The Mirror of the Sea

The Mirror of the Sea

By Joseph Conrad.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. Author’s Note
5. Epigraph
6. The Mirror of the Sea
   1. Epigraph
   2. Landfalls and Departures
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
   3. Emblems of Hope
      1. IV
      2. V
      3. VI
   4. The Fine Art
      1. VII
      2. VIII
      3. IX
   5. Cobwebs and Gossamer
      1. X
      2. XI
      3. XII
   6. The Weight of the Burden
      1. XIII
      2. XIV
      3. XV
   7. Overdue and Missing
      1. XVI
      2. XVII
      3. XVIII
      4. XIX
   8. The Grip of the Land
      1. XX
      2. XXI
   9. The Character of the Foe
      1. XXII
      2. XXIII
      3. XXIV
   10. Rulers of East and West
       1. XXV
       2. XXVI
       3. XXVII
       4. XXVIII
       5. XXIX
   11. The Faithful River
       1. XXX
       2. XXXI
       3. XXXII
   12. In Captivity
       1. XXXIII
       2. XXXIV
   13. Initiation
       1. XXXV
       2. XXXVI
   14. The Nursery of the Craft
       1. XXXVII
       2. XXXVIII
       3. XXXIX
   15. The Tremolino
       1. XL
       2. XLI
       3. XLII
       4. XLIII
       5. XLIV
       6. XLV
   16. The Heroic Age
       1. XLVI
       2. XLVII
       3. XLVIII
       4. XLIX
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To
Mrs. Katherine Sanderson
whose warm welcome and gracious hospitality
extended to the friend of her son
cheered the first dark days of my parting with the sea
these pages are affectionately inscribed

Author’s Note

Less perhaps than any other book written by me, or anybody else, does this volume require a preface. Yet since all the others including even the Personal Record, which is but a fragment of biography, are to have their Author’s Notes I cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. I can see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task. Necessity⁠—the mother of invention⁠—being even unthinkable in this case, I do not know what to invent in the way of discourse; and necessity being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion I don’t even know how to begin to exert myself. Here, too, the natural inclination comes in. I have been all my life averse from exertion.

Under these discouraging circumstances I am, however, bound to proceed from a sense of duty. This Note is a thing promised. In less than a minute’s time, by a few incautious words I entered into a bond which has lain on my heart heavily ever since.

For, this book is a very intimate revelation; and what that is revealing can a few more pages add to some three hundred others of most sincere disclosures? I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life; went on full of love’s delight and love’s anguish, facing them in open-eyed exultation, without bitterness and without repining, from the first hour to the last.

Subjugated but never unmanned I surrendered my being to that passion which, various and great like life itself, had also its periods of wonderful serenity which even a fickle mistress can give sometimes on her soothed breast, full of wiles, full of fury, and yet capable of an enchanting sweetness. And if anybody suggests that this must be the lyric illusion of an old, romantic heart, I can answer that for twenty years I had lived like a hermit with my passion! Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist as assuredly as it does not exist for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. I am speaking now of that innermost life, containing the best and the worst that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding converse with his kind.

This perhaps is enough for me to say on this particular occasion about these, my parting words, about this, my last mood in my great passion for the sea. I call it great because it was great to me. Others may call it a foolish infatuation. Those words have been applied to every love story. But whatever it may be the fact remains that it was something too great for words.

This is what I always felt vaguely; and therefore the following pages rest like a true confession on matters of fact which to a friendly and charitable person may convey the inner truth of almost a lifetime. From sixteen to thirty-six cannot be called an age, yet it is a pretty long stretch of that sort of experience