‘Ha! My dear boy. The men we have known – the ships we’ve sailed – ay! and the things we’ve done…’
(Captain Ned Elliot in sentimental mood, page 76)
‘The End of the Tether’ is a novella by Joseph Conrad, written and published in 1902. It is 52,564 words long.
Cast
Captain Whalley, otherwise known as Dare-devil Harry or Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. Whalley has been fifty years at sea, forty of them out East but now he is old and fallen on hard times.
Mrs Whalley, his soul mate, who painted his cabin on the Condor with roses. But tragically she passed away 23 years ago, leaving Whalley only…
Ivy, his daughter, living in Melbourne, married to…
His son-in-law, consistently unlucky in business. When Whalley loses his life’s savings the son in law takes to a bath chair and doctors say he will never walk again.
Old Swinburne, his mate on the Condor who wept when they buried Mrs Whalley at sea.
Mrs Gardner, the wife of the senior partner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co, the owners of the Condor, who was kind to him after his wife died.
Captain ‘Ned’ Elliott, Singapore Master-Attendant, a fat jovial blusterer, same age as Whalley, much exercised by worry about the future of his three layabout daughters, and with such a dearth of decent men. (As so often in Conrad, a secondary character provides a contrast to the central protagonist, in this case Elliott’s daughters versus Whalley’s daughter.)
Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley), the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, witness on the night Massy wins the lottery.
The lawyer who draws up the contract between Whalley and Massy, ‘a young man fresh from Europe and not overburdened with business’ (p.121).
Historic figures
Mr Denham, the early, jacket off, hands-on governor of Singapore who encouraged young Whalley to captain the Dido on a voyage to
Evans, ‘with his red face, his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes, who had set up the first patent slip for repairing small ships, on the edge of the forest, in a lonely bay three miles up the coast’.
On the Sofala
Captain Whalley
George Massy the resentful engineer and owner: ‘His black hair lay plastered in long lanky wisps across the bald summit of his head; he had a furrowed brow, a yellow complexion, and a thick shapeless nose. A scanty growth of whisker did not conceal the contour of his jaw. His aspect was of brooding care.’
Mr Stern, first mate, ‘tall, young, lean, with a mustache like a trooper, and something malicious in the eye.’
Second engineer, Jack, who never talks to the rest of the crew but only grunts or hoots, and goes on periodic benders when he locks himself in his cabin and rants and raves.
The Serang, ‘an elderly, alert, little Malay, with a very dark skin’, like a wizened pygmy next to Whalley’s bulk. ‘Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old gray felt hat rammed down on his head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy of fourteen.’
The Malay leadsman, ‘the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, cut off close to the shoulder, bared his brown arm of full rounded form and with a satiny skin like a woman’s’ (p.83)
The quartermaster, ‘a middle-aged, pock-marked, Sumatra Malay, almost as dark as a negro’.
The carpenter, ‘a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose blue drawers for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and fled below, with streaming tail and shaking all over’ before the fury of the generally furious Massy (p.118).
On land
Mr Van Wyk, ‘a short, dapper figure’, ‘the white man of Batu Beru, an ex-naval officer who, for reasons best known to himself, had thrown away the promise of a brilliant career to become the pioneer of tobacco-planting on that remote part of the coast’ (p.125).
The Sultan, ‘a restless and melancholy old ruler who had done with love and war, for whom life no longer held any savour (except of evil forebodings) and time never had any value’ (p.125).
1. Background and setup
The story is set in the mid-1880s and centres on old Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise known as Dare-devil Harry or Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. Whalley has been fifty years at sea, forty of them out East. The text is dotted with his memories of the good old days, way before steam, when places like Singapore were just a muddy creek.
For years he was captain of the Condor, famous in her day. Somewhere between Australia and China lie a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef, named after him and his ship.
But his wife, his best friend and soul mate, who had elaborately painted the state room of the Condor with flowers, passed away, 26 years ago. He buried her at sea, keeping his voice steady as he read the service while his chief mate, old Swinburne, cried like a baby.
