 Chapter 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29 of the Mirror of the Sea. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad. Rulers of East and West. Chapter 25 There is no part of the world of coasts, continents, oceans, seas, straits, capes, and islands, which is not under the sway of a raining wind, the sovereign of its typical weather. The wind rules the aspects of the sky and the action of the sea, but no wind rules unchallenged his realm of land and water. As with the kingdoms of the earth, there are regions more turbulent than others. In the middle belt of the earth, the trade winds reign supreme, undisputed like monarchs of long-settled kingdoms, whose traditional power, checking all undue ambitions, is not so much an exercise of personal might as the working of long-established institutions. The intertropical kingdoms of the trade winds are favorable to the ordinary life of a merchant man. The trumpet call of strife is seldom borne in their wings to the watchful ears of men on the decks of ships. The regions ruled by the northeast and southeast trade winds are serene. In a southern-going ship bound out for a long voyage, the passage through their dominions is characterized by a relaxation of strain and vigilance on the part of the seamen. Those citizens of the ocean feel sheltered under the aegis of an uncontested law of an undisputed dynasty, there indeed, if anywhere on earth, the weather may be trusted. Yet, not too implicitly, even in the constitutional realm of trade winds north and south of the equator, ships are overtaken by strange disturbances. Still, the easterly winds, and generally speaking the easterly weather all the world over, is characterized by regularity and persistence. As a ruler, the east wind has a remarkable stability. As an invader of the high latitudes lying under the tumultuous sway of his great brother, the wind of the west, he is extremely difficult to dislodge by the reason of his cold craftiness and profound duplicity. The narrow seas around these isles where British admirals keep watch and ward upon the marches of the Atlantic Ocean are subject to the turbulent sway of the west wind. Call it northwest or southwest, it is all one, a different phase of the same character, a changed expression on the same face. In the orientation of the winds that rule the seas, the north and south directions are of no importance. There are no north and south winds of any account upon this earth. The north and south winds are but small princes in the dynasties that make peace and war upon the sea. They never assert themselves upon a vast stage. They depend upon local causes, the configuration of coasts, the shapes of straits, the accidents of bold promontories round which they play their little part. In the polity of winds as amongst the tribes of the earth, the real struggle lies between east and west. Chapter 26 The west wind rains over the seas surrounding the coasts of these kingdoms, and from the gateways of the channels, from promontories as if from watchtowers, from estuaries of rivers, as if from poster and gates, from passageways, inlets, straits, furths, the garrison of the isle, and the crews of the ships going and returning look to the westward to judge by the varied splendors of his sunset mantle the mood of that arbitrary ruler. The end of the day is the time to gaze at the kingly face of the western weather who is the arbiter of ships' destinies. Benignant and splendid, or splendid and sinister, the western sky reflects the hidden purposes of the royal mind. Clothed in a mantle of dazzling gold or draped in rags of black clouds like a beggar, the might of the westerly wind sits enthroned upon the western horizon with the whole north Atlantic as a footstool for his feet and the first twinkling stars making a diadem for his brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers of the weather, think of regulating the conduct of their ships by the mood of the master. The west end is too great a king to be a dissembler. He is no calculator plotting deep schemes in a somber heart. He is too strong for small artifices. There is passion in all his moods, even in the soft mood of his serene days in the grace of his blue sky whose immense and unfathomable tenderness reflected in the mirror of the sea embraces, possesses, lulls to sleep the ships with white sails. He is all things to all oceans. He is like a poet seated upon a throne, magnificent, simple, barbarous, pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable, unfathomable. But when you understand him, always the same. Some of his sunsets are like pageants devised for the delight of the multitude when all the gems of the royal treasure house are displayed above the sea. Others are like the opening of his royal confidence, tinged with thoughts of sadness and compassion in a melancholy splendor meditating upon the short-lived piece of the waters. And I have seen him put the pent-up anger of his heart into the aspect of the inaccessible sun and cause it to glare fiercely like the eye of an implacable autocrat out of a pale and frightened sky. He is the warlord who sends his battalions of Atlantic rollers to the assault of our seaboard. The compelling voice of the west wind musters up to his service all the might of the ocean. At the bidding of the west wind there arises a great commotion in the sky above these islands and a great rush of waters fall upon our shores. The sky of the westerly weather is full of flying clouds of great big white clouds coming thicker and thicker till they seem to stand welded into a solid canopy upon whose gray face the lower rack of the gale, thin black and angry-looking flies past with vertiginous speed. Denser and denser grows this dome of vapors descending lower and lower upon the sea, narrowing the horizon around the ship. And the characteristic aspect of westerly weather, the thick gray smoky and sinister tone sets in, circumscribing the view of the men, drenching their bodies, oppressing their souls, taking their breath away with booming gusts, deafening, blinding, driving, rushing them onwards in a swaying ship towards our coast lost in mists and rain. The caprice of the winds, like the wilfulness of men, is fraught with the disastrous consequences of self-indulgence. Long anger, the sense of his uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the west wind. It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding rancor. He devastates his own kingdom in the wantness of his force. Southwest is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his darkened brow. He breathes his rage in terrific squalls and overwhelms his realm with an inexhaustible welter of clouds. He strews the seeds of anxiety upon the decks of scutting ships, makes the foam-stripped ocean look old, and sprinkles with gray hairs the heads of shipmasters in the homeward bound ships running for the channel. The westerly wind, asserting his sway from the southwest quarter, is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild implications the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck disaster and death. The southwesterly weather is the thick-weather par excellence. It is not the thickness of the fog, it is rather a contraction of the horizon, a mysterious veiling of the shores with clouds that seem to make a low-vaulted dungeon around the running ship. It is not blindness, it is a shortening of the sight. The west wind does not say to the seamen, you