Conrad arrived in England in 1878, at the age of twenty, with only a few words of English, yet passed his examination for master within eight years. Though many foreigners worked on British ships, few aspired to become officers. And none had Conrad’s noble-gentry heritage, cultured background, good education, refined manners, elegant dress, intellectual interests and rare sensitivity—all of which set him apart from both seamen and officers, and made him a lonely outsider.
During his twenty years at sea, he sought variety rather than consistency in the pursuit of his profession. He never sustained a successful career with any one firm or shipping line, and worked on eighteen different ships. He served during a period of transition from sail to steam and found it increasingly difficult to get suitable berths. He quarreled with several of his captains, and spent many long, frustrating periods ashore. Conrad had to serve as first mate after he had qualified as master. He had only one command—which he obtained by accident—and, after impulsively resigning, was never able to command another ship.
The unromantic steamer Mavis left Marseilles in April, with Conrad aboard as ordinary seaman, and stopped in Malta and Constantinople. Russia had just defeated Turkey in the war of 1878; as they approached the Bosporus, Conrad saw the pointed tents of the victorious army at San Stefano (now Yesilkoy, a village southwest of Istanbul, on the Sea of Marmara) where the peace treaty had been signed. The ship then entered Russian waters, docking at Kerch in the Crimea and Yeysk in the Sea of Azov, where she picked up a cargo of linseed. She then passed through the Mediterranean and returned to Lowestoft, on the Norfolk coast. Having quarreled with the captain, William Munnings, Conrad forfeited part of his apprentice’s deposit and left the ship. On June 18, 1878, he stepped onto English soil for the first time.
From July 11 to September 23, Conrad made three round-trip voyages between Lowestoft and Newcastle on a coal-carrying schooner, The Skimmer of the Sea. He may have recognized and been drawn to the schooner by its name, which was the subtitle of Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Water-Witch (1830). Though Conrad, known as “Polish Joe,” earned only three shillings on his first English voyages, he got on well with the Norfolk sailors and later idealized them in his works.
Ignoring his two months on the Mavis, which had been unpleasant and could not be romanticized, Conrad said his voyages on The Skimmer of the Sea were his first experience on English ships. Writing to his close friend Cunninghame Graham in 1898, the small, dark Pole portrayed the sailors as hearty, high-colored Nordics: “In that craft I began to learn English from East Coast chaps each built as though to last forever, and coloured like a Christmas card. Tan and pink—gold hair and blue eyes with that Northern straight-away-there look! Twenty-two [actually, twenty] years ago! From Lowestoft to Newcastle and back again. Good school for a seaman.”
In his speech to the Lifeboat Institution in 1923, he emphasized the sailors’ amiability and their patience with the eager foreign apprentice who was trying to learn the essentials of seamanship and of English. And in “Poland Revisited” he also reminisced about his youthful experiences in the North Sea:
That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name. It had been for some time the school-room of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow-water academy of seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the sailors of the Norfolk shore; coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning.1
When he left The Skimmer of the Sea, after two months, to secure a berth sailing the wide oceans, he knew enough English to write (perhaps with some help) a letter to London inquiring about a job.
In a fascinating digression in “Poland Revisited,” Conrad emphasized his loneliness and described his first visit to London as if he were penetrating the heart of darkness instead of the depths of the city:
I had come up from Lowestoft—my first long railway journey in England—to “sign on” for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets.
Holding a folded map of London in his hand and placing the address of the shipping agent in his pocket, he navigated the strange city without asking anyone for help.
Finally, he found the Dickensian nook, under an inconspicuous archway, where the office was hidden: “It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. . . . Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop.” When Conrad muttered some phrases in broken English, James Sutherland recognized him and exclaimed: “Oh it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.” The agent informed Conrad that the law forbade him to procure ships for sailors (“I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament!”). But he extracted a sizable fee and, circumventing the law, got Conrad a job as ordinary seaman on the Duke of Sutherland for the derisory pay of one shilling a month.
