Nonfiction · 1906
The Mirror of the Sea
Conrad's own account of twenty years at sea, written as a set of connected essays rather than a memoir. He takes the seaman's working vocabulary and opens it up: what landfall and departure actually mean; why the anchor and the phrase "to let go" carry what they do; the difference between the East and West winds as characters rather than directions; the weight of the burden a shipmaster carries, and the particular loneliness of it. There are set pieces — the loss of the Tremolino off the Spanish coast in his gun-running youth, the ships he served in, the men who handled them well and badly — but the book's subject is craft, and its argument is that a ship is worked, not driven.
Joseph Conrad published The Mirror of the Sea in 1906, his first book of non-fiction, written while he was at work on The Secret Agent. He had commanded at sea himself and left it only a dozen years before.
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About the author
1857–1924 · Victorian
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in what is now Ukraine, to Polish parents exiled for their politics. He went to sea at sixteen, served in French and then British merchant ships for twenty years, rising to master, and began to write in English — his third language — in his late thirties. Almayer’s Folly (1895), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911) are among his works. He lived in the south of England, mostly in Kent, from 1896 until his death.
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