Cast
As in all Conrad’s narratives, the story focuses on one central protagonist so vividly that it’s easy to overlook the way it describes many others, obviously the rest of the crew on the ship which experiences the typhoon, but a host of others, the crew’s family members back in Blighty. A full cast list includes:
Captain Thomas MacWhirr, son of a petty grocer in Belfast who ran away to sea at 15 and is now captain of the Nan-Shan.
His Dad, a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.
His Mother, ‘wept very much after his disappearance’ (p.4).
MacWhirr’s wife, Lucy, ‘the daughter of a superior couple who had seen better days’, now Mrs MacWhirr, ‘a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner’, and in her neighbourhood considered ‘quite superior’. (p.11)
Their daughter, Lydia, a ‘lanky girl, upon the whole… rather ashamed of him’. (p.11)
Their son, Tom, ‘frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful, unaffected way manly boys have’. (p.11)
Young Jukes, chief mate on the Nan-Shan i.e. MacWhirr’s number two, a lively loquacious young man who frets against his captain’s lack of imagination and blunt speech.
Jukes’ friend who he writes his letters to and who is the second officer on a trans-Atlantic liner (p.13).
Mr Solomon Rout, the chief engineer, also known as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout, to be found smoking his morning cigar over the skylight. As the tallest man on every ship he joins, he is used to stooping to hear the tales of other seamen.
Mrs Rout, ‘a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of forty’. (p.12)
Mr Rout‘s toothless and venerable mother, quite deaf, who Mrs Rout has to shout at to communicate with. (p.12)
The new curate near Mrs Rout’s home who she confuses when she talks about ‘Solomon’ saying this or that, because he momentarily thinks she’s referring to the Biblical Solomon and doesn’t realise she’s talking about her husband (p.12).
The ship’s steward who secretly reads MacWhirr’s letters home (p.11).
The cook who the steward gossips to about MacWhirr’s letters (p.68).
The elder and younger of the shipbuilders in Dumbarton where the Nan-Shan was built, and who are described discussing the appointment of MacWhirr as captain.
Bates, foreman of the joiners on the shipyard who is told off when MacWhirr identifies faulty locks on the new ship’s doors.
Old Mr Sigg and young Mr Sigg, owners of the firm in Siam which commissioned the Dumbarton shipbuilders to build the Nan-Shan.
The Bu Hin company’s Chinese clerk who attends the voyage to supervise to the 200 coolies who are being shipped back to China.
Harry, the second engineer, who gets cross at Jukes for not moving the stokehold ventilators to maximise the air flow into the stiflingly hot engine room.
Jack Allen, the second officer who fell overboard into an empty coal lighter, broke some bones and was invalided home (p.20/21), leading to the hurried recruitment of…
The second mate, ‘an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on his face’.
The boatswain or boss’n, ‘an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly ape’ (p.36), who has a wife, ‘a fat woman, and two grown-up daughters [who] kept a greengrocer’s shop in the East-end of London (p.45).
Beale, the third engineer, who never says a word.
Hackett, the heroic helmsman who keeps the ship’s direction through the mayhem of the typhoon (p.47).
The donkeyman, ‘a dapper little chap with a dazzling fair skin and a tiny, gingery moustache, worked in a sort of mute transport’ (p.51).
The coolie who threw his head up like a baying hound in the hold.
The bummer, a tall individual with thin legs, a round belly, wearing ‘a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat’, who greets the second mate on the quay at Fu-Chau after MacWhirr has sacked him (p.66).
Twenty-nine identifiable characters in total, not counting the unnamed coolies.
Imagination, the enemy
As in Conrad’s other fictions, having a vivid imagination is regarded as a bad thing and the point of the character of MacWhirr and, to some extent, of the entire story, is as a portrait of a man totally bereft of any spark of imagination whatsoever:
Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he [Captain MacWhirr] was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.