shall be blind. It restricts merely the range of his vision and raises the dread of land within his breast. It makes of him a man robbed of half his force, of half his efficiency. Many times in my life standing in long sea-boots and streaming oil-skins at the elbow of my commander on the poop of a homeward bound ship making for the channel and gazing ahead into the gray and tormented waste I have heard a weary sigh shape itself into a studiously casual comment. Can't see very far in this weather and have made answer in the same low perfunctory tone, no sir. It would be merely the instinctive voicing of an ever-present thought associated closely with the consciousness of the land somewhere ahead and of the great speed of the ship. Fair wind, fair wind, who would dare to grumble at a fair wind? It was a favor of the Western King who rules masterfully the North Atlantic from the latitude of the Azores to the latitude of Cape Farewell. A famous shove, this to end a good passage with, and yet somehow one could not muster upon one's lips the smile of a courtier's gratitude. This favor was dispensed to you from under an overbearing scowl, which is the true expression of the great autocrat when he has made up his mind to give a battering to some ships and to hunt certain others home in one breath of cruelty and benevolence equally distracting. No sir, can't see very far. Thus would the mate's voice repeat the thought of the master, both gazing ahead while under their feet the ship rushes at some twelve knots in the direction of the lee shore, and only a couple of miles in front of her swinging and dripping gym boom carried naked with an upward slant like a spear, a gray horizon closes the view with a multitude of waves surging upwards violently as if to strike at the stooping clouds. Awful and threatening scowls darken the face of the west wind in his clouded southwest mood and from the king's throne hall in the western board stronger gusts reach you like the fierce shouts of raving fury to which only the gloomy grandeur of the scene imparts a saving dignity. A shower pelts the deck and the sails of the ship as if flung with a scream by an angry hand, and when the night closes in the night of a southwesterly gale it seems more hopeless than the shade of Hades. The southwesterly mood of the great west wind is a lightless mood without sun, moon, or stars with no gleam of light but the phosphorescent flashes of the great sheets of foam that boiling up on each side of the ship fling bluish gleams from her dark and narrow hull rolling as she runs chased by enormous seas distracted in the tumult. There are some bad nights in the kingdom of the west wind for homeward bound ships making for the channel and the days of wrath dawn upon them colorless and vague like the timid turning up of invisible lights upon the scene of a tyrannical and passionate outbreak. Awful in the monotony of its method and the increasing strength of its violence it is the same wind, the same clouds the same wildly racing seas the same thick horizon around the ship only the wind is stronger the clouds seem denser and more overwhelming the waves appear to have grown bigger and more threatening during the night the hours whose minutes are marked by the breaking seas slip by with the screaming pelting squalls overtaking the ship as she runs on and on with darkened canvas with streaming spars and dripping ropes the downpours thicken proceeding each shower a mysterious gloom like the passage of a shadow above the firmament of grey clouds thrown upon the ship now and then the rain pours upon your head in streams as if from spouts it seems as if your ship were going to be drowned before she sank as if all atmosphere had turned to water you gasp, you splutter, you are blinded and deafened, you are submerged obliterated, dissolved, annihilated all over as if your limbs too had turned to water and every nerve on the alert you watch for the clearing up mood of the western king that shall come with a shift of wind as likely as not to whip all the three masts out of your ship in the twinkling of an eye Chapter 27 heralded by the increasing fierceness of the squalls sometimes by a faint flash of lightning like the signal of a lighted torch wave far away behind the clouds the shift of wind comes at last the crucial moment of the change from the brooding and veiled violence of the southwest gale to the sparkling flashing cutting clear-eyed anger of the king's northwesterly mood you behold another phase of his passion a fury bejeweled with stars may hat bearing the crescent of the moon on its brow shaking the last vestiges of its torn cloud mantle in inky black squalls with hail and sleet descending like showers of crystals and pearls bounding off the spars drumming on the sails on the oil-skinned coats whitening the decks of homeward bound ships faint, ruddy flashes of lightning flicker in the straight upon her mast heads a chilly blast hums in the taut rigging causing the ship to tremble to her very keel and the soaked men on her decks to shiver in their wet clothes to the very marrow of their bones before one squall has flown over to sink in the eastern seaboard the edge of another peeps up already above the western horizon racing up swift shapeless like a black bag full of frozen water ready to burst over your devoted head the temper of the ruler of the ocean has changed each gust of the clouded moon that seemed warm by the heat of a heart flaming with anger has its counterpart in the chilly blasts that seem blown from a breast turned to ice with a sudden revulsion of feeling instead of blinding your eyes and crushing your soul with a terrible apparatus of cloud and mist and seas and rain the king of the west turns his power to contemptuous pelting of your back with icicles to making your weary eyes water as if in grief and your worn out carcass quake pitifully but each mood of the great autocrat has its own greatness and each is hard to bear only the northwest phase of that mighty display is not demoralizing to the same extent because between the hail and sleet squalls of a northwesterly gale one can see a long way ahead to see, to see this is the craving of the sailor as of the rest of blind humanity to have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence I have heard a reserved silent man with no nerves to speak of after three days of hard running afterly weather burst out passionately I wished to God we could get sight of something we had just gone down below for a moment to commune in a battened down cabin with a large white chart lying limp and damp upon a cold and clammy table under the light of a smoky lamp sprawling over that seamen's silent entrusted advisor with one elbow upon the coast of Africa and the other planted in the neighborhood of Cape Hatteras it was a general track chart of the North Atlantic my skipper lifted his rugged hairy face and glared at me in a half exasperated half appealing way we have seen no sun, moon or stars for something like seven days by the effect of the west winds wrath the celestial bodies had gone into hiding for a week or more and the last three days had seen the force of a southwest gale grow from fresh though strong too heavy as the entries in my logbook could testify then we separated heed to go on deck again in obedience to that mysterious call that seems to sound forever in a ship master's ears I to stagger into my cabin with some vague notion of putting down the words very heavy weather