed failure from the first. There was indeed nothing great there worthy of anybody’s passionate devotion.
It was time for a change and the decision was taken that Joseph should pursue a career in the British Merchant Navy. This was partly because the French were very strict about the number of voyages non-French nationals could make aboard their ships. The British were less fussy and besides, Thaddeus had other pragmatic reasons for pushing this switch. In his lengthy letters with his wayward nephew, he patiently explains how important it is for Joseph to gain a new nationality, for as a Russian citizen, he was eligible for National Service. With life in the French Merchant Navy out of the question, Britain seemed like a good bet, although one which young Joseph doubtless approached with some trepidation, particularly given that he didn’t speak much English. Nevertheless, in 1878 he turned his back on Marseille, and Thaddeus duly shelled out 400 Francs for a passage aboard a humble cargo steamer, the Mavis, which took him to London via Constantinople and the Black Sea. Once he had arrived in London, Joseph promptly wired his uncle asking for some more money and at this point, his long-suffering relative finally lost his patience, writing back as follows:
Ponder for a moment what you have perpetrated this last year and ask yourself whether you could have met with such patience and forbearance even from a father as you have with me, and whether some limit should not have been reached?
You were idle for nearly a whole year, fell into debt, purposely shot yourself – at the worst time of year, tired out and with the most terrible rate of exchange – I hasten to you, spend 2,000 roubles – to cover your needs I increase your allowance. Was all this not enough for you? I agreed to your sailing in an English ship, but not to staying in England, travelling to London and wasting my money there! I can give you only one piece of advice – not a new one – ‘arrange your budget within the limits of what I give you’ for I shall give you no more! Make no debts for I will not pay them, DO SOMETHING and don’t remain idle. Don’t pretend to be the rich young gentleman and wait for someone to pull your chestnuts out of the fire – for that will not happen. If you cannot get a ship then be a clerk for a time. But do something, earn something. If you learn what poverty is, that will teach you the value of money. I have no money for drones and have no intention of working so that someone else can enjoy himself at my expense.
You can almost feel Thaddeus tearing a hole in his writing paper as his pen scratches out his utter frustration with this feckless youngster. The letter touches quite heavily on work, a necessary evil, which Joseph was long to have an awkward relationship with, as he later distilled in his short story Heart of Darkness. ‘I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.’
For the first time Joseph had to fully face up to this. He truly needed to find himself for he must have felt truly abandoned; out on his own with no direction home. The desolation and loneliness of his situation must have been utterly crushing. Yet, just when things didn’t look like they could get any worse, he headed to Suffolk. He had secured a berth as a seaman aboard the Skimmer of the Sea, a small barquentine plying coals between Newcastle and Lowestoft.
Sadly Conrad never put down in words the emotions he felt when he arrived in this humble town and signed on aboard the modest little ship. There is little doubt he would have felt like his fortunes had taken a tumble. In Marseille, he had friends, spoke the language and had clearly enjoyed the climate and cosmopolitan buzz of a thriving port. Lowestoft was far from cosmopolitan and, to make matters worse, Conrad found that the people of Suffolk spoke no known language or at least spoke in such an impenetrable dialect that he had no chance of understanding. In French ships he had been treated as an apprentice (this basically means a trainee officer, separate from the ordinary seamen). The Skimmer of the Sea would have observed no such niceties. She was as rough and ready as they came, a prime example of the British coasting trade, a business for tough men who navigated, not with sextant and chronometer, but by feel and memory – the sound of a dog barking onshore could ward them off in fog. They understood the coast intimately and could read wind shifts and changes in the weather almost by intuition. Yet, for a youngster aboard, the overriding theme was backbreaking work. An example of the kind of tough labour in which Conrad would have been employed was the process of loading and unloading. Steam winches were rarely used in vessels of this size, so the Skimmer’s cargo of coal would have been winched in and out by hand. Day after day of this ‘dollying’ as it was known was necessary. The old sailors called this kind of work ‘Armstrong’s Patent’ and many suffered badly ruptured muscles from years of overdoing it.
Joseph worked aboard the old barquentine for a little under three months. During this time she made six passages between Newcastle and Lowestoft and no doubt provided an excellent learning experience for him. Even if he was already a reasonable sailor, all the nautical terms he had learned in France were now redundant and he would have had to start over. Yet he was clearly making progress and felt confident enough to sign off the Skimmer and head back to London in order to secure a more glamorous berth.
The year was 1878 and the docks of the city were still crowded with beautiful sailing ships. Some of the legendary clipper ships still survived and were thriving in the Australian wool run. This trade was the last stand of clipper ships before they were supplanted by the humdrum steamship. Every year a fleet of 20 or so of the fastest sailing ships in the world sailed out from London to the ports of Sydney and Melbourne and awaited the season’s wool clip. Once loaded, they raced around Cape Horn to London in order to catch the March wool sales. Racing was intense and dominated by the legendary former tea clippers Cutty Sark and Thermopylae. An example of the kind of work done by these boats can be witnessed in 1889 when Cutty Sark caught up and overhauled the supposedly invincible mail steamer Britannia as she raced into the Bass Strait on her way to Sydney. Here was doomed romance and beauty aplenty!
