Published in 1902, this is a novella by Joseph Conrad.

It's my first since The Secret Agent. But now we've adopted a AWIALNTO theme (Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own), and Conrad very much fits in here. Kam Raslan reminds us of his pedigree: "English was Joseph Conrad’s third language, learnt when he became a sailor in his twenties. Polish and French were his first and second languages and yet it was as an author in the English language that he became one of the most famous writers of his age... After his death in 1924 [at the age of 66] his reputation fell away until the literary critic F.R. Leavis’s influential book The Great Tradition (1948) asserted emphatically that 'the greatest novelists in the English language are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad' and that Conrad in particular was 'among the very greatest novelists in the language -- or any language'."


Joseph Conrad

This is also a novel that features our part of the world. Singapore is not named, but all are agreed that it is the "Eastern port" referred to in several Conrad stories, including this one. "Conrad," says Florence Clemens, "has long been respected for the photographic accuracy of his observation and memory... Geographically, Conrad's Malaysia is very nearly perfect... In The End of the Tether the Singapore of Conrad's day appears with maplike precision."

Singapore is the site where Captain Whalley, our protagonist, invests in the Sofala, a rundown steamer owned by the misanthropic Massy. When we meet the captain, he has already been helming this ship for three years, following a never-varying, month-long, circular route. Clemens, in another study, meticulously maps out the terrain: "The Sofala of The End of the Tether plied a route up and down the Malacca Straits stopping at peninsular and Sumatran ports, 'a round of 1600 miles and thirty days'. The names of Captain Whalley's points of trade are on the charts -- Low Cape, Batu Beru, and Malantan on the Sumatran coast, and Malacca, Pangu, and Tenasserim on the mainland... In The End of the Tether Conrad correctly characterizes the Sumatran east coast... It was outside Pangu Bay of the mainland that the Sofala struck a reef and sank. This is at the southern extremity of the Mergui Archipelago... Conrad's Malaysian background is authentic."

According to Ian Burnet, Conrad didn't actually spend much of his sailing career in this region, but it impressed him deeply, to the extent that about half of his output revolves around this part of the world: "This includes five novels and more than a dozen short stories and novellas. Many of them were directly based on his experience as first mate on a ship that sailed regularly from Singapore to a small trading post about 48 km up the Berau River on the east coast of Borneo between 1887 and 1888."

His descriptions of navigation are always evocative. The book opens, for example, like this:

"For a long time after the course of the steamer Sofala had been altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea -- seemed to shatter themselves upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady brightness."


Singapore, 2010. A whole different shipping era...

Anyway, the story... It's intense. So much so that I read it quite slowly, overwhelmed from the get-go by the heavy feeling of fate that suffuses it.

We begin with Captain Whalley, on the bridge of the Sofala. It's soon clear that this monotonous round is a step down in his sailing career. He's in his mid-60s, but in his prime he has sailed much grander vessels on much grander missions. He has long been a widower; and he has one adult daughter, Ivy (whose marriage, to an unlucky man, has not brought the financial security her father would have wished).

During his long years at sea, Whalley built up a record as a highly competent seaman, honourable, incorruptible, and proud. But then he lost a lot of money when a bank collapsed. He refused to be ashamed of this misfortune. Others were no wiser either. But it meant that the Fair Maid, the ship he'd bought "to play with" in his retirement, had to be put to work. Things are no longer the same as they were in his heyday (when are they ever?) What with the Suez canal and a system whereby "ships now had yellow funnels with black tops, and a time-table of appointed routes like a confounded service of tramways", it's a different game, and Whalley is saddened by the smallness of the remittances he is able to send to his daughter.

Even at this point, though, he's on an even keel. Then Ivy writes to him, telling him of her plan to open a boarding-house in Melbourne, for which project she needs GBP 200. Where to get such a sum? Whalley cannot contemplate a refusal, so he decides to sell the Fair Maid. He sends Ivy her GBP 200, which leaves him with GBP 500. He uses it to invest in the Sofala. Which means taking on Massy... Too troublesome to work long for anyone else, Massy had a stroke of luck in the Manila lottery, bought the Sofala, and is his own boss. But he's an engineer by trade, and he needs a captain to sail her. A miserable employer, he has run through captains at the rate of 11 in three years. If he can't get a captain, his business will collapse, which he can't countenance because he's more addicted to the lottery than ever. So Whalley is able to negotiate a fairly sound deal (a share in the profits, and all his money out after three years), but he is utterly reliant on nothing going wrong...

