Grove Koger

Today’s entry in the series I’m calling “Sea Fever” deals with a short novel by the master of sea fiction.

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Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line: A Confession. The English Review (London) Sept. 1916–March 1917; Metropolitan Magazine (New York) Oct. 1916; J.M. Dent, 1917

Joseph Conrad’s short novel The Shadow-Line (or The Shadow Line) occupies an intriguing position in his oeuvre. Published in 1917, it’s generally regarded as his last important work. Unlike his longer, melodramatic novel Victory (1915), it’s written in a refreshingly direct, uncluttered style, and the story it tells is an intriguing one.

Despite its appearance near the end of Conrad’s career, however, The Shadow-Line is based on his first, and only, command, that of the 3-masted, 147-foot barque Otago. (A barque, or bark, has two or more square-rigged masts and a fore-and-aft rigged mizzen mast.) Conrad had sailed aboard the S.S. Melita from what was then the British colony of Singapore, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, to Bangkok, Siam (now Thailand), in January 1888 in order to take command of the Otago, which he managed to accomplish later that month. His assignment was to sail her back down the Gulf of Siam to Singapore.

Conrad made the claim that The Shadow-Line was “exact autobiography,” but, as Norman Sherry makes clear in Conrad’s Eastern World (Cambridge UP, 1966), he was not quite telling the truth. Not quite. Although the outline of the experiences described in the novel is close to the truth, Conrad shaped and exaggerated the steps he took and the experiences he underwent as the ship’s master. There’s nothing surprising about any of this, and if you’re interested in the details, there’s no better source that Sherry’s study.  

The unlucky voyage of the fictional Otago can be described briefly. After frustrating delays, the ship is becalmed for days in the Gulf, and before long, nearly every member of its crew has been laid low with “fever,” presumably malaria. The narrator administers the quinine that he finds in the ship’s medicine chest, only to discover, after a time, that the previous captain had emptied out the precious powder and filled the bottles with some sort of useless substitute.  

Conrad’s characters are clearly drawn, from Captain Giles, who craftily nudges the narrator into securing the command, to the feverish and deranged Burns, the chief mate of the Otago, who believes that the ship is haunted by the ghost of its previous captain. Particularly memorable is the cook, Ransome, whose heart, as Burns explains, has “’something wrong with it,” and who “mustn’t exert himself too much or he may drop dead suddenly.’” As the narrator observes, the poor man lives and works “in mortal fear of starting into sudden anger” their “common enemy it was his hard fate to carry consciously within his faithful breast.”

The Shadow-Line complements Conrad’s 1898 short story “Youth,” and in effect carries his young seaman across the “shadow-line” between youth and maturity. But the line might easily be read as the metaphorical one between sanity and insanity, as well as the literal line—at 8°20’—where the crew of the Otago had consigned the body of their deranged captain to the water. Significantly enough, Conrad dedicated the novel to his son. Borys, who had enlisted to fight in World War I, “and all others who like himself have crossed in early youth the shadow-line of their generation.”

In my opening paragraph, I referred to Conrad as “the master of British sea fiction.” I did so in spite of the fact that he himself disliked being categorized in such a way, and once expressed the desire to be “freed from that infernal tail of ships, and that obsession with [his] sea life which,” he felt, had no bearing on his “literary existence.” Nevertheless, it’s for his sea fiction that he’s most often read and admired, including “Youth,” the opening section of Lord Jim (1899-1900), The End of the Tether (1902), Typhoon (1902), and “The Secret Sharer” (1909-10). The sea plays a significant role in several of his other works, including such “island” novels as Almayer’s Folly (1895), as well as his masterpiece, Nostromo (1904), which, after all, is subtitled “A Tale of the Seaboard.” Had Conrad not written these works, his reputation would stand considerably lower than it does today. (The dates I mention, by the way, are for the first periodical publication.)

The image you see at the top of today’s post is the cover of the first British edition, while the image at the bottom, the cover of my World’s Classics paperback copy, is a detail from Henry Scott Tuke’s 1888 painting Climbing the Rigging. The map, reproduced from the 1924 issue of National Geographic, shows the route of the Otago as a blue line, while the 1888 photograph of the ship is reproduced courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, London.

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