Old Solomon describes Captain MacWhirr’s honesty as having ‘the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay’ and the captain’s literal-mindedness is reinforced with scores of instances, for example the way he doesn’t get jokes or Jukes’s flights of fantasy. He even dislikes the use of metaphor or simile in speech and tells Jukes off for using them: as when Jukes says the oppressive heavy weather makes him feel as if he had his head tied up in a woollen blanket and MacWhirr asks him when he’s ever had his head tied up in a blanket and why? Or when Jukes jocularly refers to the 200 Chinese coolies as the ‘passengers’ and MacWhirr irritably exclaims:
The Chinamen! Why don’t you speak plainly? Couldn’t tell what you meant. (p.23)
This is a man who speaks with ‘the utmost simplicity of manner and tone’ (p.24). I’ve just come from reading Conrad’s long novel ‘Lord Jim’ which is, arguably, the portrait of a good man undone by his over-active imagination. It’s almost as if Conrad made MacWhirr a conscious study of the extreme opposite.
Would we now think of MacWhirr as having ADHD, the condition which is being diagnosed in ever-growing numbers of people nowadays?
Because at one point this is how Jukes describes him:
He told me once quite simply that he found it very difficult to make out what made people always act so queerly. (p.14)
‘To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine’ (p.29). Maybe some aspects of his character are ‘on the spectrum’, as we say nowadays.
Anyway, within the narrative MacWhirr’s stolid literal-mindedness is deliberately contrasted with his young chief mate, Jukes, a man of quick wit, ‘liveliness of fancy’, fondness for colourful comparisons and inventive figures of speech – all of which MacWhirr deprecates and criticises, much to Jukes’s muttered resentment. Yin and tang. Chalk and cheese. A stark contrast for the purposes of making the narrative more schematic.
So, for example, when the typhoon hits, MacWhirr keeps soldiering stolidly on, making sensible decisions, while Jukes is overcome with panic-fear and wastes all his energy, not managing the situation and its challenges but managing his feverish imagination.
Being very young, he had found the occupation of keeping his heart completely steeled against the worst so engrossing that he had come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any other form of activity whatever. (p.37)
Incommunication
In my reading of Conrad’s other early stories I’ve developed the notion of incommunication to refer to the way so many characters in Conrad can barely communicate with each other.
Mumbling
The number of times the characters murmur, mutter under their breath, look down at their boots, look at the horizon and generally do everything except say what they mean directly to the person they’re talking to.
The second mate made in his throat a noise of an unfriendly nature… (p.20)
Their [the crew’s] grumbling and sighing and muttering worried him [the boatswain] greatly… (p.39)
With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. (p.21)
MacWhirr’s few words
This is notably true of Captain MacWhirr, ‘a man of few words’, (‘He never talks’ complains Jukes), ‘the silent man’, who says nothing unnecessary.
With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little occasion to talk.
Or mutters or mumbles:
This unusual form of address, though mumbled rather than spoken…
But it’s true of other crew members, too, who are endlessly muttering or mumbling under their breath:
‘None of you here shall make a fool of me if I know it,’ he mumbled to himself.
Carried over into letters
Conrad cleverly and rather beautifully takes the time to show how the characters’ ability or inability to express themselves is carried over into the letters they write home to their loved ones, which reflect their characters. Thus the letters MacWhirr writes home to his wife once a month are masterpieces of incommunication, sticking entirely to the banal facts, lacking any colour or expression:
as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and of a faded meaning.
Whereas the letters Old Solomon writes to his wife are full of gossip and comments which his wife reads out loud to his deaf mother.
Mother and curate, deaf and confused
And the episode of the curate, at first sight so arbitrary and random, is in fact a further demonstration of the incommunication theme. What episode? Well, Mrs Rout receives monthly letters from her husband and she enjoys reading them out to Old Solomon’s mother. But because the old lady is deaf, Mrs R has to shout them out loud at the top of her voice – and this is yet another form of incommunication.
The incident of the curate is that, on his first visit to Mrs Rout he is genuinely confused at the talkative woman repeating ‘Solomon says this’ and ‘Solomon says that’, so the curate is worried that she had access to a version of the Bible he didn’t know. It is an instance of comic misinterpretation and confusion, until finally she clarifies that she’s referring to Solomon her husband.
So just this one fairly short digression includes two elements which demonstrate the central theme of incommunication, deafness and misunderstanding.
Foreign
Another form of incommunication is that between people of different languages, such as when Jukes speaks bad pidgen English to the Chinese.
‘No catchee rain down there – savee?’ pointed out Jukes. ‘Suppose all’ee same fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come topside.’
