The Merchant Service: Freedom through Necessity

Abstract

It is significant that it was to W. E. Henley, ‘the patron of Kipling and Stevenson’,¹ that Conrad first sent The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ for publication (in the New Review). Conrad was tapping a strong vein of national sentiment in England in this story (as well as in others of the same kind) and he sensed it. Being the inhabitants of a small island, the sea has acquired a special hold over the English. The sea is also bound up with national identity. The sea has been associated with spectacular national triumphs since the age of Elizabeth I and the success of the Royal Navy has achieved the status of myth. The Navy was the senior service; the Navy was the Royal Navy whereas the Army was the British Army. The Merchant Marine was not as distinguished as the Navy but by 1900, though beaten by the Americans in the early decades of the century, it was the most successful national carrier in the world, servicing half the world’s trade. In such circumstances, it was logical that Conrad’s sea tales were prized, to an extent more than the author liked and to the detriment of interest in his political novels. There were other writers about the sea in Conrad’s day and earlier, in prose and verse — Kipling himself, Captain Marryat and Henry Newbolt among them, but none of Conrad’s calibre.

With Conrad, I’m impressed by the way he questions things, requestions things like action, the morality of action, for instance. This kind of questioning has impressed me a lot because with Conrad I have felt I have come into contact with another whose questioning to me is much more important than the answers which he gives.

(Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in African Writers Talking, eds Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse, 1975 edn.)