The poor ship is sadly neglected. Massy spends all his profits on lottery tickets, so there's never anything to put into maintenance (Jack, the taciturn, envious, occasionally dead-drunk second engineer, claims that "half the boiler tubes [are] plugged up for leaks", so he daren't set her running at full throttle). But she's solid: "She could always be depended upon to make her courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and steadiness."

When we first see Captain Whalley at work on the deck, aided by his ultra-reliable Malay boatswain, we have the feeling that something is wrong, but we don't know what.

We also rapidly become aware that two of his shipmates are gunning for him. Sterne is the mate, "tall, young, lean, with a mustache like a trooper, and something malicious in the eye". Ambitious. Impatient. Obsequious. "Instinctively disloyal". And he it is who realizes what is going wrong with Whalley... Every day that goes by brings him more proofs.

Massy, the owner, is as damnable a character as it is possible to imagine. He's mean, self-pitying, resentful -- utterly misanthropic in a word. He tries to inveigle Whalley into putting more money into the ship, and will not believe him when he says he has no funds put by. And because Whalley saved him by buying in, he hates him all the more. He too has realized what is going wrong. But "he had not yet given up the desire and the hope of inducing that hated old man to stay". So he plays his cards close to his chest.



I realized the nature of the problem before we're explicity told. Captain Whalley is going blind (why do I now keep butting up against blindness stories...?) Then when I went back, and reread the opening scene, I was amazed how many clues I'd missed... This is written very, very cleverly.

But what to do? If Whalley tells Massy, there's a good chance he'll lose his job -- and his investment (which he sees as money held in trust for Ivy). If he carries on (which he technically can, given the way he is able to partner with his boatswain), he is doing so under false pretences.

There's a solitary Dutchman, Van Wyk, who lives at one of the ports of call. He has a lot of time for Whalley. When Sterne sneaks up, and tells him of Whalley's misfortune, he invites his old friend to dinner, to try to get to the bottom of it all. And Whalley spills the beans. He's mortified; he knows he is acting against his own sense of honour, truth, and pride. But he will not risk losing the nest-egg that he regards as Ivy's. He will keep going one more month.

Van Wyk tries to protect Whalley by suborning Sterne -- suggesting that he will loan Massy money in return for his engaging Sterne, but insisting that Captain Whalley finish his time, thereby foreswearing Sterne to silence.

Massy, by pretending not to know there's anything up with Whalley, thinks he can blackmail him into serving longer, and contributing more funds. But, in an acute attack of frustration, he decides he can't wait that long, and he thinks up a wrecking scheme... Deflecting the needle of the compass by parking a load of iron in its vicinity, he sets the Sofala on a course for disaster.

Too late, Whalley realizes what has happened: "He saw it. Iron near the compass. Wrong course. Wreck her! His ship. Oh no. Not that." The Sofala runs violently aground. Whalley gives orders for a lifeboat to be launched. But he remains immobile: "His thoughts were darker than this night in which he had lost his first ship. 'He made me lose a ship.'"

Initially, Whalley wants to see that Massy is punished. But Massy says Whalley drove him to it: "'I shall go to prison for trying to cheat the insurance, but you’ll get exposed; you, honest man, who has been cheating me. You are poor. Aren’t you? You’ve nothing but the five hundred pounds. Well, you have nothing at all now. The ship’s lost, and the insurance won’t be paid.' Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s money! Gone in this wreck. Again he had a flash of insight. He was indeed at the end of his tether."

He stays on board as the others take to the lifeboat: "For Ivy he had carried his point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a crime. God had not listened to his prayers. The light had finished ebbing out of the world; not a glimmer. It was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley who had gone so far to carry a point should continue to live. He must pay the price." Whalley goes down with his stricken ship.

In the end, with the captain not present to give his damning testimony, an inquiry exonerates everyone. An unusual set of the current is deemed to be the cause of the mishap... Massy skips off to Manila, the insurance money in his pocket...

We close with Van Wyk feeling guilty, wishing he had acted earlier, and Sterne disappointed, his ambition thwarted. Ivy will presumably get her money, duly paid out by the insurance. And Whalley -- though he has avoided the stark choice between living a lie, and thwarting his daughter's fortune by telling the truth -- has found that the end of his tether is death.

But there's one more blow. The novella closes with Ivy receiving the letter Whalley placed with his solicitor in the event of his demise. Given her father's sacrifices, her reaction seems strangely tentative, strangely muted: "Gone! Was it possible? My God was it possible! The blow had come softened by the spaces of the earth, by the years of absence. There had been whole days when she had not thought of him at all -- had no time. But she had loved him, she felt she had loved him, after all." So little, it seems, after so much...