The full-rigged, thousand-ton wooden wool clipper left London on October 12, 1878, crossed the Equator, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, took one hundred and nine days to reach Sydney, and returned home a year and a week later. Noting the difference between the risk involved and the skill required on sail and on steam ships, Conrad recalled during an interview his agonizing time, high on the mainmast, struggling in the darkness to unfurl the booming royals: “The conditions haven’t changed so much. It is the men who have changed. It’s not that they are less romantic, it’s simply because they are of a different type. The man on a steam vessel suffers less strain on the nerves. His work is easier.” Conrad related how he had spent two terrible hours in the rigging, trying to break the ice on the sails, accompanied by a terrified Australian boy who cried out wildly, panicked by the flapping canvas. “The sailing ship made men,” said Conrad. “Sailors today are little more than factory hands.”2
While Conrad was acting as night-watchman aboard the Duke of Sutherland on Circular Quay in Sydney, a strange man begged for a night’s shelter on the ship. When Conrad indignantly refused, the intruder suddenly knocked him down and gave him a black eye. Another problem during his five months in Sydney was helping A. G. Baker, the drunken chief mate, come on board every night. Ten years later, when Conrad was commanding the Otago, he met Baker, who had given up drink but was down and out. Conrad knew he would place himself in an impossible situation if he offered Baker a job under his command and, though sympathetic, was unable to help him.
Two months after returning from Sydney, and longing for the easier life on a Mediterranean voyage, Conrad sailed as an ordinary seaman on the 676-ton iron steamer Europa. The ship left London on December 12, 1879; called at Genoa, Livorno, Naples, at Patras in Greece, at Messina and Palermo in Sicily; and returned to London, after a seven-week voyage, on January 30, 1880.
Conrad’s experience on the Europa, like that on the Mavis, was unpleasant. Since his letters to Uncle Tadeusz were lost when the family estate was destroyed during the Russian Revolution, and only six of his letters before 1889 have survived, our main—though indirect—source of information about Conrad’s maritime years comes from Tadeusz’s letters to him. Tadeusz’s correspondence is concerned with money and filled with platitudes. Responding to Conrad’s complaints on February 12, 1880, his uncle, like a Greek chorus, offered scant comfort to the resentful mariner. He felt harsh conditions were to be expected at sea and said that he—not Conrad—had foreseen them. He also expressed concern that the son of two parents who had died of tuberculosis was showing alarming symptoms, and commented rather too literally on the alleged insanity of the captain of the ship:
I was not so much upset by the troubles you had on the Europa, though I realize you must have felt them keenly, for these are inseparable from life and getting to know people. They pain you, because you feel that you did not deserve them and that you are being exploited. I understand this and partly agree with you. But in your position, in which everything you gain must be won by work and endurance, in a profession where the conditions are extremely hard, what has happened was to be foreseen—and foreseen by me;—and probably now that you have had the first dose of experience they don’t surprise although they hurt—and hurt they must! I am much more affected by the news that you “cough and sometimes have fever,” for these are symptoms which, if prolonged, may endanger your health and even your life. . . .
Your discomposure because of that madman Captain Munro worries me not less than it does you, although I don’t understand English logic, since if the Captain is a madman his certificate and commission should be withdrawn.3
The glamour and romance which Conrad invested in sailing ships—in his fiction, autobiography and conversation—and his understandable reticence about the brutality and squalor on board, should not allow us to forget two crucial facts: that the merchant marine was a floating business whose main purpose was to make money; and that the conditions, as Tadeusz recognized, were extremely hard. There was a terrible stench aboard ship; the men suffered from damp, cold or heat; the quarters were cramped and primitive; there was no quiet and no privacy; the work was monotonous, exhausting and often hazardous. Robert Foulke observes that “during his twenty years of seafaring, a life not ‘adventurous in itself’ by his own report, Conrad suffered personal injury from a falling spar [on the Highland Forest], stranding, collision, fire, foundering [on the Palestine], and a survivor’s voyage in an open boat.”
The tainted food and sour water produced a high incidence of disease. When Conrad asked himself: “why should I . . . undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of salt junk and hard tack upon the wide seas?,” he could not give a satisfactory answer. In the East, when food was scarce, he had eaten shark, snake and trepang—worm-like aquatic animals, like mollusks, which the Chinese used to make soup. As Tadeusz told Stefan Buszczynski: Conrad “complains of the uncomfortable conditions on English ships [distinctly worse than the French] where no one is in the least concerned with the crew’s comfort.”4
Worse, perhaps, than the physical hardships, were the economic, social, psychological and intellectual difficulties. The pay was poor, promotion was slow, employment unsteady and insecure. Seamen, always abundant, were paid off in port and had to sign on again—months later—for the return journey. The caliber of shipmates, even among captains, was often quite poor. Donkin, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” represents the nadir among the sailors and shows how one man can spread his malign influence throughout the ship.