Whether tales of the clippers seduced Conrad is not clear, although he certainly wrote in reverent tones about them in later years. Certainly he was always slightly scornful of steamships and their ‘plodding’ progress across the sea, as he described it. It is also clear that he sought out interesting and unusual vessels, which appealed to his romantic nature, and it was perhaps this that led him to a berth in a clipper ship.
Stumbling into a shipping agent’s office, Joseph asked in broken English for a berth and, after an initial rebuttal, the agent relented and informed the young sailor that there was an apprentice’s position available aboard the Duke of Sutherland, an Aberdeen-based vessel built of wood in 1865. Although she was described as a clipper, it appears that her powers were very much on the wane by the time Conrad stepped aboard. A couple of slow runs in the wool trade could damage the reputation of a ship, which would then generally find itself relegated to less glamorous – and less profitable – trades. As it was, the passage that Joseph took in 1879 was to be the Duke of Sutherland’s last as a wool clipper. She took 108 days to get out to Sydney, a rather stark contrast when compared with the 76 days set by the clipper Pericles – the fastest passage of the year to Sydney and a full month quicker than the Duke of Sutherland’s voyage.
Although the old vessel was clearly struggling, Joseph was finding his feet and the young mariner was remembered many years later by one of his shipmates, Henry Horning:
Conrad occupied one of the top bunks and I the lower. He was a Pole of dark complexion and black hair. In his watches below he spent all of his time reading and writing English; he spoke with a foreign accent. I can well remember his favourite habit of sitting in his bunk with his legs dangling over the side and either a book or writing material in his lap. How he came to occupy a bunk in the half-deck instead of one in the topgallant forecastle is quite beyond me.
This is an interesting insight not only into Joseph as a rather bookish seaman, but also into the snobbery of young Horning. The reference to Conrad occupying the half deck rather than the topgallant forecastle is telling. The half deck was where all of the privileged young gentlemen apprentices trained to become officers. The topgallant forecastle was where the poorer sailors were lodged. Generally professional sailors had fewer aspirations to become an officer and the insinuation is that Conrad, as a foreigner, had no place with the young gentlemen. This is ironic, as the Pole probably had an allowance to match even the most spoilt apprentice, yet he was clearly seen as an outsider, an anomaly. This theme would crop up throughout his life, and run through his later novels. What Horning also reveals is that Joseph was finally knuckling down. Thaddeus’s endless nagging seemed to be paying off and, shortly after signing off from the Duke of Sutherland at the end of a long return voyage around Cape Horn to London, Joseph put himself in for his Board of Trade examination in order to obtain his second mate’s certificate.
This exam was an ordeal at the best of times, as the Board of Trade attempted to put into words the very fluid and complicated practice of sailing a square-rigged ship in all sorts of challenging circumstances. To qualify, you needed four years of sailing experience ‘before the mast’. Conrad had just enough time under his belt but the examiner clearly eyed this unusual candidate with scepticism. In fairness, his record of discharge from a motley selection of ships looked none too promising and he proceeded to give the aspiring officer the grilling of his life. Conrad later recalled the examination with eloquence:
It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers. But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious and weird. ‘This ancient person,’ I said to myself, terrified, ‘is so near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is all very well for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the way to my hired home.’ This statement is not so much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this earth. I verily believe that at times I was light-headed in a sort of languid way. At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seemed to last for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting bow. When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon, and the doorkeeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and tip him a shilling, said: ‘Well! I thought you were never coming out.’ ‘How long have I been in there?’ I asked, faintly. He pulled out his watch. ‘He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don’t think this ever happened with any of the gentlemen before.’
Second Officer Korzeniowski now had his qualification; what he lacked was a ship, and this was not as easy to procure as might be expected. Fortune was on his side, however, and he was able to gain a berth through the time-honoured practice of the pierhead jump. It so happened that as Joseph was prowling the London Docks in search of a job he got wind that the second mate of the wool clipper Loch Etive had been seriously injured and would be unable to sail. The ship was scheduled to depart and Conrad hurried along the wharves to the Loch Etive to meet with her skipper, Captain Stuart. The meeting was later used in one of his fictional works, Chance, as follows:
I suppose he had heard I was freshly passed and without experience as an officer, because he turned about and looked at me as if I had been exposed for sale. ‘He’s young’ he muttered. ‘Looks smart though.. You’re smart and willing (this to me sudden and loud) and all that aren’t you?’
I had just managed to open and shut my mouth, no more, being taken unawares. But it was enough for him. He made as if I had deafened him, with protestations of my smartness and willingness.
Captain Stuart promoted his third mate to second and made Conrad his new third. This position is often given to senior apprentices trying to make up the time to sit their second mate’s examination. Both first and second mates are in charge of the two separate watches of men and the third mate simply fills in. If the position wasn’t terribly prestigious, Conrad had certainly struck gold with regard to the ship. The Loch Etive was one of a number of extremely fast clippers owned by Aitken and Lilburn’s Loch Line, which specialised in the Australian trade. To serve in the Loch Line was the rough sailing equivalent of the Cunard Line or P&O services today. The Loch Etive was not quite as fast as some of their earlier clipper ships, but she benefitted from being commanded by one of the finest captains in the world at the time. Captain Stuart was a dour old Scotsman who had previously skippered the Tweed, a quirky vessel out of which he had coaxed some extraordinarily fast passages. He had made the Tweed’s name and she had made his. Conrad soon ascertained that his captain was in mourning for his old ship, and seemed to console himself by wringing the last ounce of speed out of his new one, as Conrad noted later:
It was hopeless for Captain Stuart to try to make his new iron clipper equal the feats which made the old Tweed. There was something pathetic in it, as in the endeavour of an artist in his old age to equal the masterpieces of his youth – for The Tweed’s famous passages were Captain Stuart’s masterpieces. It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least bit dangerous. At any rate, I am glad that I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a passage. And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde shipbuilder’s masterpiece as I have never carried on in a ship before or since.