They had a daughter named Ivy and Whalley imagined her twined around his heart forever. When she was of age she settled in Melbourne and married a weakling, a man not worthy of her, a man continually unlucky in business.
He was looking forward to a comfortable retirement when he was caught up in the crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, ‘whose downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake’ and lost his life savings.
He retained enough, however, to run a pretty little barque, the Fair Maid. In this he undertook small cargo trips but times have changed. Commercial sailing has become professionalised and dominated by large companies running shipping routes like trams. Not much room for a freelancer and an elderly one at that.
But then, as he turned 65, his daughter’s husband has some kind of collapse and takes to a bath chair; the doctors say he will never walk again. It’s then that Ivy sends him a letter saying she’s decided to open a boarding house and needs £200 seed money.
All that day and night he walks the maindeck thinking, to the astonishment of his officers who are used to his methodical, regular routine. By the morning he’s decided the only way to raise the money the apple of his eye has asked for is to sell his beloved barque, the Fair Maid.
And so the narrative finds him coming out of an office in the main strip at Singapore, having just sold his beloved barque to a Japanese speculator. He got £500 for it, £200 of which he is sending to his daughter in Melbourne. But as he walks through the half-built streets of Singapore he feels bereft. For the first time in 50 years he isn’t attached to a ship and for the first time feels like a back number. His mood is reinforced by the realisation that when he first set foot her, some 40 years earlier, back when ‘individuals were of some account’, the place was just a fishing village on a muddy creek. It is then that he bumps into Captain ‘Ned’ Elliott, a Master-Attendant friend of his.
A master-attendant is a superior sort of harbour-master; a person, out in the East, of some consequence in his sphere; a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of the port, and possessed of vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.
They get talking, Whalley tells him about selling the Fair Maid and Elliott tells him he’s heard about a vacancy on a ship called the Sofala. The catch is that the owner, George Massy, is also the engineer. He’s a prickly character who came into port on a ship which couldn’t wait to get rid of him, and gained a reputation for surly resentment. But then he went and won (second prize) in the Manilla lottery. At which point he bought the Sofala, a ship generally considered too small and not quite modern enough for the sort of coastal trade she was in. And with one swoop Massy adopted the swaggering mannerisms of the worst kind of ship owner, larded with a vast chip on his shoulder and an urge to get revenge on everyone who’d ever wronged him.
Which is why Massy keeps sticking his oar in and arguing with his captains, which is why they all keep quitting (he’s run through 11 captains in three years). The deuce of it is that, after buying the ship Massy ran through the remainder of his winnings trying to win a second time and now has almost no capital. What he needs is not just a captain but a business partner.
So in, his slow quiet way, Whalley realises this is just the opening which suits him, with his £500 from the sale of the Fair Maid to invest. And so, despite his misgivings, and his strong sense of going down in the world, Whalley negotiates a deal with Massy. It is a three-year contract. In return for his investment of £500, he will brook no interference in his actions as captain and will take a sixth part of the profits from the ship’s voyages (p.90).
2. Captain of the Sofala
And so the main narrative commences. In this timeline (with which the text actually opened) it is three years later and Whalley has skippered the Sofara through the same outward voyage along the coast, stopping at trading stations, and back, no fewer than 36 times, once a month for three years, so that he knows the route off by heart.
The long central passages describe the tensions between the four white crew of the Sofala, being sturdy, taciturn old Whalley with his vast white beard; the angry resentful engineer-owner, Mr Massy; Jack the monosyllabic second engineer; and the malicious and ambitious, competent but widely disliked Mr Stern.
There’s a great deal about their inter-relationships, with a lot of backstory about Massy’s conviction that the whole world is against him. One factor in this is that he has run through all his lottery winnings, partly in futile efforts to win a second time, and the ship desperately needs repairs. Specifically, the boilers are reaching their end of their life, are harder to maintain. The alcoholic second engineer complains about the effort required endlessly, but this only infuriates Massy because any talk of repairing them throws him into a panic; almost certainly he’ll have to borrow the money and it will mean the ship being laid up for some time and losing custom, maybe permanently, probably to the bloody German coast steamers which are spreading everywhere. Anyway, this explains why Massy and Jack are almost continuously shouting abuse at each other.