The social status of merchant seamen was dubious, and many sailors found it difficult to marry and have a family. (Conrad is amusing in “Typhoon” about how Mrs. MacWhirr dreaded the infrequent yet obtrusive visits of her strange husband.) “The most telling feature of voyages in sail,” writes Foulke, “was almost complete isolation—an isolation which sealed off all contact with shore life and created a sense of estrangement. . . . They could not avoid the confinement and boredom of a microcosmic society.” Joseph Retinger confirmed that Conrad felt the strain of isolation and ennui: “Not once but often he told me about his tremendous boredom at sea, when for months and months he had no congenial company, no books to read, no subject over which to meditate.” The sea made Conrad “familiar with long silences,” which, with the isolation, may have reminded him of the long, depressing months with his moribund father. The loneliness of Conrad’s childhood was prolonged in his youth. As he realistically wrote in Lord Jim: “he had to bear the criticisms of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread. . . . There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.”5
Conrad’s time ashore, which became longer and longer between voyages, did not provide the necessary relief from the hardships at sea. He did not indulge in the customary sprees of drink and sex. He kept to the port; he did not travel inland, see the sights or explore the countries of Europe and Asia. He had no family to visit and knew almost no one in England. He had no social connections in Bangkok or Singapore, and felt they were not “very practicable for a seaman.” He lived mostly in sailors’ hostels and in seedy lodging houses in remote, unfashionable parts of London.
What did Conrad do on land? When he became an officer and lived aboard ship in port, he was occupied with his duties and responsibilities. He had to report to the owners, discharge the old cargo, find and stow the new one, pay off and hire the crew, oversee repairs, replenish stores and supplies, settle accounts with ship chandlers, deal with medical problems, attend to legal matters with the harbormaster and the consuls. “In Bangkok,” Conrad wrote, “when I took command [of the Otago], I hardly ever left the ship except to go to my charterers. . . . I was really too busy ever to hear much about shore people.”
When living ashore, he rested from the strenuous work, stretched his legs, bought a few books and tasted a change of cooking. The food, though better than trepang, could not have been very good in cheap London lodgings. He endured humiliating searches for employment with sailing agents and would go to the Shipmasters’ Society at 60 Fenchurch Street, in east London, to see if they had managed to find him a berth. He prepared for his officer’s exams, read extensively in English and French literature, and (as early as 1886) began his apprentice attempts at fiction. His future wife, Jessie, later summed it up by saying: “his days ashore were intervals of utter loneliness.”6
During his long periods between voyages,7 the increasingly disillusioned Conrad had ample opportunity to consider other ways of earning a living, and explored a great many possibilities that failed to eventuate. Unlike his father, who had taught him to despise money, Conrad was obsessed by it. He spent whatever he had, speculated to earn more, was always short of cash and counted on Tadeusz to supply the deficit. His annual allowance at the beginning of his career, about £80 or $400, was considerably more than he earned on ships until he became chief mate on the Highland Forest, at £8 a month (though not for every month of the year) in 1887. In 1881 Tadeusz reduced Conrad’s allowance to £50 so he could support the numerous children of his impoverished brother Kazimierz (who had helped support Apollo in exile).
During his years at sea, Conrad’s unrealistic projects to earn money outside the merchant marine included a whaling venture, piloting in the Suez Canal, Australian pearl fisheries, the Japanese navy, Canadian railroads, business in Newfoundland and work for an American politician. These projects, often inspired by gossip with casual acquaintances, were greeted by Tadeusz with great scepticism and caution: “You would not be a [Korzeniowski], dear boy, if you were steady in your enterprises and if you didn’t chase after ever new projects.” Yet, Conrad told a Polish friend in Cardiff in 1885: “It is not the desire of getting much money that prompts me. It is simply the wish to work for myself. I am sick and tired of sailing about for little money and less consideration.” The only stints of shore work he actually did were to toil as a warehouseman and, for two months in the early 1890s, to work as a translator of Slavic languages. Sometimes his remuneration did not exceed ninepence per week.8
Conrad’s business opportunities increased at the beginning of 1880. After leaving the Europa and renting a flat from William Ward in Tollington Park Street, Finsbury Park, north London, he met his first two English friends: G. F. W. Hope and Adolf Krieger. Hope, who became a lifelong companion, was born in 1854, the son of a solicitor. He had been trained as a boy on the Conway, had spent an adventurous year in the African diamond mines and was a former merchant marine officer. He had also served on the Duke of Sutherland and was a director of the South African Mercantile Company. A married man with a high forehead, trimmed beard and pointed mustache, Hope was fond of cigars and of yachting. He later took Conrad out on his cruising yawl Nellie and was the model for the director of companies mentioned at the beginning of Heart of Darkness.