Or when one of the coolies, badly knocked about in their below-decks hold, starts to talk, in a language none of the white characters can begin to understand and so find outlandish and alien.
Suddenly one of the coolies began to speak. The light came and went on his lean, straining face; he threw his head up like a baying hound. From the bunker came the sounds of knocking and the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural hooting sounds, that did not seem to belong to a human language, penetrated Jukes with a strange emotion as if a brute had tried to be eloquent. (p.58)
Maybe Conrad missed a trick by not having any members of the crew be foreign i.e. from another European country, as they are in Lord Jim and other tales (Captain Gustav in Jim; Falk is himself Scandinavian, the German hotel-keeper Schomberg, etc). But maybe he thought that he had a sufficient range of types of incommunication – just among English speakers.
The language of facts
All this inept and clumsy communication stands in start contrast to the world of facts, which, unlike human utterances with all their metaphor and ambiguity, speak to people like MacWhirr in a clear and precise language.
There were matters of duty, of course – directions, orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet, the more general actualities of the day required no comment – because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision.
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.
This interpretation is, of course, inflected by the presence of MacWhirr in the sense that Conrad makes us see the world of facts through MacWhirr’s mind, ‘faithful to facts, which alone his consciousness reflected’. If it had been Marlow narrating all this is would have been riven with ambiguities and puzzlement. The entire tone and, in a sense, the worldview of ‘Typhoon’ is set by the bluff stolidity of its central figure so it is his natural world of readily ascertainable facts, which the narrator refers to…
Language shredded by the typhoon
Having been sensitised by all this to the way men communicate (or not) you notice that the arrival of the storm compounds the already-existing communication problems.
The voices of the lost group reached him after the manner of men’s voices in a gale, in shreds and fragments of forlorn shouting snatched past the ear.
And this is then dramatised, as the wind and rain become tumultuous, by Juke’s fragmented attempts to speak to MacWhirr:
All at once Jukes appeared at his side, yelling, with his head down.
‘Watch—put in—wheelhouse shutters—glass—afraid—blow in.’
Jukes heard his commander upbraiding.
‘This—come—anything—warning—call me.’
He tried to explain, with the uproar pressing on his lips.
‘Light air—remained—bridge—sudden—north-east—could turn—thought—you—sure—hear.’
We pride ourselves on being the animal with language, the animal which speaks, but in practice – the story suggests – it is a gift we misuse and abuse as we struggle to convey even the simplest things to each other.
The speaking-tube
Another variation on the theme of speaking and communication is the speaking-tube which connects the bridge with the engine room. In the middle of the storm this acquires a genuine real-world importance as engineer Rout tries to speak to the captain on the bridge but this, also, is a very flawed medium because – at several vital moments – either Rout or the captain are distracted and end up shouting down the tube with no reply, fearing the worst.
In this way the speaking-tube becomes yet another symbol of the vital importance of human speech, of communication, and yet its terrible fragility.
The violent sea
MacWhirr’s lack of imagination and calm unruffled, largely silent mode of life is not only contrasted with Young Jukes (on the human level) but, on a more cosmic level, with the life of the sea itself and this is what the story is about: the man of few words and no imagination for the first time in his life confronting ‘the wrath and fury of the passionate sea’ (p.14).
The typhoon as intensification of normal levels of incommunication
I suppose the typhoon can be seen either as the opposite of the everyday, a grand assault on norms of people’s communications so that they have to put their mouths next to the auditor’s ear and yell their heads off to be heard.
Or, it could be seen as more of an intensification of the normal world. The typhoon represents, on some level, the reality we live in, the storm of confusion and miscommunication which dogs all our lives, with the mask of the everyday stripped away.
Plot summary
So, having established the quite sizeable cast and the central themes of the text, it’s relatively easy to summarise the ‘plot’.
If the story is based on the time Conrad spent working as the chief mate on the Highland Forest under a Captain John McWhir (as most biographers think), then the voyage is set in 1887.
Captain MacWhirr sets off in the Nan-Shan, a British-built steamer flying the Siamese flag, to sail north to the Chinese treaty port of Fu-chau, with some cargo in her lower holds and two hundred Chinese coolies returning to their village homes in the province of Fo-kien, on the fore-deck. They run into a typhoon, the name given to a tropical cyclone in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean.