It was during this voyage from London to Sydney and back that Conrad also got his first taste of real responsibility aboard ship, for the second mate was taken ill and Conrad was briefly put in charge of a watch of men. The experience sounds truly terrifying, for Captain Stuart clearly did not make life easy for his young officers, as this encounter between the two illustrates beautifully:
He was, I must say, a most uncomfortable commander to get your orders from at night. If I had the watch from eight till midnight, he would leave the deck about nine with the words, ‘Don’t take any sail off her.’ Then, on the point of disappearing down the companion-way, he would add curtly: ‘Don’t carry anything away.’
It was in this tough school that Conrad learned the art of being an officer and there can’t have been many more exacting arenas than the wool trade in which to learn: after a run down the Atlantic, the hard work really started off the Cape of Good Hope. From here the clippers ‘ran their easting down’, blown before the wild winds of the Roaring Forties, which howl unrestricted around this empty part of the globe. Dipping far south in search of fresh westerlies, the rigging of a ship would be adorned with icicles, the deck a maelstrom of confused water and icy spume flying inboard with the force of buckshot, cutting to the skin and freezing to the bone. The seas were often immense and daunting and the vessels driven almost under by their commanders. It was here that the rigging of the ship, always thrumming, would start to emit a deep roaring moan and the whole vessel would tremble like a leaf. This description by Conrad of a gale in the southern ocean gives some insight into the suffering and terror and beauty:
For a true expression of dishevelled wildness there is nothing like a gale in the bright moonlight of a high latitude. The ship, brought-to and bowing to enormous flashing seas, glistened wet from deck to trucks; her one set sail stood out a coal-black shape upon the gloomy blueness of the air. I was a youngster then, and suffering from weariness, cold, and imperfect oilskins which let water in at every seam.
Arrival in Sydney must have been a blessed relief and there was a brief pause as ship and crew girded their loins for the run back home around Cape Horn; once more, the vessel would enter the screaming wasteland of the Roaring Forties with only the lonely albatross and the howling westerly wind for company. It was here that Conrad was involved in the dramatic rescue of a small Danish brig, which was right on the verge of sinking when the Loch Etive reached her and launched her boats with unseemly haste, as Conrad recalls:
We made a race of it, and I would never have believed that a common boat’s crew of a merchantman could keep up so much determined fierceness in the regular swing of their stroke. What our captain had clearly perceived before we left had become plain to all of us since. The issue of our enterprise hung on a hair above that abyss of waters which will not give up its dead till the Day of Judgment. It was a race of two ship’s boats matched against Death for a prize of nine men’s lives, and Death had a long start. We saw the crew of the brig from afar working at the pumps – still pumping on that wreck, which already had settled so far down that the gentle, low swell, over which our boats rose and fell easily without a check to their speed, welling up almost level with her headrails, plucked at the ends of broken gear swinging desolately under her naked bowsprit.
Her bulwarks were gone fore and aft, and one saw her bare deck low-lying like a raft and swept clean of boats, spars, houses – of everything except the ringbolts and the heads of the pumps. I had one dismal glimpse of it as I braced myself up to receive upon my breast the last man to leave her, the captain, who literally let himself fall into my arms. It had been a weirdly silent rescue – a rescue without a hail, without a single uttered word, without a gesture or a sign, without a conscious exchange of glances. Up to the very last moment those on board stuck to their pumps, which spouted two clear streams of water upon their bare feet. Their brown skin showed through the rents of their shirts; and the two small bunches of half-naked, tattered men went on bowing from the waist to each other in their back-breaking labour, up and down, absorbed, with no time for a glance over the shoulder at the help that was coming to them.
It was a dramatic rescue and the culmination of a truly adventurous and educational trip. Conrad signed off in London and went in search of a new vessel. The choice of his next berth clearly illustrates that his thirst for adventure was far from quenched. She was the Palestine, an ancient ship under the command of the equally ancient and wonderfully named Captain Beard. Despite his advanced years, this was Captain Beard’s first command and from the first this little man enchanted Conrad. He offered him the berth of second mate for the Palestine’s voyage round to North Shields to load coal. From there, she would make the long haul around the globe to Bangkok. This shabby little vessel was a million miles away from the smart Loch Etive, but her dilapidated air and epic voyage appealed to the romantic in Conrad and he eagerly signed on.
The passage did indeed prove to be a challenge and is narrated in Conrad’s short story, ‘Youth’. The bare facts of it are as follows: the Palestine (renamed ‘Judea’ in ‘Youth’) headed from London around to North Shields and ran straight into a series of equinoctial gales. It took her a month to reach her destination, by which time she had lost the berth booked for her and had to wait some weeks to load. While in dock, she was hit by an out-of-control steamer and further delayed while repairs were carried out. Setting out to Bangkok in November, she struggled down channel against a succession of gales and after a month of being battered by the elements she was seriously leaking. Fortunately, progress had been so slow that Falmouth was a two-week sail away, so while the hands pumped for their lives, the Palestine limped back to port. Despite the hardship, Conrad was clearly enjoying the trip, as he recalled in ‘Youth’:
As soon as we had crawled on deck I used to take a round turn with a rope about the men, the pumps, and the mainmast, and we turned, we turned incessantly, with the water to our waists, to our necks, over our heads. It was all one. We had forgotten how it felt to be dry.
And there was somewhere in me the thought: By Jove! this is the deuce of an adventure – something you read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate – and I am only twenty – and here I am lasting it out as well as any of these men, and keeping my chaps up to the mark. I was pleased. I would not have given up the experience for worlds. I had moments of exultation.
On finally reaching Falmouth, carpenter and crew effected repairs, the ship sailed again and promptly started leaking anew. Once more she returned to Falmouth, where most of her cargo was unloaded and the shipwrights got to work on her. She was then reloaded but leaked worse than ever. By now the vessel was becoming something of a joke, as Conrad related:
They towed us back to the inner harbour, and we became a fixture, a feature, an institution of the place. People pointed us out to visitors as ‘That ’ere bark that’s going to Bankok – has been here six months – put back three times.’ On holidays the small boys pulling about in boats would hail, ‘Judea, ahoy!’ and if a head showed above the rail shouted, ‘Where you bound to? – Bankok?’ and jeered.
In all, the vessel was six months in Falmouth but when they finally made good their escape there were no further dramas until they neared their destination. At this point ill-fortune descended again, when a wisp of smoke was detected rising from the main hatch; the Palestine was on fire. This was probably due to her cargo of coal getting damp through all the leaks and being loaded and unloaded for repairs.
Spontaneous combustion of a cargo was an ever-present danger back in those days of leaky wooden ships and the crew now set to work pumping water back in to the boat they had spent so long emptying, while the vessel proceeded on her course. She was tantalisingly close to her destination, but after several days of containing the blaze, the barque finally blew her decks off, sending many of the crew flying overboard. Fortunately the weather was calm and a steamer that was close at hand offered to tow them, as Java was within striking distance. The tow only succeeded in fanning the flames however, and the line was cut. The steamer offered to take the crew to safety, but Captain Beard declined, preferring to stick with his ship until the bitter end. The crew took to the ship’s boats and awaited the death of their doomed vessel. It came thus:
Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously, mournful and imposing like a funeral pyre kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph.
And that was the end of the Palestine debacle. It took Conrad and his crew three hours or so to row to Java and he was able to observe for the first time the East and all the mysteries it held. It was a significant moment, for these waters were to provide the inspiration for many of his tales.
Yet he did not tarry for long here and returned to Britain in a more prosaic manner as passenger on a steamer. His next vessel was the Riversdale, a ship which sailed to Madras via Africa. At this point Conrad signed off due to a dispute with the skipper. It appears that the captain was a heavy drinker and was suffering from delirium tremens when he arrived in Madras. He ordered Conrad to fetch a doctor, which he did, informing him that the captain was suffering from an alcohol-related illness. This unfortunately got back to his captain, who promptly dismissed his second mate. This could have left Conrad in a bit of a fix; many sailors ended up stuck ‘on the beach’ in eastern ports and Conrad obviously did not have a reference from the Riversdale. Fortunately, he headed to Bombay and easily secured a berth aboard the beautiful full-rigged ship, the Narcissus. Any stain on his character regarding the Riversdale had been cleared once that vessel had left Madras, for her skipper immediately wrecked her despite the weather being perfectly calm and clement. An official inquiry found that the ship was many miles off course, and gave a good insight into her drunken captain by stating: ‘Either he did not know where he was going, in which case there was culpable recklessness; or, he did not know where he was, in which case there was equally culpable negligence or ignorance.’ The skipper’s certificate of competence was suspended for twelve months. Conrad was clearly best off out of the Riversdale and returned to London aboard the Narcissus, the elegant ship that was to provide the setting for his later book, The Nigger of the Narcissus. On returning to London, he had gained enough sea time to sit his examination for First Mate and was once more tormented by the Board of Trade examiner who set him the most impossible theoretical situations from which he had to rescue a wayward square-rigger. He later recalled:
The imaginary ship seemed to labour under a most comprehensive curse. It’s no use enlarging on the never ending misfortunes; suffice it to say that, long before the end I would have welcomed with gratitude the opportunity to exchange into the Flying Dutchman.
Despite these travails, he successfully attained his first mate’s certificate and shipped aboard another big square-rigger, the Tilkhurst, which made a round trip to Singapore and back without incident. On being discharged, Conrad sat his master’s certificate and also applied to become a British citizen. He was successful on both counts and at the age of 24 had achieved a great deal. For his uncle Thaddeus it was a very proud moment; a triumph of his own sensible, pragmatic nature over the natural instinct of the Korzeniowskis to go off the rails. He wrote effusively to his nephew praising him for his achievements. It was a far cry from the angry missive he had sent on Conrad’s first arrival in London.