Conrad met Hope in January 1880 through the sailing agent James Sutherland, whose office was frequented by men of the merchant marine. Hope later wrote: “I saw him several times before he found a berth and the more I saw him the more I liked him.” When they went to the London Tavern for lunch, Hope had difficulty understanding Conrad’s “very broken English.” Richard Curie called Hope, who had no intellectual or artistic interests, “one of the simplest of men” and said that “Conrad rather bewildered him.”9 Hope introduced Conrad to his future wife. And Conrad maintained their friendship after he began to move in literary circles. In 1900, he dedicated Lord Jim to “Mr. and Mrs. G. F. W. Hope, with grateful affection after many years of friendship.”
Adolf Krieger came from a German background and was born in Knox City, Indiana, in 1850. A rugged, good-looking man with thick hair and a drooping mustache, he also had rooms in Ward’s house in Tollington Park Street. He married in 1881 and became a partner in a firm of shipping agents, Barr, Moering and Company, at 36 Camomile Street, near Liverpool Street Station. In the summer of 1883, after meeting Conrad in Marienbad, Tadeusz gave his nephew £350 to invest in Krieger’s firm. Krieger often lent Conrad money and helped him find employment in the Congo. In 1898 Conrad dedicated his first collection of stories, Tales of Unrest, “To Adolf Krieger, for the sake of the old days.” At the end of the century, however, Conrad got into financial difficulties with both friends. He lost his inheritance by speculating in South African gold shares with Hope, and quarreled with Krieger when he could not repay his loans.
On August 24, 1880, after seven months ashore, Conrad made his second voyage to Australia, on the Loch Etive, a full-rigged sailing ship of 1,287 tons, which could reach a speed of twelve knots. Though he passed his second mate’s exam in 1880, Conrad had to sign on as third mate for wages of £3.10.0 a month.
The Loch Etive, a wool clipper known “for never losing steerage way as long as there was air enough to float a feather,” was commanded by William Stuart. A tall, dark figure with a short white beard, he was famous for the quick, daredevil passages he had made on the sailing ship, the Tweed, which had once beaten the steam mail boat from Hong Kong to Singapore by a day and a half.
The chief mate, William Purdu, was rather deaf, could not hear how much wind there was and tended to carry too much sail. He had a “cheery temper, an admiration for jokes in Punch, [and] little oddities—like his strange passion for borrowing looking-glasses.” Later, Purdu was washed overboard by a heavy sea during a rough passage from New Zealand to Cape Horn.
While crossing the mid-Atlantic, the Loch Etive took off the nine-man crew of a Danish brig that had been badly battered on her homeward passage from the West Indies. When the English crew sighted it, they first thought it was a water-logged derelict but soon realized that men were on board. As they lowered the boats, Captain Stuart warned Conrad: “You look out as you come alongside that she doesn’t take you down with her” if she sinks. After the weirdly silent rescue, the Danish captain explained that they had lost their masts and sprung a leak in a hurricane, drifted for two weeks in bad weather, were not seen by passing ships and had nothing with which to make a raft. As they rowed back to the Loch Etive, the Danish brig sank behind them, marked only by an angry white stain undulating on the surface of the steely-grey waters.
The Loch Etive stayed in Sydney for seven weeks, took on a cargo of wool and arrived in London on April 24, 1881. On Christmas Day of the return voyage, they met an American whaler, the Alaska, two years out from New York. The English crew generously filled a wooden keg with old Australian newspapers and two boxes of figs, and flung it overboard as a holiday gift.10
Back in London, Conrad either speculated on credit with the sailing agent James Sutherland or, after the long confinement on ship, went on a spending spree. In any case, his half-yearly allowance disappeared. In order to recover his money, he concocted, in a letter to Tadeusz, a fantastic story about costly losses during an accident that had wrecked his ship, the Annie Frost, and put him into the hospital.
Though Conrad had absolutely no connection with this ship, the kindhearted and gullible Tadeusz, relieved “that you had the uncommon luck to emerge safely from that ill-fated adventure,” immediately sent a remittance to the “mariner in distress.” He also told Conrad that news of the latest calamity had given him diarrhea and warned him, as a Korzeniowski, to “beware of risky speculations based only on hope.” Tadeusz concluded with the suggestion that Conrad assist a certain Professor Kopernicki in an unusual way: “He earnestly requests you to collect during your voyages skulls of natives, writing on each one whose skull it is and the place of origin. When you have collected a dozen or so of such skulls, write to me and I will obtain from him information as to the best way of dispatching them to Cracow where there is a special Museum devoted to Craniology.” A macabre collection of skulls turns up on Kurtz’s fence post in Heart of Darkness and Cesare Lombroso’s theory of cranial types appears in The Secret Agent.
