Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  To this end a syndicate of four was formed, including a mysterious lady by the name of Dona Rita, who may well have been Conrad’s first love – it is certainly hinted at in some of his later works. Perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this book, there was a boat involved and he certainly fell in love with this vessel. She was the Tremolino, a balancelle, which is an Italian derivative of the lateen-rigged dhows. Conrad later described her as follows:

  Two short masts raking forward and two curved yards, each as long as her hull; a true child of the Latin lake, with a spread of two enormous sails resembling the pointed wings on a sea-bird’s slender body, and herself, like a bird indeed, skimming rather than sailing the seas.

  Her name was the Tremolino. How is this to be translated? The Quiverer? What a name to give the pluckiest little craft that ever dipped her sides in angry foam! I had felt her, it is true, trembling for nights and days together under my feet, but it was with the high-strung tenseness of her faithful courage. In her short, but brilliant, career she has taught me nothing, but she has given me everything. I owe to her the awakened love for the sea that, with the quivering of her swift little body and the humming of the wind under the foot of her lateen sails, stole into my heart with a sort of gentle violence, and brought my imagination under its despotic sway. The Tremolino! To this day I cannot utter or even write that name without a strange tightening of the breast and the gasp of mingled delight and dread of one’s first passionate experience.

  Joseph was to be the active member of the syndicate, meaning that he actually took the risk of being aboard while the guns were being run. The captain was a Corsican by the name of Dominic Cervoni, a flamboyant moustachioed man who appeared to fear very little:

  He was perfect. On board the Tremolino, wrapped up in a black caban, the picturesque cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those massive moustaches and his remorseless eyes set off by the shadow of the deep hood, he looked piratical and monkish and darkly initiated into the most awful mysteries of the sea.

  Several successful runs lined the syndicate up perfectly for the catastrophe that followed. For this fateful voyage, Conrad had borrowed about 3,000 Francs from his uncle, and all of this was stored in gold pieces in his money belt, which fatefully, he hid in a locker. The crew featured Cervoni’s own nephew Cesar, and it was this shifty individual who betrayed the conspirators, forewarning the authorities of their plans. Running along the coast of Spain, a Spanish coastguard vessel was spotted and the crew pushed the Tremolino hard in order to evade it until they could make good their escape under cover of darkness. The little Tremolino flew like a bird before the rising gale and all were hopeful of escape until her great mainsail was unexpectedly torn from its yard by a heavy gust of wind. Close inspection revealed that this had been weakened by tampering. With the Tremolino disabled, Cervoni opted to run the vessel close inshore and destroy her by ramming her on to the rocks. Once ashore they would then easily be able to escape the coastguard. It was at this point that Joseph went to retrieve his Uncle’s 3,000 Francs from the locker, only to discover that they had been stolen. There was no time for recriminations and the Tremolino was duly shattered on the unyielding rocks of the Spanish coastline. The crew took to the dinghy, but not before Cesar had been knocked into the water. To everyone’s surprise, the unpopular crewmember sank like a stone and did not resurface. The rest of the crew survived and were able to escape, but it was soon abundantly clear that Cesar had stolen the money belt and it had been his own duplicity and the weight of the gold that had drowned him.

  Conrad was left to return to Marseille with all the makings of a truly marvellous novel. Many of the elements of the tale were used in one of his last books, The Arrow of Gold. Of course, this was scant consolation to a shipwrecked 20 year old, who now found himself very heavily in debt to his uncle. Ashamed of his misadventures, he returned to Marseille and dug himself deeper into trouble by borrowing a further 800 Francs and gambling it away in an attempt to recoup the loss. After a night at the card table, he returned to his hotel room at rock bottom; utterly alone, penniless, and hopeless. He couldn’t bring himself to admit his errors to his uncle, as they all too closely resembled those of his father before him. His attempt on his own life was driven by despair. There is some speculation that the wound to his chest was actually inflicted during a duel over the mysterious Dona Rita, but if this is so, we will never know, for Conrad took the exact details to his grave. All we can fully establish is that Uncle Thaddeus was duly informed of his nephew’s troubles and headed to Marseille to sort them out. In a later correspondence with a close friend, he wrote that Joseph had been injured in a suicide attempt and that they had opted to cover up the embarrassing truth by fabricating the story of a duel.

  Conrad was to fully repent his Carlist adventures, and in a later recollection, he couched them in much less colourful words:

  All this gun-running was a very dull if dangerous business. As to intrigues, if there were any, I didn’t know anything of them. But in truth, the Carlist invasion was a very straightforward adventure conducted with inconceivable stupidity and a foredoomed failure from the first. There was indeed nothing great there worthy of anybody’s passionate devotion.