Although Conrad was now technically a captain, it was common to spend several years as first mate before stepping up to command, and this is exactly what he did, signing on aboard the Highland Forest, another big windjammer. He joined the vessel in Amsterdam during an epic cold snap. The weather was so cold that the cargo was frozen upriver and, as a result, the crew were all discharged. To add to the loneliness, the captain was also absent and would not join the vessel until just prior to departure. Conrad later recalled the chilly desolation of this frustrating time beautifully:
Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the ink froze on the swing-table in my cabin, and I found it more convenient to go ashore stumbling over the arctic waste-land and shivering in glazed tramcars in order to write my evening letter to my owners in a gorgeous café in the centre of the town. It was an immense place, lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble tables felt tepid to the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of coffee bore, by comparison with my utter isolation, the dear aspect of an intimate friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a letter addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is no cargo, and no prospect of any coming till late spring apparently. And all the time I sat there the necessity of getting back to the ship bore heavily on my already half-congealed spirits – the shivering in glazed tramcars, the stumbling over the snow-sprinkled waste ground, the vision of ships frozen in a row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black vessels in a white world, so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seemed to be.
Eventually the cargo did arrive and, in the absence of the captain, Conrad was responsible for loading the ship. This was not as easy as one might think, for sailing ships were tricky vessels and no two were the same. Load some down by the stern and they would be sluggish in light weather but fly before a storm. Down by the bow might lead to the opposite being true, but not always. Load a vessel with the cargo too high up and she might become unstable or ‘crank’, load her too low and she would be too ‘stiff’ and not roll naturally. It was vital to load a ship to suit her personal requirements. Conrad did not know the Highland Forest, and had to do the best he could. Sadly, it was not good enough, as he discovered on Captain McWhirr’s arrival:
Without further preliminaries than a friendly nod, McWhirr addressed me: ‘You have got her pretty well in her fore and aft trim. Now, what about your weights?’ I told him I had managed to keep the weight sufficiently well up, as I thought, one-third of the whole being in the upper part ‘above the beams,’ as the technical expression has it. He whistled ‘Phew!’ scrutinizing me from head to foot. A sort of smiling vexation was visible on his ruddy face. ‘Well, we shall have a lively time of it this passage, I bet,’ he said.
Neither before nor since have I felt a ship roll so abruptly, so violently, so heavily. Once she began, you felt that she would never stop, and this hopeless sensation, characterizing the motion of ships whose centre of gravity is brought down too low in loading, made everyone on board weary of keeping on his feet. The captain used to remark frequently: ‘Ah, yes; I dare say one-third weight above beams would have been quite enough for most ships. But then, you see, there’s no two of them alike on the seas, and she’s an uncommonly ticklish jade to load’.
It is perhaps understandable that after many months of this interminable rolling and jerking the Highland Forest lost one of her lighter spars from aloft, and it is poetic justice that the offending spar should strike the man responsible on the back. Conrad was seriously injured by the blow and was laid up for many months in a hospital in Singapore. When he finally got back on his feet he made another unusual move; signing up as first mate aboard a small coasting steamer, the Vidar, which plied her trade along the numerous colonial outposts of the China Seas. This was quite a leap from treading the deck of a big square-rigger, and would demand an entirely different skill set, for the little steamer threaded her way through some of the most treacherous waters in the East. Conrad came to understand them intimately and described them perfectly:
The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents – tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.
Once again, he was on a steep learning curve but was proving to be an adaptable sailor. He was five months aboard the Vidar, exploring the steamy, sweltering coast and observing closely some of the strange, broken down characters who occupied these outposts of colonialism; drinkers, despots over tiny kingdoms, madmen, they were all here, including one Dutch trader called Olmeijer, who was to become the central character in his first novel, Almayer’s Folly. After five months of happily tramping this interesting coast he signed off rather abruptly:
Suddenly I left all this. I left it in that, to us, inconsequential manner in which a bird flies away from a comfortable branch. It was as though all unknowing I had heard a whisper or seen something. Well – perhaps! One day I was perfectly right and the next everything was gone – glamour, flavour, interest, contentment – everything. It was one of these moments, you know. The green sickness of late youth descended on me and carried me off. Carried me off that ship, I mean.
You would swear that he was doing little more than research for future novels, yet Conrad claims it never even occurred to him to take up writing at this point in his life. Besides which, one of his most momentous adventures was just around the corner, for a strange twist of fate was about to land the young officer his first command: the Otago.
The circumstances of his gaining this command were, on the face of it, extremely fortunate. While awaiting a passage home from the East, he lodged at a sailors’ home in Singapore. While he was loafing there he was invited to take command of a small barque, which was stuck in nearby Bangkok following the death of her previous skipper. Conrad eagerly accepted the offer of command, headed to Bangkok and this is where the trouble started. He narrates the early days of his command in The Shadow-Line a short story in which he confesses to a degree of trepidation: ‘A strange sense of exultation began to creep into me. If I had worked for that command ten years or more there would have been nothing of the kind. I was a little frightened.’