Before Conrad departed on his most disastrous journey—his first voyage to the Far East—Tadeusz made a sentimental appeal for a more practical project (which Conrad also ignored): as “a tribute to the memory of your father who always wanted to and did serve his country by his pen . . . [you should] collect some reminiscences from the voyage and send them as a sample [to] the address of Wedrowiec [The Wanderer, a Warsaw weekly]. . . . Six reports sent from different parts of the world during the year would not take much of your time: they would bring you some benefit and provide you with a pleasant recreation, while giving pleasure to others.”11
The Palestine, a wooden barque of 427 tons, with Conrad as second mate at £4 a month, left London for Bangkok on September 21, 1881. In “Youth” (1898) he gave a fairly accurate account of the adventurous though ill-fated voyage. The ship (called the Judea in the story) “was all rust, dust, grime—soot aloft, dirt on deck.” She experienced heavy gales on the way up to Newcastle, where she took on a new crew and a full cargo of coal. During another gale, when she was three hundred miles from England, the ship lost her sails and sprang a leak—“Boats gone, decks swept clean, cabin gutted, men without a stitch but what they stood in, stores spoiled, ship stranded”—and put back to Falmouth, where they spent eight months undergoing repairs. While waiting in Cornwall, Conrad took a brief leave and squandered all his money in London: “It took me a day to get there and pretty well another to come back—but three months’ pay went all the same. I don’t know what I did with it. I went to a music-hall, I believe, lunched, dined, and supped in a swell place in Regent Street, and was back to time, with nothing but a complete set of Byron’s works and a new railway rug to show for three months’ work.”
The Palestine finally left Falmouth, a year after its original departure and with a fourth new crew, on September 17, 1882. Six months later, the dangerous cargo of coal caught fire by spontaneous combustion. The crew fought the fire with water and then had to pump water out of the hold in order to save the ship from sinking. On March 14, the coal gas exploded, blowing up the decks and burning Conrad: “I did not know that I had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, that my young moustache was burnt off, that my face was black, one cheek laid open, my nose cut, and my chin bleeding.”
The fiery ship was then taken into tow by the Somerset, which had to cut the tow rope when the fire threatened to spread to their own ship. The crew, forced to abandon the Palestine, lowered the boats; and Conrad’s “first command” was a fourteen-foot rowboat with a crew of three. As they pulled away, the ship suddenly went down, head first, in a great hiss of steam. After rowing for twelve hours, they reached Men-tok, on Bangka Island, off the southeast coast of Sumatra, where Conrad, his romantic illusions shattered, got his first view of the exotic Orient.
In a fine passage in “Youth,” he describes how the burnt and blackened sailors were greeted by those on shore:
Then I saw the men of the East—they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of the hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal.12
When Richard Curle was writing an essay on Conrad, the novelist, arguing for suggestiveness rather than specificity, objected to Curle mentioning the name of the place where he had landed: “The paragraph you quote of the East meeting the narrator is all right in itself; whereas directly it’s connected to Muntok [now, Mentok] it becomes nothing at all. Muntok is a damned hole without any beach and without any glamour. . . . Therefore the paragraph, when pinned to a particular spot, must appear diminished—a fake. And yet it is true.”
Conrad stayed in Mentok for six days; took the Sissie to Singapore, where he remained for a month; returned to London, via Port Said, as a passenger on a steamer; and arrived in early June 1883. Though Conrad was attracted to women of mixed blood, and some of the heroines of his Malayan novels are Eurasian, he was never seriously tempted by Eastern women in Singapore, Bangkok or Borneo. “A dash of Orientalism on white is very fascinating, at least for me,” Conrad confessed; then primly added: “though I must say that the genuine Eastern had never the power to lead me away from the path of rectitude; to any serious extent—that is.”13
The Court of Enquiry on the Palestine took place in Singapore on April 2, 1883, while Conrad was following the path of rectitude, and exonerated the officers and the crew. The detailed report describes the facts that Conrad later intensified and transformed into fiction. In the story, conditions are worse than they were in reality. The fictional Judea, between gales, was rammed in the dark by a steamer; the open boat knocked about for “nights and days” instead of reaching Mentok in twelve hours. On the Palestine,
the passage was tedious owing to persistent light winds, but nothing unusual occurred until noon of the 11th March, when a strong smell resembling paraffin oil was perceived; at this time the vessel’s position was . . . [in the] Bangka Strait. Next day smoke was discovered issuing from the coals on the port side of the main hatch. Water was thrown over them until the smoke abated, the boats were lowered, water placed in them. On the 13th some coals were thrown overboard, about 4 tons, and more water poured down the hold. On the 14th, the hatches being on but not battened down, the decks blew up fore and aft as far as the poop. The boats were then provisioned and the vessel headed for the Sumatra shore. About 3 p.m. the S.S. Somerset came alongside in answer to signals and about 6 p.m. she took the vessel in tow. Shortly afterwards the fire rapidly increased and the master of the Palestine requested the master of the Somerset to tow the barque on shore. This being refused, the tow-rope was slipped and about 11 p.m. the vessel was a mass of fire, and all hands got into the boats, 3 in number. The mate and 4 seamen in one boat, the 2nd mate with 3 hands in another and the master in the long boat with 3 men. The boats remained by the vessel until 8.30 a.m. on the 15th. She was still above water, but inside appeared a mass of fire. The boats arrived at Mintok at 10 p.m. on the 15th, and the master reported the casualty to the harbour master. The officers and crew came on to Singapore in the British steamer Sissie arriving on 22nd March.
Conrad behaved admirably during the series of disasters. After he had left the ship the chief mate, H. Mahon, told G. F. W. Hope that he was an “excellent fellow, good officer, the best second mate I ever sailed with.”14
In 1881 Tadeusz had planned a crankish “grape cure” with Conrad in Wiesbaden. During July and August 1883, five years after their unfortunate encounter in Marseilles, Conrad finally arranged to stay with his uncle for a month—first in Marienbad and then in Töplitz [now, Teplice], in Bohemia, south of Dresden. The visit with Tadeusz provided a welcome and luxurious relief from the austere life at sea. It gave him an opportunity to speak his own language, to catch up on news and to reminisce about the past with the closest and best-loved member of his family, who was deeply concerned with Conrad’s welfare and also paid all the bills. Uncle and nephew enjoyed the continental cuisine, the comfortable surroundings, the relaxing and well-regulated routine of hydrotherapy, massage and mineral waters as well as modest gambling in the casino, listening to the evening concerts, taking carriage rides and strolling amidst good society in the well-manicured Kurort.
After Conrad returned to London, Tadeusz, spending another week at the spa, wrote that he had enjoyed their holiday and was grateful for Conrad’s unusually considerate letter: “You were right in supposing that on returning to Toeplitz I was sad and melancholy, sitting down alone to my evening cup of tea, opposite the empty chair of my Admiral!!! . . . I noticed immediately that you had gone out of your way to give me pleasure, and this small fact gave me a far deeper joy than the most eloquent words.” While at Töplitz, Conrad wrote to his father’s friend Stefan Buszczynski about his recent difficulties and dangers on the Palestine, and made a pious declaration of loyalty to his country: “I have not been too happy on my journeyings. I was nearly drowned, nearly got burned. . . . I always remember what you said when I was leaving Cracow: ‘Remember . . . wherever you may sail you are sailing towards Poland!’ That I have never forgotten, and never will forget!”15 In fact, Conrad was always sailing away from Poland—which was filled with so many sad memories and hopeless prospects. He returned there only three times after leaving in 1874: to see Tadeusz in 1890 and 1893; and, after a hiatus of twenty years, to show his family Cracow in 1914.
On September 10, 1883, Conrad signed on the Riversdale as second mate at five guineas a month. The full-rigged sailing ship of 1,490 tons went round the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in Madras on April 8, 1884. During the voyage the captain, Lawrence McDonald, behaved like a despot. The officers were kept at a distance and treated “as machines, to be worked by himself when and as he pleased.” When they reached Madras, McDonald had some kind of convulsive fit and Conrad was sent ashore with a friend of the captain to fetch a doctor. When the doctor inquired about the captain’s condition, Conrad rashly remarked that he was suffering from the effects of drink, and the doctor expected to find him in a state of delirium tremens. After the doctor had examined the captain and found no evidence of alcoholism, the friend told McDonald what Conrad had said. The captain was naturally furious at his insubordination. Though Conrad wrote an insincere letter of apology (which he later regretted), withdrawing his charges, expressing regret and assuring the captain that “there was never any intention to cast even the shadow of a suspicion on Captain McDonald’s personal or professional character,” he was dismissed by the captain on April 17. By agreeing to pay 60 rupees for the expenses involved in replacing him, Conrad admitted a certain responsibility.
McDonald also gave Conrad, for the only time in his career, a harmful “Decline [to answer]” mark for conduct on his Certificate of Discharge. R. L. Cornewall-Jones explains that the negative evaluation was quite clear: “It is by law, however, competent to the seaman who would have B. [Bad] stamped on his discharge to decline to have anything put upon it; but as nobody would object to G. [Good] or V.G. [Very Good], the absence of any marking is perfectly intelligible.”
On April 28, twenty-four hours after leaving Madras, without Conrad, the Riversdale, sixty miles off course in fine weather, ran aground on the coast of India. McDonald’s negligent and reckless navigation were blamed for the wreck and his certificate was suspended for a year. During the Court of Enquiry, McDonald accused Conrad of falling asleep three times during his watch, but admitted he had discharged him “for making certain statements to Dr. Thompson.” Conrad was eventually cleared of these serious charges and allowed to take his chief mate’s exam. In 1919, he joked about the incident and gave the novelist Hugh Walpole “a wonderful account about his time with the drunken captain on the Riversdale.”16 But in 1884, this incident could have destroyed his career. It is not clear exactly why Conrad would make—and then attempt to withdraw—this reckless accusation. But it seems that McDonald, though not drunk when examined by Dr. Thompson, was often intoxicated and that Conrad had wrongly assumed that alcohol had caused his fit.
Eager to get another ship and clear his name, Conrad crossed India by land from Madras in the southeast to Bombay on the west coast. Once there, he was struck by the sight of a graceful, full-rigged iron sailing ship, which had left Wales without a second mate and had had serious trouble with the crew throughout the voyage:
One evening he was sitting with other officers of the Mercantile Marine on the veranda of the Sailors’ Home in Bombay, which overlooks the port, when he saw a lovely ship, with all the graces of a yacht, come sailing into the harbour. She was the Narcissus, of 1,300 tons, built by a sugar refiner of Greenock nine years before. Her owner had originally intended her for some undertaking in connection with the Brazilian sugar trade. This had not come off, and subsequently he had decided to employ her in the Indian Ocean and the Far East.
On June 3, 1884, Conrad sailed from Bombay as second mate at £5 a month and reached Dunkirk, on the Channel coast of France, on October 16. The Narcissus, the only actual ship’s name he used in his fiction, had a rough passage home and inspired his first great work, The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” In August, on the edge of the Agulhas Bank off Capetown, the seas, driven by a westerly gale, became terribly precipitous. The Narcissus “went on her beam ends and remained lying thus on her side for thirty hours among these steep seas, whose menacing aspect and vicious rush are not to be forgotten.”
Most of the characters portrayed in the novel—including Archie, Belfast, Donkin and Singleton (whose real name was Sullivan)—belonged to the real Narcissus. Conrad later told his first biographer that the eponymous hero was a thirty-five-year-old American named Joseph Barron, who died in the North Atlantic on September 24:
I remember, as if it had occurred but yesterday, the last occasion I saw the Nigger. That morning I was quarter officer, and about five o’clock I entered the double-bedded cabin where he was lying full length. On the lower bunk, ropes, fids [tapered wooden pins] and pieces of cloth had been deposited, so as not to have to take them down into the sail-room if they should be wanted at once. I asked him how he felt, but he hardly made me any answer. A little later a man brought some coffee in a cup provided with a hook to suspend it on the edge of the bunk. At about six o’clock the officer-in-charge came to tell me that he was dead. We had just experienced an awful gale in the vicinity of Needles, south of the Cape.17
Conrad, like conventional sailors, brought back a pet monkey from India. But he could not keep it in his boarding-house and did not know what to do with it. He was not terribly attached to it and when the monkey tore up the papers in Krieger’s office, it had to be sold.
Conrad then spent two months ashore studying for his chief mate’s exam, which he passed in December 1884. But ships were hard to find and he had to accept a berth on the Tilkhurst as second mate at the same wages, £5 a month, that he had earned on the Narcissus. The Tilkhurst, a full-rigged iron sailing ship of 1,527 tons (Conrad’s largest sailing ship) left Hull on April 27, 1885, and picked up a cargo of coal in Cardiff, where it remained for a month before leaving for Singapore.