All this squalid human business is juxtaposed with stunning descriptions of the jungle foliage as the steamer slowly makes its way upriver to its terminus at Batu Beru.
But towards the end of this section, the dominant thing becomes the fact that Mr Stern is convinced he has made a massive discovery which changes everything. Right at the very start of the text, before it cut back in time to give Whalley’s backstory, and again, now, during this passage describing the ship’s 36th journey up the river, much has been made of the way Whalley relies on ‘the Serang’, a wizened old Malayan to do the majority of the navigating. Their close, professional relationship is nicely described, alongside the physical disparity between the massive Whalley and tiny native figure.
But observing them as, for the 36th time, they position the ship to pass through a break in the mud bar at the entrance to the river, Stern has a brainwave. He realises that it’s the Serang steering the ship. Conrad spends several pages describing Stern’s excitement at his discovery but it’s not for some time that we get the central gist, of this discovery and, indeed, of the entire story: Whalley is going blind. Stern is excited because he instantly thinks that he will be able to step into the captain’s shoes, once he is forced out – blithely ignoring the fact that Massy absolutely detests him.
3. Mr van Wyk
The Sofala travels slowly up the river before docking at a tobacco plantation. This is owned by Mr Van Wyk, a Dutchman, a dapper, civilised figure who, after a devastating heartbreak in love, has chosen to isolate himself in the back of beyond. A flashback describes their first meeting three years earlier, on the Sofala’s first trip skippered by Whalley, and how the rather fierce Wyk came to respect and like the optimistic, ancient old seaman with his sturdy faith in his Creator. Noticeably, he is the only member of the crew he routinely invites up to his house for dinner, regarding the others as trash.
Having painted the origins of their friendship, Conrad comes back to the present and this particular trip. As he walks down from his house to the quay where the Sofala has just docked, Van Wyk is intercepted by Stern who, in his sneaky unlikeable way, quickly tells him Whalley’s secret.
Disturbed and upset, Van Wyk hurries to invite Whalley for dinner, as usual. He notices Whalley’s clumsiness and then that he knocks over a tumbler at dinner, and then Whalley admits it: he is going blind but he has told no one. And this makes the ship technically unseaworthy. It is illegal and greatly against the simple principles of a man who’s devoted his life to the sea. He is ashamed.
He had nothing of his own – even his past of honour, of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his spotless life had fallen into the abyss. He had said his last goodbye to it. (p.157)
But, as he explains, by the terms of his contract with Massy, at the end of the three years, he is paid back the £500 he invested in the business. But, if he is dismissed for negligence, illness and so forth, Massy can withold this payment for a year. In which case he, Whalley would have no money to live on and nowhere to live for a year. There are only 6 weeks of the contract left. So, Whalley explains, he plans to complete this trip, and one more, and then will leave at the expiry date of his contract with all his money.
I haven’t properly conveyed how Whalley considers himself as doing all this for his daughter. His daughter is the one thing he has left in his life, the spitting image of his beloved wife. For the three years of his service on the Sofala he has sent her all his salary. In the last few pages it is fidelity to her which Conrad positions as the key motive for Whalley lying to everyone and desperately hoping to make it through the last few weeks of his contract. For then he will collect his £500 investment and take it to her, the daughter, in Melbourne, and place himself in her care.
4. The climax
During this last trip, while anchored off Van Wyk’s plantation, the second engineer goes on another bender, locking himself into his cabin, ranting and raving. Massy, as usual, kicks and bangs on the door yelling at him to shut up. But in among his ravings, the engineer rants about letting the whole bloody ship go to the bottom, and this triggers an idea in Massy’s head.
It’s a simple idea and a common one (in fiction, at least) for someone at their wits’ end for how to get money. He’ll deliberately contrive the shipwreck of his own ship, then claim the insurance. the ship is worth more to him dead than alive.