in a logbook not quite written up to date but I gave it up and crawled into my bunk instead, boots and hat on all standing it did not matter everything was soaking wet, a heavy sea having burst the poop skylights the night before to remain in a nightmarish state between waking and sleeping for a couple of hours of so called rest the south westerly mood of the west wind is an enemy of sleep and even of a recumbent position in the responsible officers of a ship after two hours of futile light headed inconsequent thinking upon all things under heaven in that dark dank wet and devastated cabin I arose suddenly and staggered up on deck the autocrat of the north atlantic was still oppressing his kingdom and its outlying dependencies even as far as the bay of bisque secrecy of thick, very thick weather the force of the wind though we were running before it at the rate of some ten knots an hour was so great that it drove me with a steady push to the front of the poop where my commander was holding on what do you think of it he addressed me in an interrogative yell what I really thought was that we both had had just about enough of it the manner in which the great west wind chooses at times to administer his possessions does not commend itself to a person of peaceful and law abiding disposition inclined to draw distinctions between right and wrong in the face of natural forces whose standard naturally is that of might alone but of course I said nothing for a man caught as it were his skipper and the great west wind silence is the safest sort of diplomacy moreover I knew my skipper he did not want to know what I thought ship masters hanging on a breath before the thrones of the winds ruling the seas have their psychology whose workings are as important to the ship and those on board of her as the changing moods of the weather the man as a matter of fact under no circumstances ever carried a brass farthing for what I or anybody else in his ship thought he had had just about enough of it I guess and what he was at really was a process of fishing for a suggestion it was the pride of his life that he had never wasted a chance no matter how boisterous threatening and dangerous of a fair wind like men racing blindfold for a gap in a hedge we were finishing a splendidly quick passage from the antipodes with a tremendous rush for the channel in as thick a weather as any I can remember but his psychology did not permit him to bring the ship to with a fair wind blowing at least not on his own initiative and yet he felt that very soon indeed something would have to be done he wanted the suggestion to come from me so that later on when the trouble was over he could argue this point with his own uncompromising spirit laying the blame upon my shoulders I must render him the justice that this sort of pride was his only weakness but he got no suggestion from me I understood his psychology besides I had my own stock of weaknesses at the time it is a different one now and amongst them was the conceit of being remarkably well up in the psychology of the westerly weather I believed not to mince matters that I had a genius for reading the mind of the great ruler of high latitudes I fancied I could discern already the coming of a change in his royal mood and all I said was the weather's bound to clear up with the shift of the wind anybody knows that much he snapped at me at the highest pitch of his voice I mean before dark I cried this was all the opening he ever got from me the eagerness with which he seized upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety he had been laboring under very well he shouted with an affectation of impatience as if giving way to long entreaties all right if we don't get a shift by then we'll take that for sale offer and put her head under her wing for the night I was struck by the picturesque character of the phrase as applied to a ship brought to in order to ride out again with wave after wave passing under her breast I could see her resting in the tumult of the elements like a seabird sleeping in wild weather upon the raging waters with its head tucked under its wing an imaginative precision in true feeling this is one of the most expressive sentences I have ever heard on human lips but as to taking the for sale off that ship before we put her head under her wing I had my grave doubts they were justified that long enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrary decree of the West wind to whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances of their hands within the limits of his kingdom with the sound of a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily leaving behind of its stout substance not so much as one solitary strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for say a wounded elephant torn out of its bolt ropes it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by the shift of the wind for the shift of wind had come the unveiled low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a confused and tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast we recognized the headland and looked at each other in the silence of dumb wonder without knowing it in the least we had run up alongside the Isle of White and that tower tinged a faint evening red in the salt wind haze was the lighthouse on St. Catherine's Point my skipper recovered first from his astonishment his bulging eyes sank back gradually into their orbits his psychology, taking it all round was really very creditable for an average sailor he had been spared the humiliation of laying his ship to with a fair wind and at once that man of an open and truthful nature spoke up in perfect good faith rubbing together his brown hairy hands the hands of a master craftsman upon the sea hum, that's just about where I reckoned we had got to the transparency and ingenuousness in a way of that delusion the airy tone, the hint of already growing pride were perfectly delicious in truth this was one of the greatest surprises ever sprung by the clearing up mood of the west wind upon one of the most accomplished of his courtiers Chapter 28 the winds of north and south are, as I have said but small princes amongst the powers of the sea they have no territory of their own they are not raining winds anywhere yet it is from their houses that the raining dynasties which have shared between them the waters of the earth are sprung all the weather of the world is based upon the contest of the polar and equatorial strains of the tyrannous race the west wind is the greatest king the east rules between the tropics they have shared each ocean between them each has his genius of supreme rule the king of the west never intrudes upon the recognized dominion of his kingly brother he is a barbarian of a northern type violent without craftiness and furious without malice one may imagine him seated masterfully with a double-edged sword on his knees upon the painted and gilt clouds of the sunset bowing his shock head of golden locks a flaming beard over his breast imposing colossal mighty limbed with a thundering voice distended cheeks and fierce blue eyes urging the speed of his gales the other, the east king the king of blood-red sunrises I represent to myself as a spare southerner with clear-cut features black-browed and dark-eyed grey-robed upright in sunshine resting a smooth-shaven cheek in the palm of his hand impenetrable, secret, full of wiles fine-drawn, keen, meditating aggressions the west wind keeps faith