The Mirror of the Sea

‘Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to know.‘ In this volume of essays, more than in any other single work, we get to see clearly just what Joseph Conrad‘s years working on sail-powered ships meant to him — and they certainly meant a great deal to him, for all Conrad‘s subsequent fretting that he might be typed as ‘only‘ a writer of the sea. This collection is particularly renowned for the lengthy episode titled ‘The Tremolino‘, where Conrad gives us, in the character of the real-world Dominic, the model of his fictional Nostromo, as well as an account of personalities and gun-running activities he would later depict in ‘The Arrow of Gold‘.