A Polish sailor had asked Conrad to deliver some money he owed to a watchmaker in Cardiff, Spiridion Kliszczewski, who had emigrated to Britain after the insurrection of 1830. Conrad received an enthusiastic welcome and formed a close friendship with the watchmaker’s son Joseph, who was his contemporary. Joseph’s young son noted how strange Conrad seemed in England and “was struck by their guest’s unusual attire—a frock coat with a flat felt hat, the traditional headgear of the Anglican clergy—his strong foreign accent and refined manners.” When Conrad reached Calcutta, he wrote Spiridion his earliest surviving letters on politics, repudiating Apollo’s liberal ideas and expressing his lifelong pessimism: “The present has, you easily understand, but few charms for me. 1 look with the serenity of despair and the indifference of contempt upon the passing events. Disestablishment, Land Reform, Universal Brotherhood are but like milestones on the road to ruin. The end will be awful, no doubt!”18
The night before sailing from Singapore to Calcutta, a drunken brawl broke out on the Tilkhurst and an able seaman, William Cummings, was severely struck on the head. He became delirious and, though watched by the sailors, committed suicide by jumping overboard in the Andaman Sea. It was probably on the Tilkhurst that Conrad received an unexpected compliment about his seamanship. “One day [Conrad] had ordered the men working at the sail on deck to put it away, for he saw the weather would change, and, his order being heard by the captain below through the open skylight, Conrad heard him growl to the mate: ‘That second officer knows the weather.’ ‘That cheered me up,’ he explained. ‘For he was a silent man, and I had never known before how he took me.’ ”
The master of the Tilkhurst, E. J. Blake, was a Plymouth man, well over fifty years old, short, stout, dignified and a bit pompous. When they docked in Dundee with a full cargo of jute from Calcutta, Blake inquired about Conrad’s plans. He then complimented him by saying: “If you happen to be in want of employment, remember that as long as I have a ship you have a ship, too.”19 But soon after this conversation, Blake fell ill and was forced to retire. Conrad visited the captain in his home, but never sailed with him again.
When Conrad was still in Marseilles, Tadeusz, on the lookout for opportunities to make money, had asked his nephew to inquire about the price and transport cost of a case of local Liqueurs des Îles and of 10,000 Havana cigars (which Conrad had fancied in Cracow), so he could import them into Russia. And after leaving the Tilkhurst on June 17, 1886, Conrad began negotiations to import flour and sugar, through Krieger’s Barr, Moering and Company, with Tadeusz as his Russian agent. But this project, like all the earlier attempts to escape from the sea, came to nothing.
Conrad was busier and more successful than usual during his next eight months ashore. In the summer he responded to an advertisement in the May 1, 1886, number of the magazine Tit-Bits, which offered a “SPECIAL PRIZE FOR SAILORS. . . . We will give the sum of Twenty Guineas [more than four months’ wages on the Tilkhurst] for the best article entitled ‘My Experiences as a Sailor.’ ” Conrad did not win the prize and the original of his first story has been lost; but a revised version appeared in the London Magazine in 1908 and was collected in the posthumous Tales of Hearsay (1925). “The Black Mate,” one of Conrad’s weakest tales, turns on a trick and appeals to the spiritualism that was fashionable at that time. After being rejected as an oldster during a heart-breaking search for a berth, the chief mate Bunter dyes his hair raven black. During a storm at sea, he loses his hair dye and then slips on some brass-plated steps. In order to disguise the natural growth of his white hair, so disliked by the irritating and gullible spiritualist, Captain Jones, Bunter claims that he fell on the stairs after being frightened by a ghost, which suddenly changed the color of his hair.
On August 18, Conrad finally escaped from the clutches of Russia and became a British citizen. A police sergeant reported that the “Applicant, who is about 30 years old, stated that he left Russia when he was 12 years old. He had been 10 years in the British Merchant Service, and now holds an appointment as chief mate.” In fact, the twenty-eight-year-old Conrad was ten years old when he left Russia, had served for only eight years and had never been a chief mate.
In November Conrad achieved his long-held ambition. He passed his master’s exam and became the only Polish-born captain in the merchant marine of the most powerful country in the world. Uncle Tadeusz, who had first opposed and then supported Conrad’s nautical career, was ecstatic that his investment had paid off: “Dear boy! Long live the ‘Ordin[ary] Master in the British Merchant Service’!! May he live long! May he be healthy and may every success attend him in every enterprise both on sea and on land! You have really delighted me with the news of the ‘Red Seal’ on your certificate. Not being an Admiral I have no right to give orders to a newly created Master. . . . As the humble provider of the means for this enterprise I can only rejoice that my groats have not been wasted but have led you to the peak of your chosen profession.”20