with his brother the king of the easterly weather what we have divided we have divided he seems to say in his gruff voice this ruler without guile who hurls as if in sport enormous masses of cloud across the sky and flings the great waves of the Atlantic clear across from the shores of the new world upon the hoary headlands of old Europe which harbors more kings and rulers upon its seamed and furrowed body than all the oceans of the world together what we have divided we have divided and if no rest and peace in this world have fallen to my share leave me alone let me play at quakes with cyclonic gales flinging the disks of spinning cloud and whirling air from when end of my dismal kingdom to the other over the grand banks or along the edges of pack ice this one with true aim right into the bite of the Bay of Biscay that other upon the fjords of Norway across the North Sea where the fishermen of many nations look watchfully into my angry eye this is the time of kingly sport and the royal master of high latitude sighs mightily with the sinking sun upon his breast and the double-edged sword upon his knees as if wearied by the innumerable centuries of a strenuous rule and saddened by the unchangeable aspect of the ocean under his feet by the endless vista of future ages where the work of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind shall go on and on till his realm of living waters becomes a frozen and motionless ocean but the other crafty and unmoved nursing his shaven chin between the thumb and forefinger of his slim and treacherous hand thinks deep within his heart full of guile aha! a brother of the west has fallen into the mood of kingly melancholy he is tired of playing with circular gales and blowing great guns and unrolling thick streamers of fog and wanton sport at the cost of his own poor miserable subjects their fate is most pitiful let us make a foray upon the dominions of that noisy barbarian great raid from Finisterre to Hatteras catching his fisherman unawares baffling the fleets that trust to his power and shooting sly arrows into the livers of men who court his good graces he is indeed a worthless fellow and forthwith while the west wind meditates upon the vanity of his irresistible might the thing is done and the easterly weather sets in upon the north atlantic the prevailing weather of the north atlantic is typical of the way in which the west wind rules his realm on which the sun never sets north atlantic is the heart of a great empire it is the part of the west winds dominions most thickly populated with generations of fine ships and hardy men heroic deeds and adventurous exploits have been performed there within the very stronghold of his sway the best sailors in the world have been born in bread under the shadow of his scepter learning to manage their ships with skill and audacity before the steps of his stormy throne reckless adventurers, toiling fishermen admirals as wise and brave as the world has ever known have waded upon the signs of his westerly sky fleets of victorious ships have hung upon his breath he has tossed in his hand squadrons of war-scarred three-deckers and shredded out in mere sport the bunting of flags hallowed in the traditions of honor and glory he is a good friend and a dangerous enemy without mercy to unseaworthy ships and faint-hearted seamen in his kingly way he has taken but little account of life sacrificed to his impulsive policy he is a king with a double-edged sword bared in his right hand the east wind, an interloper in the dominions of westerly weather is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poignard held behind his back for a treacherous stab in his forays into the North Atlantic the east wind behaves like a subtle and cruel adventurer without a notion of honor or fair play veiling his clear-cut lean face in a thin layer of a hard high cloud I have seen him like a wise and robber-cheek of the sea holding up large caravans of ships to the number of three hundred or more at the very gates of the English Channel and the worst of it was that there was no ransom that we could pay to satisfy his avidity for whatever evil is wrought by the raiding east wind it is done only to spite his kingly brother of the west we gazed helplessly at the systematic, cold, grey-eyed obstinacy of the easterly weather while short rations became the order of the day and the pinch of hunger under the breastbone grew familiar to every sailor in that held-up fleet every day added to our numbers in knots and groups and straggling parties flung to and fro before the closed gate and meantime the outward bound ships passed running through our humiliated ranks under all the canvas they could show it is my idea that the easterly wind helps the ships away from home in the wicked hope that they shall all come to an untimely end and be heard of no more for six weeks did the robber sheik hold the trade route of the earth while our liege lord, the west wind, slept profoundly like a tired titan or else remained lost in a mood of idle sadness known only to frank natures all was still to the westward we looked in vain toward his stronghold the king slumbered on so deeply that he let his foraging brother steal the very mantle of gold-lined purple clouds from his bowed shoulders what had become of the dazzling horde of royal jewels exhibited at every close of day gone disappeared extinguished carried off without leaving a single gold band or the flash of a single sunbeam in the evening sky day after day through a cold streak of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would slink shame facedly without pomp or show to hide in haste under the waters and still the king slept on or mourned the vanity of his might and his power while the thin-lipped intruder put the impress of his cold and implacable spirit upon the sea and sky with every daybreak the rising sun had to wade through a crimson stream luminous and sinister like the spilt blood of celestial bodies murdered during the night in this particular instance the mean interloper held the road for some six weeks on end establishing his particular administrative methods over the best part of the North Atlantic it looked as if the easterly weather had come to stay forever or at least till we had all starved to death in the held up fleet starved within sight as it were of plenty within touch almost of the bountiful heart of the empire there we were dotting with our dry white sails the hard blueness of the deep sea there we were a growing company of ships each with her burden of grain of timber of wool of hides and even of oranges for we had one or two belated fruit schooners in company there we were in that memorable spring of a certain year in the late 70s dodging to and fro baffled on every tack and with our stores running down to sweepings of breadlockers and scrapings of sugar casks it was just like the east winds nature to inflict starvation upon the bodies of unoffending sailors while he corrupted their simple souls by an exasperation leading to outbursts of profanity as lurid as his blood red sunrises they were followed by gray days under the cover of high motionless clouds that looked as if carved in a slab of ash-colored marble and each mean starved sunset left us calling with implications upon the west wind even in its most veiled misty mood to wake up and give us our liberty if only to rush on and dash the heads of our ships against the very walls of our unapproachable home Chapter 29 In the