Little wonder either; at 29 Conrad was unusually young to gain command of a ship, and his rather erratic and itinerant lifestyle meant that he had served far fewer hours as an officer than many of a similar age with the same qualifications. Nevertheless, the first sight of the trim little Otago as he arrived in Bangkok by steamer seems to have dismissed his fears and doubts:
I leaned over the rail of the bridge looking over the side. I dared not raise my eyes. Yet it had to be done – and, indeed, I could not have helped myself. I believe I trembled. But directly my eyes had rested on my ship all my fear vanished. It went off swiftly, like a bad dream. Only that a dream leaves no shame behind it, and that I felt a momentary shame at my unworthy suspicions. Yes, there she was. Her hull, her rigging filled my eye with a great content. That feeling of life-emptiness which had made me so restless for the last few months lost its bitter plausibility, its evil influence, dissolved in a flow of joyous emotion. At first glance I saw that she was a high-class vessel, a harmonious creature in the lines of her fine body, in the proportioned tallness of her spars. Whatever her age and her history, she had preserved the stamp of her origin. She was one of those craft that, in virtue of their design and complete finish, will never look old. Amongst her companions moored to the bank, and all bigger than herself, she looked like a creature of high breed – an Arab steed in a string of cart-horses.
She was indeed a sweet little vessel; built of iron in Glasgow in 1869. She was 147ft long, which was a handy size for a first command, and evidently pleasing to the eye. That, however, was about as far as Conrad’s good fortune went, for the ship was languishing in Bangkok in unusual circumstances. It appears that after the death of her previous captain, a Mr Snadden, the mate, Mr Born, had taken her to Bangkok rather than the more cosmopolitan Singapore. His reason for this was that he realised he had a far greater chance of gaining command of the vessel if she was stuck in some backwater rather than busy Singapore. This led to immediate friction between Conrad and Born. What is more, the mate seemed utterly spooked by the death of Captain Snadden, who is described in The Shadow-Line:
He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours – till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took him. Very loud, too.
According to Born, his former skipper had thrown the offending instrument overboard on the night he died. Whether this tale is merely a bit of poetic licence from Conrad we will never know. What there is no doubt about is that Snadden had left a pretty tangle behind him for the new skipper to unthread. The ship’s accounts were in a terrible mess, and her crew was ailing with disease after too long spent in the unhealthy air of Bangkok. Yet work must go on, and after loading a cargo of teak logs – rather picturesquely aided by local elephants, the Otago was ready for sea with orders to head to Sydney. The first part of this trip was tortuous, with fickle breezes fanning vessels through a maze of reefs towards the Sunda Strait, which divides Java and Sumatra and is the gateway to the Indian Ocean and freedom. Things did not go well from the start; Otago was towed out of Bangkok and ghosted along before a few catspaws (a gentle puff of breeze that soon dies away again) and shortly afterwards the wind died completely. Then she lay for days motionless and sweltering in the heat. To make matters worse, it was soon evident that many of the crew were seriously ill with cholera, dysentery and fever. As the vessel drifted, the men grew increasingly sick. The relationship between Conrad and his first mate was also distilling into one of mutual dislike. This was not helped by the fact that Mr Born was ailing with fever, and his terror that the ship was under the curse of the departed Captain Snadden seemed reinforced by the deathly calm. Conrad describes their relationship:
To begin with, he was more than five years older than myself at a time of life when five years really do count, I being twenty-nine and he thirty-four; then, on our first leaving port (I don’t see why I should make a secret of the fact that it was Bangkok), a bit of manoeuvring of mine amongst the islands of the Gulf of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare. Ever since then he had nursed in secret a bitter idea of my utter recklessness.
The scare he refers to occurred when Conrad opted to stand in toward some islands off Bangkok in order to get the benefit of the evening land breeze. No breeze materialised and the Otago was left drifting helpless and too close to land for comfort. By now it was clear the crew was too sick to continue, and Conrad discovered that Captain Snadden had sold off the ship’s supply of Quinine and substituted it with an unknown white powder. This was the final straw and a course was set for Singapore. It took her 21 days to stagger there and she finally arrived flying a flag of distress. Conrad’s first voyage as captain was over and it had clearly been a thoroughly testing experience. In Singapore a new crew was shipped and from hereon things generally went without a hitch, the Otago arriving in Sydney in May of 1888.
Interestingly, the services of the fractious mate, Born, were retained and Conrad grew to value his strengths. This picturesque description gives a good insight into the manner in which business was conducted aboard the Otago:
He was worth all his salt. On examining now, after many years, the residue of the feeling which was the outcome of the contact of our personalities, I discover, without much surprise, a certain flavour of dislike. Upon the whole, I think he was one of the most uncomfortable shipmates possible for a young commander. If it is permissible to criticise the absent, I should say he had a little too much of the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in a seaman. He had an extremely disturbing air of being everlastingly ready (even when seated at table at my right hand before a plate of salt beef) to grapple with some impending calamity. I must hasten to add that he had also the other qualification necessary to make a trustworthy seaman – that of an absolute confidence in himself. What was really wrong with him was that he had these qualities in an unrestful degree. His eternally watchful demeanour, his jerky, nervous talk, even his, as it were, determined silences, seemed to imply – and, I believe, they did imply – that to his mind the ship was never safe in my hands. Such was the man who looked after the anchors of a less than five-hundred-ton barque, my first command, now gone from the face of the earth, but sure of a tenderly remembered existence as long as I live. No anchor could have gone down foul under Mr. Born’s piercing eye. It was good for one to be sure of that when, in an open roadstead, one heard in the cabin the wind pipe up; but still, there were moments when I detested Mr. Born exceedingly. From the way he used to glare sometimes, I fancy that more than once he paid me back with interest. It so happened that we both loved the little barque very much. And it was just the defect of Mr. Born’s inestimable qualities that he would never persuade himself to believe that the ship was safe in my hands. But upon the whole, and unless the grip of a man’s hand at parting means nothing whatever, I conclude that we did like each other at the end of two years and three months well enough.