The good and the bad in this book are clearly distinguished for me by the characters' attitude toward the Sofala... Massy has come to hate the ship because she needs repairs, needs coal, fetches in little for her "poor beggarly freights". As soon as they arrive at the last port of call, Massy says he wants to see her go under. Later: "He cursed the Sofala... He was tired of waiting for some chance that would rid him at last of that ship that had turned out a curse on his life... He hated her: he loathed the troubles that took his mind off the chances of fortune. He wished her at the bottom of the sea, and the insurance money in his pocket."

I don't know how anyone can be so mean to a steam engine, to the mechanical invention that is closest to a living organism... Deliberately destroying a steam engine is akin to murder...

For Whalley, on the other hand, "the old ship was his last friend... the best friend of his decline". Through his ears, we hear "all the sounds of her faithful and laborious life".

Whalley, then, is in the good camp... But it's really not as simple as that.

By the time we first meet him, he is behaving in a way his former upright self would find reprehensible. How are we do react to him? Conrad, David Mulry tells us, "bridled at the excessive sentimentalism of the story's contemporary reception". And it is a very complex depiction, far from black and white. On the one hand, it can be said that Whalley is heroic, and blameless. Neither the bank failure nor the blindness can be deemed to be his fault. Yet, "there are, perhaps, overtones of a Lear-like hubris in this tragic tale"; Whalley stakes everything on his endurance. He assumes he will always be able to carry on; he assumes his physical strength will never let him down. We all know how badly wrong that can go...

There's also that relationship to his daughter, Ivy, "who, as has been noted, is appropriately named for her stifling, strangling effect on her father". But what is that paternal love actually? Conrad has told us that Whalley struggles to get his mind around a life without a ship. Is the idea of saving Ivy just a convenient construct that gives him the excuse to carry on when he knows he shouldn't? The narrative closes, says Mulry, on an ironic and disturbing note, "offering the reader no illusion that Whalley's sacrifice was of any substance... That closure is part of the generally nihilistic tone of a text filled with the same kind of darkness as Heart of Darkness."

William Moynihan agrees that Whalley, far from being a sentimental figure, "deserves a place with other notable ironic-tragic Conradian heroes... Whalley is a man of physical strength, not spiritual. When his physical strength is impaired, he is destroyed... The tragedy of Captain Whalley is sealed by neither faith nor love, but by pride. His pride convinced him that God wanted what he wanted."



The other interesting element woven into all this is fate, or luck, or fortune. For Patrick McGrath, luck is Conrad's key theme -- "luck and its lack of any discernible relationship to the moral character of its possessor". Conrad saw life as a series of traps for the unwary: "But just who are 'the unwary,' in Conrad's view? ... For many of Conrad's people who sink into fiery depths, or watery depths, or the depths of despair, being 'unwary' is pretty much the same thing as being alive; and vulnerable, therefore, as much to bad luck as to bad choices." Whalley might not be wholly good, but it's undeniable that he was unlucky. Massy, on the other hand, is the epitome of nastiness, and he ends up lucky... No justice...

*_*_*

I grow more and more interested in Conrad. Yes, he was a man of his times. But his attitude to the colonial reality around him seems nuanced, perhaps -- Douglas Kerr suggests -- because he was Polish, and had experienced at first hand "what powerful nations and material interests could do to weaker peoples". His detached, even marginal, position as a mariner offered him a unique perspective on the imperial age, and he often didn't like what he saw.

In The End of the Tether, Malays are regarded with respect by Whalley (it's people like Sterne and Massy who express derogatory, race-based remarks...) The Malay boatswain, for example, is portrayed as a master at his trade (indeed, for a long time, he's the one whose expertise allows Whalley's secret to be protected).

Kam Raslan comments: "The boat glides slowly past a market. The market people could have been portrayed as grotesque, indolent or, worse still, noble (I have read all in nineteenth-century memoirs), but instead they are seen as simply so very casual and comfortable in their world that the observer (Conrad) tacitly becomes the 'other', intruding on an unhappy boat that barely functions".

Van Wyk, meanwhile, regularly meets with the Sultan, "a restless and melancholy old ruler who had done with love and war, for whom life no longer held any savor (except of evil forebodings) and time never had any value. He was afraid of death, and hoped he would die before the white men were ready to take his country from him."

There's a lot more to explore here, for sure.