atmosphere of the easterly weather as polluted as a piece of crystal and refracting like a prism we could see the appalling numbers of our helpless company even to those who in more normal conditions would have remained invisible sails down under the horizon it is the malicious pleasure of the east wind to augment the power of your eyesight in order perhaps that you should see better the perfect humiliation the hopeless character of your captivity easterly weather is generally clear and that is all that can be said for it almost supernaturally clear when it likes but whatever its mood there is something uncanny in its nature its duplicity is such that it will deceive a scientific instrument no barometer will give mourning of an easterly gale were it ever so wet it would be an unjust and ungrateful thing to say that a barometer is a stupid contrivance it is simply that the wiles of the east wind are too much for its fundamental honesty after years and years of experience the most trusty instrument of the sort that ever went to see screwed onto a ship's cabin bulkhead will almost invariably be induced to rise by the diabolic ingenuity of the easterly weather just at the moment when the easterly weather discarding its methods of hard dry impassive cruelty contemplates drowning what is left of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold and horrid rain the sleet and hail squalls following the lightning at the end of a westerly gale are cold and be numbing and stinging and cruel enough but the dry easterly weather when it turns to wet seems to rain poison showers upon your head it is a sort of steady persistent overwhelming endlessly driving downpour which makes your heart sick and opens it to dismal forebodings and the stormy mood of the easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing blackness the west wind hangs heavy gray curtains of mist and spray before your gaze but the eastern interloper of the narrow seas when he has mustered his courage and cruelty to the point of a gale puts your eyes out puts them out completely makes you feel blind for life upon a lee shore it is the wind also that brings snow out of his black and merciless heart he flings a white blinding sheet upon the ships of the sea he has more manners of villainy and no more conscience than an Italian prince of the 17th century his weapon is a dagger carried under a black cloak when he goes out on his unlawful enterprises the mere hint of his approach fills with dread every craft that swims the sea from fishing smacks to four-masted ships that recognize the sway of the west wind even in his most accommodating mood he inspires a dread of treachery I have heard upwards of ten score of windlasses spring like one into clanking life in the dead of night filling the downs with a panic-struck sound of anchors being torn hurriedly out of the ground at the first breath of his approach fortunately his heart often fails him he does not always blow home upon our exposed coast he has not the fearless temper of his westerly brother the natures of those two winds that share the dominions of the great oceans are fundamentally different it is strange that the winds which men are prone to style capricious remain true to their character in all the various regions of the earth to us here for instance the east wind comes across a great continent sweeping over the greatest body of solid land upon this earth for the Australian east coast the east wind is the wind of the ocean coming across the greatest body of water upon the globe and yet here and there its characteristics remain the same with a strange consistency in everything that is vile and base the members of the west winds dynasty are modified in a way by the regions they rule as a Hohenzollern without ceasing to be himself becomes a Romanian by virtue of his throne or a Saxe-Colberg learns to put the dress of Bulgarian phrases upon his particular thoughts whatever they are the autocratic sway of the west wind whether forty north or forty south of the equator is characterized by an open generous frank barbarous recklessness for he is a great autocrat and to be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian I have been too much molded to his sway to nurse now any idea of rebellion in my heart moreover what is a rebellion within the four walls of a room against the tempestuous rule of the west wind I remain faithful to the memory of the mighty king with a double-edged sword in one hand and in the other holding out rewards of great daily runs and famously quick passages to those of his courtiers who knew how to wait watchfully for every sign of his secret mood as we deep water men always reckoned he made one year in three fairly lively for anybody having business upon the Atlantic or down there along the forties of the southern ocean you had to take the bitter with the sweet and it cannot be denied he played carelessly with our lives and fortunes but then he was always a great king fit to rule over the great waters where strictly speaking a man would have no business whatever but for his audacity the audacious should not complain a mere trader ought not to grumble at the toils levied by a mighty king his mightiness was sometimes very overwhelming but even when you had to defy him openly as on the banks of the Agulis homeward bound from the East Indies or on the outward passage around the horn he struck at you fairly his stinging blows full in the face to and it was your business not to get too much staggered and after all if you showed anything of accountants the good-natured barbarian would let you fight your way past the very steps of his throne it was only now and then that the sword descended and a head fell but if you fell you were sure of impressive obsequies and of a roomy generous grave such is the king to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads and whom the modern and palatial steamship defies with impunity seven times a week and yet it is but defiance not victory the magnificent barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold-line clouds looking from unhigh on great ships gliding like mechanical toys upon his sea and on men who armed with fire and iron no longer need to watch anxiously for the slightest sign of his royal mood he is disregarded but he has kept all his strength all his splendor and a great part of his power time itself that shakes all the thrones is on the side of that king the sword in his hand remains as sharp as ever upon both its edges and he may well go on playing his royal game of quates with hurricanes tossing them over from the continent of republics to the continent of kingdoms in the assurance that both the new republics and the old kingdoms the heat of fire and the strength of iron with the untold generations of audacious men shall crumble to dust at the steps of his throne and pass away and be forgotten before his own rule comes to an end End of Chapter 29 Chapters 30 31 and 32 of the Mirror of the Sea This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad The Faithful River Chapter 30 The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination. This appeal is not always a charm, for there are estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness. Lowlands mud flats are perhaps barren sand hills without beauty of form or amenity of aspect covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness. Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A river whose estuary resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most fertile country. But all the estuaries of great rivers have their fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water is friendly to man. The ocean, a part of nature furthest removed in the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of mankind, has ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the earth. And of all the elements this is the one to which men have always been prone to trust themselves, as if its immensity held the reward as vast as itself. From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition to adventurous hopes. That road open to enterprise and courage invites the explorer of coast to new efforts towards the fulfillment of great expectations. The commander of the first Roman galley must have looked with an intense absorption upon the estuary of the Thames as he turned the beaked prowl of his ship to the westward under the brow of the North Forlan. The estuary of the Thames is not beautiful. It has no noble features, no romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality. But it is wide open, spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day. The navigation of his craft must have engrossed all the Roman's attention in the calm of a summer's day he would choose his weather. When the single row of long sweeps, the galley would be a light one, not a trireme, could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet of water like plate glass, reflecting faithfully the classic form of his vessel and the contour of the shore as close on his left hand. Soon he followed the land and passed through what is at present known as Margate Roads, groping his careful way along the hidden sand-banks whose every tail and spit has its beacon or buoy nowadays. He must have been anxious, though no doubt he had collected beforehand on the shores of the Gauls a store of information from the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen, slave-dealers, pirates, all sorts of unofficial men connected with the sea in a more or less reputable way. He would have heard of channels and sand-banks of natural features of the land useful for sea-marks of villages and tribes and modes of barter and precautions to take. With the instructive tales about native chiefs died more or less blue, whose character for greediness, ferocity, or amiability must have been expounded to him with that capacity for vivid language which seems joined naturally to the shadiness of moral character and recklessness of disposition. With that sort of spiced food provided for his anxious thought, watchful for strange men, strange beasts, strange turns of the tide, he would make the best of his way up, a military seamen with a short sword on thigh and a bronze helmet on his head, the pioneer post-captain of an imperial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the Isle of Thane of a ferocious disposition, I wonder, and ready to fall with stone-studded clubs and wooden lances hardened in the fire upon the backs of unwary mariners? Amongst the great commercial streams of these islands, the Thames is the only one, I think, open to romantic feeling, from the fact that the sight of human labor and the sounds of human industry do not come down its shores to the very sea, destroying the suggestion of mysterious vastness caused by the configuration of the shore. The broad inlet of the shallow North Sea passes gradually into the contracted shape of the river, but for a long time the feeling of the open water remains with the ship steering to the westward through one of the lighted and buoyed passageways of the Thames, such as Queen's Channel, Prince's Channel, Four Fathom Channel, or else coming down the Swinn from the North. The rush of the yellow flood tide hurries her up as if into the unknown between the two fading lines of the coast. There are no features to this land, no conspicuous far-famed landmarks for the eye. There is nothing so far down to tell you of the greatest agglomeration of mankind on earth, dwelling no more than five and twenty miles away, where the sun sets in a blaze of color flaming on a gold background, and the dark, low shores trend towards each other. And in the great silence the deep, faint booming of the big guns being tested at shoe-beariness hangs about the Nor, a historical spot in the keeping of one of England's appointed guardians. Chapter 31 The Nor sand remains covered at low water and never seen by human eye, but the Nor is a name to conjure with visions of historical events, of battles, of fleets, of mutinies, of watch and ward marked upon the great throbbing heart of the state. This ideal point of the estuary, this center of memories, is marked upon the steely gray expanse of the waters by a light ship painted red that, from a couple of miles off, looks like a cheap and bizarre little toy. I remember how, on coming up the river for the first time, I was surprised at the smallness of that vivid object, a tiny, warm speck of crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones. I was startled as if of necessity the principal beacon in the waterway of the greatest town on earth should have presented imposing proportions, and behold, the brown spritz sail of a barge hit it entirely from my view. Coming in from the eastward, the bright coloring of the light ship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an admiral, the commander-in-chief at the Nor, accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames estuary, but soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the medway with its men of war moored in line and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon upon. On the imposing expanse of the great estuary, the traffic of the port where so much of the world's work and the world's thinking is being done becomes insignificant, scattered, streaming away in thin lines of ships, stringing themselves out into the eastern quarter through the various navigable channels of which the Nor light ship marks the divergence. The coasting traffic inclines to the north, the deep water ships steer east with a southern inclination on through the downs to the most remote ends of the world. In the widening of the shore as sinking low in the grey smoky distances, the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore. Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for the greater profit of the world, they slip one by one into the open. While in the offing the inward bound ships come up singly and in bunches from under the sea horizon, closing the mouth of the river between Orphaness and North Forlan, they all converge upon the Nor, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and grey, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and once sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited except for the cluster of houses which is south-end, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil storage tanks, low and round, with slightly domed roofs, peep over the edge of the foreshore as it were a village of central African huts imitated in iron. Borded by the black and shining mud flats, the level marsh extends for miles, away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooden slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes. Then on the slight turn of the lower hope-reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in grays and green hide. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufacturers, and trade, as palm groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty, and vigor of tropical nature. The houses of graves end crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion, as if they had tumble down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the kentus shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men's houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slight roof more inaccessible than an alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest heaviest building for miles around, a thing like a hotel, like a mansion of flats, all to let, exiled into these fields out of a street in west Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock gates. Mast heads and funnel tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea. Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red brick pile on the Essex shore, the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the lower hope reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt-acrid flavor is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the gnor. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town, but the sea-freedom stopped short there, surrendering the salt-tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Warves landing places dock gates, waterside stairs follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men's work fills the river with a menacing muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The waterway so fair above and wide below flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grind-glassed and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust. This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London's infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. In other river ports it is not so. They lie open to their stream with quays like broad clearings, with streets like avenues cut through thick timber for the convenience of trade. I am thinking now of river ports I have seen, of Antwerp for instance, of Nantes or Bordeaux, or even Old Rouen, where the night watchmen of ships, elbows on rail, gaze at shop windows and brilliant cafes, and see the audience go in and come out of the opera house. But London, the oldest and greatest of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside of watersides where only one aspect of the world's life can be seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream. The lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the stranded barges lie, and the narrow lanes coming down to the foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams. Behind the growth of the London waterside, the docks of London spread out unsuspected, smooth and placid, lost amongst the buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of mast heads here and there, overtopping the roof of some four-story warehouse. It is a strange conjunctionness of roofs and mast heads of walls and yard arms. I remember once having the incongruity of the relation brought home to me in a practical way. I was the chief officer of a fine ship, just docked with a cargo of wool from Sydney after a 90-days passage. In fact, we had not been in more than half an hour, and I was still busy making her fast to the stone posts of a very narrow quay in front of a lofty warehouse. An old man with a gray whisker under the chin and brass buttons on his pilot-cloth jacket hurried up along the quay, hailing my ship by name. He was one of those officials called birthing masters, not the one who had birthed us, but another, who apparently had been busy securing a steamer at the other end of the dock. I could see from afar his hard blue eyes staring at us, as if fascinated with a queer sort of absorption. I wondered what that worthy sea dog had found to criticize in my ship's rigging, and I too glanced aloft anxiously. I could see nothing wrong there, but perhaps that superannuated fellow craftsman was simply admiring the ship's perfect order aloft, I thought, with some secret pride. For the chief officer is responsible for his ship's appearance, and as to her outward condition, he is the man open to praise or blame. Meantime the old salt, ex-coasting skipper, was writ large all over his person, had hobbled up alongside in his bumpy, shiny boots, and waving an arm short and thick like the flipper of a seal terminated by a paw red as an uncooked beefsteak, addressed the poop in a muffled, faint, roaring voice, as if a sample of every North Sea fog of his life had been permanently lodged in his throat. Haul him round, Mr. Mate, were his words. If you don't look sharp, you'll have your top gallant yards through the windows of that air warehouse presently. This was the only cause of his interest in the ship's beautiful spars. I owned that for a time I was struck dumb by the bizarre associations of yard arms and window panes. To break windows is the last thing one would think of in connection with a ship's top gallant yard, unless indeed one were an experienced birthing master in one of the London docks. This old chap was doing his little share of the world's work with proper efficiency. His little blue eyes had made out the danger many hundred yards off. His rheumatic-y feet, tired with balancing that squat body for many years upon the decks of small coasters, and made sore by miles of tramping upon the flagstones of the dockside, had hurried up in time to avert a ridiculous catastrophe. I answered him pettishly, I fear, and as if I had known all about it before. All right, all right, can't do everything at once. He remained nearby, muttering to himself till the yards had been hauled round at my order, and then raised again his foggy, thick voice. None too soon, he observed, with a critical glance up at the towering side of the warehouse. That's a half-sovereign in your pocket, Mr. Mate. You should always look first how you are for them windows before you begin to breast in your ship to the quay. It was good advice, but one cannot think of everything or foresee contacts of things apparently as remote as stars and hop-holes. CHAPTER 32 The view of ships lying moored in some of the older docks of London has always suggested to my mind the image of a flock of swans kept in the flooded backyard of grim tenement houses. The flatness of the walls surrounding the dark pool on which they float brings out wonderfully the flowing grace of the lines on which a ship's hull is built. The lightness of these forms devised to meet the winds and the seas makes, by contrast with the great piles of bricks, the chains and cables of their moorings appear very necessary as if nothing less could prevent them from soaring upwards and over the roofs. The least puff of wind stealing round the corners of the dock buildings stirs these captives fettered to rigid shores. It is as if the soul of a ship were impatient of confinement. Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become restless at the slightest hint of the wind's freedom. However tightly moored, they range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the spire-like assemblages of cordage and spars. You can detect their impatience by watching the sway of the mast heads against the motionless, the soulless gravity of mortar and stones. As you pass alongside each hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes the sound of angry muttering. But, after all, it may be good for ships to go through a period of restraint and repose, as the restraint and self-communion of inactivity may be good for an unruly soul. Not indeed, that I mean to say that ships are unruly. On the contrary, they are faithful creatures, as so many men can testify. And faithfulness is a great restraint. The strongest bond laid upon the self-will of men and ships on this globe of land and sea. This interval of bondage in the docks rounds each period of a ship's life with the sense of accomplished duty of an effectively played part in the work of the world. The dock is the scene of what the world would think the most serious part in the light-bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there are docks and docks. The ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal, gritty night of a cloud of cold dust. The most important ingredient for getting the world's work along is distributed there under the circumstances of the greatest cruelty needed out to helpless ships. Shut up in the desolate circuit of these basins, you would think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage. But a ship, perhaps because of her faithfulness to men, will endure an extraordinary lot of ill usage. Still, I have seen ships issue from certain docks like half-dead prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, overcome, wholly disguised in dirt, and with their men rolling white eyeballs in black and worried faces raised to a heaven-witch in its smoky and soiled aspect seem to reflect the sordidness of the earth below. One thing, however, may be said for the docks of the port of London on both sides of the river. For all the complaints of their insufficient equipment of their obsolete rules of failure, they say, in the matter of quick dispatch, no ship need ever issue from their gates in a half-fainting condition. London is a general cargo port, as is only proper for the greatest capital of the world to be. General cargo ports belong to the aristocracy of the earth's trading places, and in that aristocracy, London, as it is its way, has a unique physiognomy. The absence of picturesqueness cannot be laid to the charge of the docks opening into the Thames. For all my unkind comparisons to swans and backyards, it cannot be denied that each dock or group of docks along the north side of the river has its own individual attractiveness. Beginning with the cozy little St. Catherine's dock, lying overshadowed in black like a quiet pool amongst rocky crags, through the venerable and sympathetic London docks, with not a single line of rails in the whole of their area, and the aroma of spices lingering between its warehouses, with their far-famed wine cellars, down through the interesting group of West India docks, the fine docks at Blackwall, on past the galleon's reach entrance of the Victoria and Albert docks, right down to the vast gloom of the great basins in Tilbury, each of those places of restraint for ships has its own peculiar physiognomy, its own expression. And what makes them unique and attractive is their common trait of being romantic in their usefulness. In their way, they are as romantic as the river they serve is unlike all the other commercial streams of the world. The coziness of the St. Catherine's dock, the old-ware air of the London docks, remain impressed upon the memory. The docks down the river, a breast of Woolwich, are imposing by their proportions and the vast scale of the ugliness that forms their surroundings. Ugliness so picturesque as to become a delight to the eye. When one talks of the Thames Docks, beauty is a vain word. But romance has lived too long upon this river not to have thrown a mantle of glamour upon its banks. The antiquity of the port appeals to the imagination by the long chain of adventurous enterprises that had their inception in the town and floated out into the world on the waters of the river. Even the newest of the docks, the Tilbury dock, shares in the glamour conferred by historical associations. Queen Elizabeth has made one of her progresses down there, not one of her journeys of pomp and ceremony, but an anxious business progress at a crisis of national history. The menace of that time has passed away and now Tilbury is known by its docks. These are very modern, but their remoteness and isolation upon the Essex march, the days of failure attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air. Nothing in those days could have been more striking than the vast, empty basins surrounded by miles of bare quays and the ranges of cargo sheds where two or three ships seemed lost like bewitched children in a forest of gaunt hydraulic cranes. One received a wonderful impression of utter abandonment, of wasted efficiency. From the first the Tilbury docks were very efficient and ready for their task, but they had come perhaps too soon into the field. A great future lies before Tilbury docks. They shall never fill a long-felt want in the sacramental phrase that is applied to railways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions of books. They were too early in the field. The want shall never be felt because free of the trammels of the tide, easy of access, magnificent and desolate, they are already there, prepared to take and keep the biggest ships that float upon the sea. They are worthy of the oldest river port in the world. And, truth to say, for all the criticisms flung upon the heads of the dock companies, the other docks of the Thames are no disgrace to the town with a population greater than that of some commonwealths. The growth of London as a well-equipped port has been slow while not unworthy of a great capital, of a great centre of distribution. It must not be forgotten that London has not the backing of great industrial districts or great fields of natural exploitation. In this it differs from Liverpool, from Cardiff, from Newcastle, from Glasgow, and therein the Thames differs from the mercy, from the tine, from the Clyde. It is a historical river. It is a romantic stream flowing through the centre of great affairs, and for all the criticism of the river's administration, my contention is that its development has been worthy of its dignity. For a long time the stream itself could accommodate quite easily the overseas and coasting traffic. This was in the days when, in the part called the pool just below London Bridge, the vessels moored stem and stern in the very strength of the tide, formed one solid mass like an island covered with a forest of gaunt leafless trees. And when the trade had grown too big for the river, there came the St. Catherine's Docks and the London Docks, magnificent undertakings answering to the need of their time. The same may be said of the other artificial lakes full of ships that go in and out upon this high road to all parts of the world. The labour of the Imperial Waterway goes on from generation to generation, goes on day and night. Nothing ever arrests its sleepless industry but the coming of a heavy fog which closed the teeming stream in a mantle of impenetrable stillness. After the gradual cessation of all sound and movement on the faithful river, only the ringing of ships' bells is heard, mysterious and muffled in the white vapor from London Bridge right down to the North for miles and miles in a decrescendo tinkling to where the estuary broadens out into the North Sea and the anchored ships lie scattered thinly in the shrouded channels between the sandbanks of the Thames' mouth. Through the long and glorious tale of years of the river's strenuous service to its people, these are its only breathing times. End of Chapter 32