Despite this rather strained relationship, both captain and mate were able to settle into the Otago after the dramatic start and evidently enjoyed the experience. The clipper was next despatched to Mauritius. This exotic little outpost of the French empire was a beautiful stopover and Conrad welcomed the chance to mix with the local society and practise his French. He even had time to fall in love with one Eugenie Renouf and seems to have proposed to her a couple of days before the Otago was scheduled to sail. To his horror he discovered she was already betrothed and he departed Mauritius somewhat melodramatically proclaiming that he would never again set foot on the island. This proclamation was to return to haunt him a year later, when, following passages to Madagascar and Melbourne, the Otago’s owners secured another charter to Mauritius. Conrad begged them to explore new avenues of trade in the East, but the charter was secured and that was that. As a result, Conrad resigned his command in 1889. Within a couple of months he was back in London, having returned by passenger steamer. He was understandably ready for a break and, only a few days after settling in to lodgings in London, he determined to start writing a book, which was eventually shaped into his first novel, Almayer’s Folly.
He may have started the ball rolling on his literary career, but this was 1889 and Almayer’s Folly wasn’t published until 1895. For now his future was still very closely tied up with ships and the sea. Conrad had already reached the peak of his seafaring career and was casting around for the next great adventure. He settled upon Africa and the roots of his decision are clear from his short novel, Heart of Darkness:
I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas – a regular dose of the East – six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship – I should think the hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn’t even look at me. And I got tired of that game too.
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and … well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.
True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird – a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can’t trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water – steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.
It was with such a careless rationale that Conrad approached the Societe Anonyme pour le commerce du Haut Congo about the possibility of working for them as skipper. They accepted and Conrad signed a contract committing himself to work on a steamer plying the trading outposts of the upper Congo. The Congo River is divided into three navigable sections that are divided by a series of rapids and waterfalls. To reach his command, Conrad would be obliged to undertake a long overland trek to Kinshasa where he would join the steamer. Much of this disastrous trip is narrated in Heart of Darkness which, according to Conrad, strays ‘a little, only a very little’ from the actual facts. King Leopold II of Belgium, keen to attain a colony for his country, had established the Congo Free State in 1884. What happened next was the transformation of the Congo into a place of unspeakable cruelty. An example of the horrors inflicted is that rubber plantation workers who did not reach their quota of rubber had their hands amputated as punishment. Some of the worst crimes ever committed were taking place here and it was into this maelstrom of intolerable degradation and disease that Conrad ventured in. Like the rest of the world, he would have been utterly unaware of the state of things beforehand, and what he saw on his travels was seared indelibly onto his conscious.
The first rumblings of misgiving came on the trip down the coast of Africa to the Congo. He wrote with concern to a friend about receiving the disquieting news that ‘sixty per cent of the company’s employees return to Europe before they have completed even six months service. Fever and dysentery!’ He saw other things that filled him with foreboding, as described in Heart of Darkness:
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Conrad made his way up the Congo River to Matadi and then had to make the overland trip to Kinshasa. This was a painful trek and Conrad did well to arrive there with his health intact. He was disgusted with most of the white people he met on the way, who for the most part were unsavoury desperadoes looking to make a quick fortune exploiting the local populace. Conrad noted in his diary that he would ‘try to avoid making acquaintances as much as possible’. During his trek upriver, Conrad relates seeing an endless succession of dead and mutilated bodies along the trail. In Kinshasa, his spirits took a further tumble, as he discovered that his command, the Florida was badly damaged and would not be back in commission for several months. In the meantime he was assigned to provide back-up to the skipper of the steamer Roi de Belges, which was soon to be despatched upriver to the Stanley Falls. One of the purposes of this trip was to pick up one of the company’s agents, Klein, who was seriously ill. During the course of this trip also, Conrad was forced to take command of the Roi de Belges, as her skipper was taken ill. This would have been a new challenge to Conrad, for handling a river steamer in restricted waters, often extremely fast flowing, is very different from being in charge of a ship in the open sea. It required an almost completely new skill set and the fact that the trip was accident-free is much to Conrad’s credit. Despite the rapid and untroubled trip, Klein died before the steamer returned to Kinshasa, and with his burial the bare bones of Heart of Darkness were laid out. If other authors, most notably Robert Louis Stevenson, had hinted that perhaps the imperialism of the ‘civilised’ world was not always beneficial, Conrad’s book was set to blow the lid completely off that myth. Heart of Darkness was to document the true rapaciousness, greed and horror of imperialism gone wrong with the unflinching eye of a man who had headed into Africa full of optimism and returned from the interior repulsed.