So Massy fills the pockets of his jacket with old nuts and bolts and iron filings from the filthy cargo hold then strolls casually onto the bridge when Whalley is on watch, depending, as usual, on the Serang to actually steer the ship. He loiters by the compass, blocking the steersman’s view, claiming to be studying it, in reality hanging his jacket on the hook. Everyone’s used to the owner hanging his jacket at random place round the ship so nobody notices this. When he strolls away the steersman is surprised to see that, according to the compass, the ship is way off course and so swings the helm round to come back to its proper course heading north.
Massy goes below and sits with his knees shaking going over and over his plan. He intends the ship to strike a reef east of Pangu, sit on them till the can release the boats, have the ship declared a write-off, collect the insurance cash.
They have sailed this route 36 times and so know it backwards. When they fail to sight land after three hours the Serang becomes increasingly anxious and begs Whalley to look around for sights and to check the compass for himself, both of which he can, of course, not do, for he cannot see.
In bending down to see the compass Whally slips and his hand catches Massy’s jacket which tears its little hanging cord and falls to the deck with a loud clang as all the nuts and bolts fall out the pockets. On his hands and knees Whalley feels them, realises what they are and realises in a flash what Massy has done, deliberately set the ship off course, but at that very second the ship runs into a huge reef just below the surface, like a car hitting a wall. There is a tremendous shock, all kinds of cables snap, the lights go out, the engines stutter.
When the ship rebounds and strikes the reef again the huge funnel amidships topples over onto the bridge which a great smashing. Whalley staggers to his feet, cut and shaken.
Stern comes running out of his cabin and Whalley quickly explains and orders him to lower the lifeboats. Massy and Whalley have a great confrontation on the deck in which Massy points out that, if Whalley tells the truth and reports him to the authorities the ship’s insurance won’t be paid, Massy won’t be able to pay Whalley his £500 back, and Ivy will never get the money. Massy has him by the short and curlies. Whalley is stricken. And for the first time Conrad deploys the book’s signature phrase:
Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s money! Gone in this wreck. Again he had a flash of insight. He was indeed at the end of his tether. (p.167)
And we reach the climax of the other great symbol, the association of Whalley’s gathering blindness with the darkness of his fate. Ever since Conrad revealed his protagonist was going blind he’s rung changes on the idea that the light has slowly leeched out of his life, overcome by darkness.
For Ivy he had carried his point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a crime. God had not listened to his prayers. The light had finished ebbing out of the world; not a glimmer. It was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley who had gone so far to carry a point should continue to live. He must pay the price. (p.167)
And in that passage you can see how, suddenly, Conrad has his protagonist realise two or three related things: he cannot live because if he does he will have to lie about Massy’s shipwrecking to enable Massy to claim the insurance which will allow him to pay Whalley back so he can pass the money onto his daughter. But he, couldn’t live with himself if he lied. And he can’t live if Ivy is to thrive. And so the decision to go down with the ship.
Once the crew are in the lifeboat he unties the rope holding it to the ship and returns to the bridge. They shout for him to jump but instead he puts on Massy’s jacket with its pockets full of iron. If he’s going to go down, it ought to be as quick and definitive as possible.
Coda
Rather like the move at the end of ‘Typhoon’ which suddenly cuts away altogether from the scene of the dramatic storm, to describe the letters the crew write to their loved ones back home i.e. shows the effect (or lack of effect) on people far removed from the central drama, same here.
The sinking of the Sofala is described with uncharacteristic brevity and then the last three pages of the text cut to its impact on two others. First, Mr Van Wyk. When the Sofala doesn’t return a month later he immediately intuits that he’ll never see it again. A few weeks later he travels to the Sofala‘s port of registration and hears about the board of enquiry and official decision that she was carried onto the reefs by freak currents.
He bumps into Stern by accident, who tells him that Massy got his insurance money, all the time babbling about a new ship, but as soon as he had the cash in hand, caught a ship to Manilla where, the reader knows, he will squander it all playing the lottery. Stern also tells him that Whalley made a conscious decision to go down with the ship, he could have easily jumped and they would have pulled him aboard the lifeboat. He wanted to die though Stern has no idea why. Only the reader knows the full story.