  It was time for a change and the decision was taken that Joseph should pursue a career in the British Merchant Navy. This was partly because the French were very strict about the number of voyages non-French nationals could make aboard their ships. The British were less fussy and besides, Thaddeus had other pragmatic reasons for pushing this switch. In his lengthy letters with his wayward nephew, he patiently explains how important it is for Joseph to gain a new nationality, for as a Russian citizen, he was eligible for National Service. With life in the French Merchant Navy out of the question, Britain seemed like a good bet, although one which young Joseph doubtless approached with some trepidation, particularly given that he didn’t speak much English. Nevertheless, in 1878 he turned his back on Marseille, and Thaddeus duly shelled out 400 Francs for a passage aboard a humble cargo steamer, the Mavis, which took him to London via Constantinople and the Black Sea. Once he had arrived in London, Joseph promptly wired his uncle asking for some more money and at this point, his long-suffering relative finally lost his patience, writing back as follows:

  Ponder for a moment what you have perpetrated this last year and ask yourself whether you could have met with such patience and forbearance even from a father as you have with me, and whether some limit should not have been reached?

  You were idle for nearly a whole year, fell into debt, purposely shot yourself – at the worst time of year, tired out and with the most terrible rate of exchange – I hasten to you, spend 2,000 roubles – to cover your needs I increase your allowance. Was all this not enough for you? I agreed to your sailing in an English ship, but not to staying in England, travelling to London and wasting my money there! I can give you only one piece of advice – not a new one – ‘arrange your budget within the limits of what I give you’ for I shall give you no more! Make no debts for I will not pay them, DO SOMETHING and don’t remain idle. Don’t pretend to be the rich young gentleman and wait for someone to pull your chestnuts out of the fire – for that will not happen. If you cannot get a ship then be a clerk for a time. But do something, earn something. If you learn what poverty is, that will teach you the value of money. I have no money for drones and have no intention of working so that someone else can enjoy himself at my expense.

  You can almost feel Thaddeus tearing a hole in his writing paper as his pen scratches out his utter frustration with this feckless youngster. The letter touches quite heavily on work, a necessary evil, which Joseph was long to have an awkward relationship with, as he later distilled in his short story Heart of Darkness. ‘I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.’
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br />   For the first time Joseph had to fully face up to this. He truly needed to find himself for he must have felt truly abandoned; out on his own with no direction home. The desolation and loneliness of his situation must have been utterly crushing. Yet, just when things didn’t look like they could get any worse, he headed to Suffolk. He had secured a berth as a seaman aboard the Skimmer of the Sea, a small barquentine plying coals between Newcastle and Lowestoft.

  Sadly Conrad never put down in words the emotions he felt when he arrived in this humble town and signed on aboard the modest little ship. There is little doubt he would have felt like his fortunes had taken a tumble. In Marseille, he had friends, spoke the language and had clearly enjoyed the climate and cosmopolitan buzz of a thriving port. Lowestoft was far from cosmopolitan and, to make matters worse, Conrad found that the people of Suffolk spoke no known language or at least spoke in such an impenetrable dialect that he had no chance of understanding. In French ships he had been treated as an apprentice (this basically means a trainee officer, separate from the ordinary seamen). The Skimmer of the Sea would have observed no such niceties. She was as rough and ready as they came, a prime example of the British coasting trade, a business for tough men who navigated, not with sextant and chronometer, but by feel and memory – the sound of a dog barking onshore could ward them off in fog. They understood the coast intimately and could read wind shifts and changes in the weather almost by intuition. Yet, for a youngster aboard, the overriding theme was backbreaking work. An example of the kind of tough labour in which Conrad would have been employed was the process of loading and unloading. Steam winches were rarely used in vessels of this size, so the Skimmer’s cargo of coal would have been winched in and out by hand. Day after day of this ‘dollying’ as it was known was necessary. The old sailors called this kind of work ‘Armstrong’s Patent’ and many suffered badly ruptured muscles from years of overdoing it.

  Joseph worked aboard the old barquentine for a little under three months. During this time she made six passages between Newcastle and Lowestoft and no doubt provided an excellent learning experience for him. Even if he was already a reasonable sailor, all the nautical terms he had learned in France were now redundant and he would have had to start over. Yet he was clearly making progress and felt confident enough to sign off the Skimmer and head back to London in order to secure a more glamorous berth.

  The year was 1878 and the docks of the city were still crowded with beautiful sailing ships. Some of the legendary clipper ships still survived and were thriving in the Australian wool run. This trade was the last stand of clipper ships before they were supplanted by the humdrum steamship. Every year a fleet of 20 or so of the fastest sailing ships in the world sailed out from London to the ports of Sydney and Melbourne and awaited the season’s wool clip. Once loaded, they raced around Cape Horn to London in order to catch the March wool sales. Racing was intense and dominated by the legendary former tea clippers Cutty Sark and Thermopylae. An example of the kind of work done by these boats can be witnessed in 1889 when Cutty Sark caught up and overhauled the supposedly invincible mail steamer Britannia as she raced into the Bass Strait on her way to Sydney. Here was doomed romance and beauty aplenty!

  Whether tales of the clippers seduced Conrad is not clear, although he certainly wrote in reverent tones about them in later years. Certainly he was always slightly scornful of steamships and their ‘plodding’ progress across the sea, as he described it. It is also clear that he sought out interesting and unusual vessels, which appealed to his romantic nature, and it was perhaps this that led him to a berth in a clipper ship.