On returning to Kinshasa, Conrad saw quite clearly that there was no hope of a permanent command, and fell out with some of the company directors. To make matters worse, he had finally succumbed to the malaria and typhoid that were decimating the populace and he had little choice but to return home or die. He relates the trip down the Congo thus:
I got round the turn between Kinshasa and Leopoldville more or less alive, although I was too sick to care whether I did or did not. I arrived at the delectable capital of Boma, where before the departure of the steamer which was to take me home I had the time to wish myself dead over and over again with perfect sincerity.
The following passage in Heart of Darkness puts things even more bluntly:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.
When he finally made it back to London, it was clear that the experience had nearly destroyed him, and it was to be a return to his old friend and adversary, the sea, that restored him. It took him eight months to convalesce from his various ailments, but when he did he found that fortune had not completely turned her back on him after all. Captain Cope of the famous passenger clipper Torrens offered him the position of first mate. Initially Conrad expressed reservations about his health, but Cope admonished him by saying it was ‘no good moping around ashore’. It proved to be just the tonic he required. The Torrens was a very beautiful ship, which took passengers on the round trip from London to Adelaide. Unlike the wool clippers that Conrad had earlier served aboard, she was able to sail back to England by the slightly easier Cape of Good Hope route. This was to make life more comfortable for her passengers but also made things much more pleasant for the crew. The Torrens had established an excellent reputation for herself and, loaded down with passengers rather than cargo, she was a very comfortable and civilised ship. Basil Lubbock, unquestionably the foremost historian of clipper ships described her thus:
She was without doubt one of the most successful ships ever built, besides being one of the fastest, and for many years she was the favourite passenger ship to Adelaide. A beautifully modelled ship and a splendid sea boat, she was very heavily sparred. In easting weather she would drive along as dry as a bone, making 300 miles a day without wetting her decks. But it was in light winds that she showed up best, her ghosting powers being quite extraordinary. The flap of her sails sent her along two or three knots, and in light airs she was accustomed to pass other clippers as if they were at anchor.
Conrad served as mate for the duration of two round the world voyages aboard this thoroughbred and she seemed to go a long way to replenishing his diminished stocks of energy and wellbeing. There is a fascinating insight into the mate of the Torrens given by the writer John Galsworthy, who travelled aboard as a passenger in 1893:
He was superintending the stowage of cargo when I first met him. Very dark he looked in the burning sunlight. Tanned with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair and dark brown eyes over which the lids were deeply folded. He was thin, not tall his arms very long, his shoulders broad. He spoke to me with a strong foreign accent. He seemed to me strange on an English ship.
The chief mate bears the main burden of sailing a ship. All the first night he was fighting a fire in the hold. None of us seventeen passengers knew of it until long after. It was he who had most truck with that tail of a hurricane off Cape Leeuwin and later with another storm. He was a good seaman, watchful of the weather, quick in handling the ship – considerate with the apprentices – we had one unhappy Belgian among them, who took unhandily to the sea and dreaded going aloft and Conrad compassionately spared him all he could. With the crew he was popular; they were individuals to him, not a mere gang. He was respectful if faintly ironic with his whiskered stout old English Captain, for Conrad had commanded ships and his subordinate position was only due to the fact that he was still convalescent from the Congo experience which nearly killed him. Many evenings were spent on the poop, even then a great teller of a tale. He had already nearly twenty years of tales to tell. Tales of ships and storms of Polish revolution, of his youthful Carlist gun running adventure of the Malay seas and the Congo; and of men and men.
This is a fine portrait of the final evolution of Conrad the sailor; affable yet a consummate professional and clearly at the top of his game. In 1891 he signed on for his last voyage aboard the Torrens and, although he had no idea at the time, it would be his final voyage as a professional seaman. He was only 36, yet had packed more adventure into those years afloat than most manage in a lifetime. He married a young lady named Jessie George three years later and the dream of the sea seemed to slowly fade as his writing career picked up. Still, his retirement from the sea was always somewhat half-hearted and his pining for it often screams out in his writing. His love of the sea was far from blind however: ‘There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea,’ he once observed. This is a man speaking of his work, but what a seductive workplace it was for him and what adventures it meted out to him along the way! For all that the sea was his career, he clearly longed for it in his later years and sums up the sense of loss he felt beautifully in Chance, the book which, in 1913, fully launched him as a literary titan. He describes Marlow thus:
Marlow had retired from the sea in a sort of half hearted fashion some years. From year to year he dwelt on land as a bird rests on the branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after minute. The sea is the sailor’s true element and Marlow, lingering on shore, was to me an object of incredulous commiseration like a bird which, secretly should have lost its faith in the virtue of high flying.
A sad epitaph to his seagoing life, yet his loss was our gain, for by turning to his pen he felt he became one of the last chroniclers of commercial sail’s pinnacle of elegance. His writings helped to record and bring alive a way of life that existed for centuries and was snuffed out in a matter of decades. His eloquence has helped at least keep the memory of these brave seafaring days alive, and make future generations aware of the great beauty we have lost in the pursuit of efficiency and utility. As he summed it up himself:
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. A modern ship does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world’s soul.