Although MacWhirr’s bluff, unimaginativeness has up till then been criticised by other members of the crew – notably lively young Jukes and the chief engineer Solomon Rout – his refusal to give in to the typhoon or change course, somehow masters the storm and sees the ship safely through it, resulting in the grudging admiration of the senior crew members.
And MacWhirr’s mastery comes to be symbolised by the sound of his steady emotionless voice. Thus when the storm hits the ship, MacWhirr and Jukes are both on the bridge and these temperamental opposites find themselves clinging to each other for dear life. And while the (over) imaginative Jukes repeatedly thinks the ship is doomed, is breaking up, they’re all going to die and so on, while he is cowering in terror, it is the quiet solidity of MacWhirr’s voice which saves him.
Again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man’s voice – the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose… (p.33)
And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo. (p.34)
He heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound, unconquered in the giant tumult. (p.35)
And presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean… small, lonely and unmoved, a stranger to the visions of hope or fear… (p.35)
Presently a small voice shoved aside the shouting hurricane quietly. ‘You, Jukes? – Well?’ (p.52)
After the initial descriptions of the devastating impact of the typhoon on the ship, the main action or event is that the bosun arrives on the seaswept bridge to tell MacWhirr there’s trouble in the ‘tween-deck where the Chinese are sheltering. So MacWhirr orders Jukes to go below decks to check things out and the narrative follows (a reluctant) Jukes on his journey down into the swaying, black, dangerous bowels of the ship where he discovers the Chinese being thrown all over the place, that some of their luggage has burst open and leaked silver dollars everywhere which they’re now fighting over. So Jukes gets some of the crew to storm the hold and calm the Chinese down (not without cuffs and blows) before establishing lifelines running across it for them to hold onto and then gathering up the silver in order to prevent fights.
During his belowdecks odyssey Jukes also arrives in the engine room, thus giving Conrad the opportunity to describe the heroic leadership of Mr Rout and the work of the stokers, stripped to the waist to keep shovelling coal into the furnaces to keep the engines running. Jukes’ odyssey allows Conrad to give a kind of schematic diagram of the working of the crew in extremis.
The storm descriptions
All the things I’ve listed are perhaps less obvious to the average reader than what most people remember, which is its super-vivid descriptions of the ship, sea and sky in the buildup to, and then the experience of, the thundering typhoon. There are 1) straightforward descriptions:
The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then the real thing came at last.
It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were – without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself whirled a great distance through the air. Everything disappeared – even, for a moment, his power of thinking… (p.30)
And:
The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end.
And:
The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed – and two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother of the wave. (p.32)
Science fiction
And then 2) there are millenarian visions, when Conrad invokes the powers of the entire universe or sees things on a cosmic scale, when he reaches a kind of science fiction intensity:
At its setting the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. (p.19)
And:
An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and light like a child’s cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth. (p.43)
Is there a touch of H.G. Wells in these descriptions, the sense of all normal human values and experiences far exceeded by the extremity of the storm? This next passage reminded me of ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’:
And then a hand gripped his thigh… and he felt himself pawed all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new species of man. (p.36)
Did Wells’s inhuman horrors strike a chord in Conrad’s imagination? At other times the cosmic viewpoint adopts a semi-religious tone:
The Nan-Shan… had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world – and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth. (p.66)
It’s only a ship caught in a storm but like the stories of his ship’s chandlers and sea captains and business agents in the jungle, Conrad makes it into an allegory of all humanity and the entire universe.
The great ellipsis and part 2
The twenty pages or so which describe the storm in such blistering intensity in fact only describe the first half of the storm. There is a lull or intermission when the ship breaks into the centre of the typhoon, things calm down and they can hear themselves speak, but there is, of course, then to follow the second part of the storm and this is where Conrad makes his Big Artistic Decision which is… not to depict it. Once, he decides, is enough, and so the ship is just heading into the second part of the typhoon and MacWhirr mutters to himself, ‘I wouldn’t like to lose her’ when this section of the text (which is divided into six parts) abruptly ends with one short, bald sentence.
He was spared that annoyance.
And the narrative cuts away to the sixth and final part, cutting to a few days later when the Nan-Shan finally steams into Fu-chau, severely damaged but still going. Its docking causes a stir but is dramatised by Conrad solely in terms of the ratty second mate, having been fired by MacWhirr, coming ashore and venting all his resentment on the first seedy water rat or ‘bummer’ he encounters, who invites him for a drink.
But most of this last six pages cuts right away from the ship and the Far East altogether, to describe the reactions of the recipients of letters from MacWhirr and Rout and Jukes, letters each describing the storm in different ways, which are received by the different wives (and chum) according to their character.
1) Hoity toity Mrs MacWhirr barely bothers to read it, skimming past the description of the storm and slighting on the only bit that interests her, her husband’s threat to come home soon and see her and the children. Oh why does he want to do that, she complains, not for the first time. And the letter which only briefly describes desperate men risking their lives at sea for pitiful pay ends with an account of Mrs MacWhirr taking her lanky daughter out shopping and greeting other wives in the street.
2) Then Conrad describes Mrs Rout reading out Old Solomon’s letter to his ancient mother and being peeved that Old Sol says the captain did a very clever thing during the typhoon but doesn’t specify what. She is irritated.
3) Then Conrad describes the reception of Juke’s letter by his chum aboard the Atlantic Ocean liner, who goes on to share it with his crew mates and Conrad summarises it for us. It takes four pages and is a quite elaborate coda. Basically Jukes was terrified that the way they sent the Chinese coolies belowdecks and then waded into break them up when they were fighting and then took away all the loose dollars they could find, would have made the Chinese riotous and angry. He worried a lot about what would happen when they finally docked and the mutinous Chinese might demand a public enquiry or a trial and so on, worrying that, as the man who made the decision, he’d be the one in the firing line.
Jukes had only barely gone to bed after 30 hours straight on deck when he’s woken up and told the captain is opening the hatch and letting the Chinese on deck. Terrified there’ll be a riot, Jukes leaps into his clothes and orders one of the crew to distribute rifles, joining eight or so armed crew on the bridge.
It is here that Captain MacWhirr ridicules this stupid over-reaction and tells Jukes to have the rifles locked away immediately before someone gets harmed. Instead he works with the Chinese interpreter from Bu Hin to explain to the coolies that they were locked below for their own safety (witness the damage they can all see on deck), that the lifelines were installed for their own safety, and that all the money the crew could find was confiscated to stop them fighting. Now MacWhirr proposes totalling up all the dollars they confiscated and dividing it up equally and fairly between the Chinese. To Jukes’ astonishment they all agree to this plan as they know that the alternatives are worse: 1) if asked, each of them would exaggerate the sum they’re owed, 2) if MacWhirr hands the hoard over to a Chinese official in the port, it will simply disappear.
To Jukes’ astonishment the Chinese are quite happy with this plan, and it must be the ‘clever decision’ that Rout mentioned in his letter to his wife but didn’t go into details about.
It is also, of course, demonstrates the gulf between over-imaginative Jukes (terrified there’s going to be a riot and so arming the crew in a way that might have led to accidental gunfire which might in fact have triggered a riot) and calm, phlegmatic and unimaginative MacWhirr, who with no mental effort, simply does the right thing.
The last page of this complex text entirely quotes Juke’s letter and the very last sentence of it is deeply ironic as we see Jukes completely misinterpret the character of MacWhirr and the high quality of his leadership decision, paranoidly thinking the captain only did it to avoid the fuss of a public enquiry whereas MacWhirr obviously just thought it was the fair thing to do:
‘This certainly is coming as near as can be to keeping the thing quiet for the benefit of all concerned. What’s your opinion, you pampered mail-boat swell? The old chief says that this was plainly the only thing that could be done. The skipper remarked to me the other day, “There are things you find nothing about in books.” I think that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man.’ (p.74)
But it is Jukes, of course, who is the stupid man.
UnEnglish phrasing
Sometimes Conrad’s bending of the English language, most of the time extremely enjoyable and rewarding, ends up snapping it. These occasions are enjoyable in their own way, for their incongruity:
Yet the uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side.
Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while incredulity was seated in his whole countenance. (p.25)
29,750 words.
Credit
Typhoon by Joseph Conrad was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition, revised and republished in 2008.
Books & Boots 