Second, the famous daughter, Ivy, whose wellbeing Whalley has obsessed about all through the story. She receives a letter from Whalley’s lawyer informing her of her father’s death, and including a letter from him. In this he says that, if she’s reading it he must be dead. He always did his best for her. He reveals he is going blind. God seems to have forgotten him. He did so want to see her one last time but his death is probably best for everyone.
And then the story ends very beautifully by dwelling on this daughter. She is thin-faced, pinched and worn with cares. Her husband is upstairs in his wheelchair. The kids are at school. She doesn’t cry. She leans her head against the window. On one level Conrad, by letting us see the dry narrow worn life she now leads, begs the obvious question: was Whalley’s devotion to her really worth it? Did he make very much difference to her tough life?
And then Conrad writes a phrase which, as the father of a grown-up daughter, made me cry:
Even the image of her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the gray twilight; it was her father’s face alone that she saw, as though he had come to see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but with something more august and tender in his aspect.
Big, reassuring, august and tender, God I hope I’ve been half as steadfast for my daughter as Captain Whalley.
1. Incommunication
All the characters struggle to communicate effectively, sometimes to talk at all. Whalley is, to put it mildly, not very talkative.
Good fellow – Harry Whalley – never very talkative. You never knew what he was up to – a bit too off-hand with people of consequence, and apt to take a wrong view of a fellow’s actions.
In the Sofala passages he makes a point of almost completely ignoring Massy’s whining. When he does reply it is in a ‘strange deep-toned voice’.
Massy only speaks in resentful murmurs and mutters but us characterised by repeated use of the word ‘whine’. He is a whiny little so-and-so.
Jack, the second engineer on the Safola, never talks to anyone; at best he hoots like an owl.
He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive manner, and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn concern for his engines that he seemed to have lost the use of speech. When addressed directly his only answer would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance. For all the years he had been in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as much as a frank good morning with any of his shipmates.
Except when he gets drunk, when he goes to the opposite extreme, from taciturn to overflowing with a multitude of voices:
Twice or perhaps three times in the course of the year he would take too much to drink. On these occasions he returned on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran across the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like a tight-rope walker; and locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and argue with himself the livelong night in an amazing variety of tones; storm, sneer, and whine with an inexhaustible persistence.
Mr Van Wyk: ‘When absolutely forced to speak he gave evasive vaguely soothing answers out of pure compassion.’ ‘The gleam of low patent shoes peeping under the wide bottom of trowsers cut straight from the same stuff as the gossamer coat, completed a figure recalling, with its sash, a pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the elegance of a slightly bald dandy indulging, in seclusion, a taste for unorthodox costume.’
Ivy By contrast with all these surly men, Whalley has a special relationship with his daughter, in which much doesn’t need to be said, proving that the deepest bonds often go too deep for words, words aren’t necessary, in fact words expressed in writing or speech often get in the way of the deeper understanding.
The ‘natives’
Much the largest gap in communication is, of course, between the white men and the different types of ‘native’, mostly either Malay or Chinese. And by further contrast, the Serang, the old Malay who steers the ship, finds white people inexplicable – which raises the larger issue of the enormous communication gulf between white or Western men, and all types of ‘natives’.
Incomprehension
A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues… Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending.
An incomprehensible growl answered him… (p.155)
And the upshot of everyone’s inability to talk or communication, is mutual incomprehension. Talk a lot or a little, shout or murmur, whine or command, in the end it barely matters because nothing anyone says can reduce the iron walls of incomprehension everyone is trapped behind.
A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues… Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending.
He [Whalley] remained incomprehensible in his simplicity, fearlessness, and rectitude.
I’ve mentioned the habit of Jack the second engineer of getting drunk and then overflowing with voices. But Conrad uses the passage to highlight, yet again, the way these drunken rants make hardly any difference to the Malays who find everything about the white man incomprehensible.
Outside the solitary lascar told off for night duty in harbour, perhaps a youth fresh from a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck listening to the endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes – beings with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by inscrutable motives.