  Stumbling into a shipping agent’s office, Joseph asked in broken English for a berth and, after an initial rebuttal, the agent relented and informed the young sailor that there was an apprentice’s position available aboard the Duke of Sutherland, an Aberdeen-based vessel built of wood in 1865. Although she was described as a clipper, it appears that her powers were very much on the wane by the time Conrad stepped aboard. A couple of slow runs in the wool trade could damage the reputation of a ship, which would then generally find itself relegated to less glamorous – and less profitable – trades. As it was, the passage that Joseph took in 1879 was to be the Duke of Sutherland’s last as a wool clipper. She took 108 days to get out to Sydney, a rather stark contrast when compared with the 76 days set by the clipper Pericles – the fastest passage of the year to Sydney and a full month quicker than the Duke of Sutherland’s voyage.

  Although the old vessel was clearly struggling, Joseph was finding his feet and the young mariner was remembered many years later by one of his shipmates, Henry Horning:

  Conrad occupied one of the top bunks and I the lower. He was a Pole of dark complexion and black hair. In his watches below he spent all of his time reading and writing English; he spoke with a foreign accent. I can well remember his favourite habit of sitting in his bunk with his legs dangling over the side and either a book or writing material in his lap. How he came to occupy a bunk in the half-deck instead of one in the topgallant forecastle is quite beyond me.

  This is an interesting insight not only into Joseph as a rather bookish seaman, but also into the snobbery of young Horning. The reference to Conrad occupying the half deck rather than the topgallant forecastle is telling. The half deck was where all of the privileged young gentlemen apprentices trained to become officers. The topgallant forecastle was where the poorer sailors were lodged. Generally professional sailors had fewer aspirations to become an officer and the insinuation is that Conrad, as a foreigner, had no place with the young gentlemen. This is ironic, as the Pole probably had an allowance to match even the most spoilt apprentice, yet he was clearly seen as an outsider, an anomaly. This theme would crop up throughout his life, and run through his later novels. What Horning also reveals is that Joseph was finally knuckling down. Thaddeus’s endless nagging seemed to be paying off and, shortly after signing off from the Duke of Sutherland at the end of a long return voyage around Cape Horn to London, Joseph put himself in for his Board of Trade examination in order to obtain his second mate’s certificate.

  This exam was an ordeal at the best of times, as the Board of Trade attempted to put into words the very fluid and complicated practice of sailing a square-rigged ship in all sorts of challenging circumstances. To qualify, you needed four years of sailing experience ‘before the mast’. Conrad had just enough time under his belt but the examiner clearly eyed this unusual candidate with scepticism. In fairness, his record of discharge from a motley selection of ships looked none too promising and he proceeded to give the aspiring officer the grilling of his life. Conrad later recalled the examination with eloquence:

  It lasted for hours, for hours. Had I been a strange microbe with potentialities of deadly mischief to the Merchant Service I could not have been submitted to a more microscopic examination. Greatly reassured by his apparent benevolence, I had been at first very alert in my answers. But at length the feeling of my brain getting addled crept upon me. And still the passionless process went on, with a sense of untold ages having been spent already on mere preliminaries. Then I got frightened. I was not frightened of being plucked; that eventuality did not even present itself to my mind. It was something much more serious and weird. ‘This ancient person,’ I said to myself, terrified, ‘is so near his grave that he must have lost all notion of time. He is considering this examination in terms of eternity. It is all very well for him. His race is run. But I may find myself coming out of this room into the world of men a stranger, friendless, forgotten by my very landlady, even were I able after this endless experience to remember the way to my hired home.’ This statement is not so much of a verbal exaggeration as may be supposed. Some very queer thoughts passed through my head while I was considering my answers; thoughts which had nothing to do with seamanship, nor yet with anything reasonable known to this earth. I verily believe that at times I was light-headed in a sort of languid way. At last there fell a silence, and that, too, seem
ed to last for ages, while, bending over his desk, the examiner wrote out my pass-slip slowly with a noiseless pen. He extended the scrap of paper to me without a word, inclined his white head gravely to my parting bow. When I got out of the room I felt limply flat, like a squeezed lemon, and the doorkeeper in his glass cage, where I stopped to get my hat and tip him a shilling, said: ‘Well! I thought you were never coming out.’ ‘How long have I been in there?’ I asked, faintly. He pulled out his watch. ‘He kept you, sir, just under three hours. I don’t think this ever happened with any of the gentlemen before.’

  Second Officer Korzeniowski now had his qualification; what he lacked was a ship, and this was not as easy to procure as might be expected. Fortune was on his side, however, and he was able to gain a berth through the time-honoured practice of the pierhead jump. It so happened that as Joseph was prowling the London Docks in search of a job he got wind that the second mate of the wool clipper Loch Etive had been seriously injured and would be unable to sail. The ship was scheduled to depart and Conrad hurried along the wharves to the Loch Etive to meet with her skipper, Captain Stuart. The meeting was later used in one of his fictional works, Chance, as follows: