Joseph Conrad's career at sea
[7] After two months at Marseilles, on 15 December 1874 Conrad, just turned seventeen, began his first sea voyage—as a passenger in a small barque, the Mont-Blanc, which reached Saint-Pierre, Martinique, in the Caribbean, on 6 February 1875.
[9] [note 4] On 10 July 1876 Conrad sailed for the West Indies as a steward (at a salary of 35 francs, equivalent to one-fifth the allowance he received from his uncle) in the barque Saint-Antoine, making Saint-Pierre on 18 August.
And attempts to track down the reality behind his accounts are complicated by Conrad's habit of using some external characteristics, and often the names, of actual people but of furnishing them with different life histories (as in the cases of Almayer, Lingard, Jim, and Kurtz).
[15] Najder writes: A careful reading of "The Tremolino" and The Arrow of Gold reveals that the whole Carlist plot is a sideline, an ornament that does not affect the course of action; its only function seems to be to glamorize and idealize smuggling.
[17] On 10 June 1878 Konrad Korzeniowski set foot on English soil for the first time, at Lowestoft, having arrived on the small British steamer Mavis, which he had boarded on 24 April 1878 at Marseilles.
I have no money for drones and I have no intention of working so that someone else may enjoy himself at my expense..."[18] Conrad returned to Lowestoft and on 11 July 1878 signed on to a coastal coal schooner, the Skimmer of the Sea.
He won popularity with the crew by bearing the cost of entertainment and treats, not paid out of his shilling-a-month ordinary seaman's earnings (the lowest permissible) but out of his uncle's allowance, 160 times higher.
[19] On 15 October 1878, in his first genuine service at sea, Conrad sailed in the clipper ship Duke of Sutherland on his longest voyage till then, around the Cape of Good Hope to Australia, arriving on 31 January 1879 at Sydney Harbour.
This probably gave rise to a fantastic story, with which he regaled his uncle in a letter of 10 August 1881, about an accident aboard the clipper Annie Frost (with which Conrad had no link), loss of luggage, and several days spent in hospital.
Thus, there is no documentary evidence of a collision with a steamship at Newcastle; the story's hero is four years younger than Conrad; there was only one attempt, not several, to leave Falmouth, Cornwall, as the ship was continuously under repair; and there are other, more striking discrepancies.
Conrad's own letters from the period, to his uncle and to Stefan Buszczyński, in Najder's words, "allow... one to dispense with an occasionally advanced hypothesis that when [Konrad] left [Poland] he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past.
There Captain Lawrence Brown McDonald, a Scot who kept the ship's officers at a distance and treated them "as machines, to be worked by himself when and as he pleased," suffered some kind of "attack" which Conrad described to the physician whom he fetched, as alcoholic inebriation.
[37] Leaving the Riversdale, Conrad took a train to Bombay, where on 28 April he signed on as second mate of the clipper Narcissus, immortalized 13 years later in the title of his first sea novel, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897).
Of the captain, Edwin John Blake, a physician's son, Conrad had the most positive recollections of all his commanders—"a singularly well-informed mind, the least sailor-like in outward aspect, but certainly one of the best seamen... it has been my good luck to serve under."
Next day he boarded the steamship Celestial, disembarking on 6 July at Singapore, where he went for treatment to the European Hospital; Conrad would describe it in his 1900 novel Lord Jim, whose hero had likewise been injured by a falling spar.
[49] Against the primeval natural background of lush, insatiable, and putrefying vegetation [writes Najder] the trading posts must have appeared either as foolish challenges to the invincible forces of the tropics, or as pathetic proof of the vanity of human endeavor.
Conrad used the names of people he met, and occasionally their external appearances, in his writings only as aids in creating a fictional world from his reminiscences, books that he had read, and his own imagination.
For two weeks, while waiting for a ship to Europe, he stayed at the Sailors' Home (for officers only), where he quarrelled with the steward, Phillips, an evangelist and temperance worker and an inspector of brothels—"in short," writes Najder, "a professional do-gooder."
"[54] Korzeniowski left Port Adelaide on 3 April as a passenger on the German steamer Nürnberg (listed as "Captain Conrad") and, passing through the Suez Canal, disembarked on 14 May at Southampton, England.
[56] [T]he son of a writer, praised by his [maternal] uncle [Tadeusz Bobrowski] for the beautiful style of his letters, the man who from the very first page showed a serious, professional approach to his work, presented his start on Almayer's Folly as a casual and non-binding incident... [Y]et he must have felt a pronounced need to write.
Just the contrary: it was a serious undertaking, supported by careful, diligent reading of the masters and aimed at shaping his own attitude to art and to reality.... [W]e do not know the sources of his artistic impulses and creative gifts.
[57]Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language.
In the first half of November 1889 he traveled to Brussels, Belgium, to meet Albert Thys, the powerful deputy director of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo.
Apparently the idea of working in Africa had occurred to Conrad for lack of something else; but it probably rekindled his old interest, recently revived by Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to rescue Emin Pasha.
[59] After Johannes Freiesleben, Danish master of the steamship Florida, was murdered by Congo tribesmen on 29 January 1890, Conrad was appointed by Thys' company to take his place.
The traveler is a Pole, but without hope that his partitioned motherland will ever become free and unified; he is conscious... that in the modern prosperous and open world no one is interested in Polish affairs and very few even know where the country is, and he is aware that to be continually harping on wrongs, suffering, and oppression evokes, at best, pity mixed with repugnance.
The diary that Conrad kept uniquely for his first 67 days in the Congo[note 7] shows that he thought very highly of Casement, the future author of a 1904 report on atrocities perpetrated against the native Congolese population, for his own personal profit, by Belgium's King Leopold II.
Writing to Poradowska, Conrad complained of "the uniform grey of my existence" and expressed nostalgia for cultivated life and the broad intellectual interests of his correspondent's milieu.
[82] When the Torrens left Adelaide on 13 March 1893, the passengers included two young Englishmen returning from Australia and New Zealand: 25-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy; and Edward Lancelot Sanderson, who was going to help his father run a boys' preparatory school at Elstree.
She was expected to leave 9 December for La Rochelle and from there for Quebec City, but passengers failed to materialize—the French showed no eagerness to join in the late-19th-century waves of emigration to the New World—and the steamer remained idle in France.