Everyone is trapped in their silo, unable to understand or even hear each other’s wishes.
The rather opaque ending with the daughter in faraway Melbourne opening the letter from her dead father subtly begs, raises, juggles this issue because, in the end, did father and daughter understand each other? Conrad’s phrasing is ambiguous to allow of both a yes and a no to that question.
Vivid turns of phrase
It’s one of the ironies of Conrad’s writing that a man so obsessed with people’s failures to communicate was himself prone to unstoppable eloquence and loquacity. Some contemporaries criticised him for being long-winded, windy and verbose. This may or may not be true, depending on whether you enjoy his repetitive, incantatory style. Certainly all of Conrad’s (early) stories are full of descriptions which are as lush and beautiful as the English language allows:
The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut, denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid wall of leaves, with here and there the shape of an enormous dark pillar soaring, or a ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannonball, disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the secular inviolable shade of the virgin forest. The thump of the engines reverberated regularly like the strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast silence, the shadow of the western wall had fallen across the river, and the smoke pouring backwards from the funnel eddied down behind the ship, spread a thin dusky veil over the sombre water, which, checked by the flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the reaches.
It’s long, langorous, sensual descriptions like this which led Conrad to be described as an ‘impressionist’, along with comments in his various prefaces where he explicitly says his aim is to make the reader see and feel and smell the scenery.
But also, alongside the lush landscapes, and the passages of trouble dialogue, Conrad regularly slips in a really vivid metaphor or simile, something out of left-field which makes your jaw drop:
The sun had set. And when, after drilling a deep hole with his stick, [Captain Whalley] moved from that spot the night had massed its army of shadows under the trees. They filled the eastern ends of the avenues as if only waiting the signal for a general advance upon the open spaces of the world… (p.76)
‘Sofala,’ articulated Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman, a new emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention as if waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man’s lips. (p.77)
Conrad’s cosmic vision
All these stories contain moments when Conrad’s vision leaves the dull earth and wheels off into space, invoking cosmic visions, invoking the planet or the universe on a scale which, to me, have a slight science fiction tinge.
The perspiration poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust. (p.87)
Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the very bosom of the earth.
It was as if nobody could talk like this now, and the overshadowed eyes, the flowing white beard, the big frame, the serenity, the whole temper of the man, were an amazing survival from the prehistoric times of the world coming up to him out of the sea. (p.132)
In the steadily darkening universe a sinister clearness fell upon his ideas. In the illuminating moments of suffering he saw life, men, all things, the whole earth with all her burden of created nature, as he had never seen them before. (p.160)
It’s a consistent aspect of his work. Compare this, from Heart of Darkness:
We were wanderers on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.
History
Changing patterns of sea trade
The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.
These were the halcyon days of steam coasting trade, before some of the home shipping firms had thought of establishing local fleets to feed their main lines. These, when once organized, took the biggest slices out of that cake, of course; and by-and-by a squad of confounded German tramps turned up east of Suez Canal and swept up all the crumbs. They prowled on the cheap to and fro along the coast and between the islands, like a lot of sharks in the water ready to snap up anything you let drop. And then the high old times were over for good…’ (p.72)
‘If he misses a couple more trips he need never trouble himself to start again. He won’t find any cargo in his old trade. There’s too much competition nowadays for people to keep their stuff lying about for a ship that does not turn up when she’s expected.’ (p.73)
‘The earth is big,’ he said vaguely…
‘Doesn’t seem to be so much room on it,’ growled the Master-Attendant, ‘since these Germans came along shouldering us at every turn. It was not so in our time…’ (p.75)
Remembering the early days of Singapore
Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness without any docks or waterworks.
He remembered muddy shores, a harbour without quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught fire mysteriously and smouldered for days, so that amazed ships came into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red at midday. He remembered the things, the faces, and something more besides – like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of to-day.
Credit
The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the 1975 penguin Modern Classics paperback edition which also contains ‘Youth and The End of the Tether’.
Books & Boots 