Thammasat University students who are interested in literature, European history, sociology, anthropology, and related subjects may find it useful to read a story in the Thammasat University Library collection.

Youth is by Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British novelist.

The TU Library collection includes several other volumes by and about Conrad.

Conrad did not speak English fluently until his twenties, but became an author of convincing novels and stories of lasting interest in English.

His books were noted for the tests experienced by characters who were alone in a cruel world.

In Youth, the narrator, a sailor, dreams of visiting Bangkok.

Many of Conrad’s other stories also reflected his own early visits to Siam.

In 1881, struggling in a career as as second mate, Conrad signed on to a small, rickety old barque, the Palestine, for a voyage to Bangkok.

Conrad was not pleased with his new job.

The Palestine left London on 21 September 1881 and sailed north on 28 September.

Conrad later described his adventures on the Palestine, renamed Judea, in his short story Youth (1898), which he was to call “a feat of memory” and “a record of experience.”

Though he preserved the names of the captain and first officer, and though the general course of events and many details correspond with the facts, a number of things are creations of Conrad’s imagination.

The Palestine, carrying a cargo of coal, left Newcastle for Bangkok on 29 November 1881. Crossing the English Channel, she met strong gales, lost a mast, and started to leak.

On 24 December she returned to Falmouth, Cornwall, for repairs.

Conrad nevertheless decided to keep his berth.

Finally after nine months, on 17 September 1882, after leaving London, the Palestine sailed from Falmouth for Bangkok, Siam.

Conrad officially signed off the Palestine on 3 April 1883.

While he looked in vain for a job that would enable him to sail back to Europe, he explored Singapore’s harbor district, which would be the scene for many of his pages. Eventually he returned to England as a passenger on a steamer, reaching London by the end of May.

On 19 January 1888, he was appointed captain of the barque Otago and left by steamer for Bangkok, Siam, where on 24 January he took up his first command.

The Otago, the smallest vessel he had sailed in except for the coaster Vidar, left Bangkok on 9 February.

In the autumn of 1889 Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer’s Folly.

Falk, The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line are three of Conrad’s works which make use of Bangkok and its river as a backdrop.

Conrad often changed aspects of Siam to fit into the fictional narrative he wished to tell.

In The Shadow Line, the narrator struggles against changing winds to bring his ship and its disease-stricken crew into Singapore.

The cruise becomes a test of the narrator’s professional and leadership abilities.

The first geographic alteration by Conrad involves the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, which the narrator crosses on his way to Bangkok as a passenger in a steamship.

Late nineteenth-century pilot guides and travel narratives agree that difficult currents, irregular tides, lack of satisfactory navigational aids, and numerous sunken wrecks made crossing this area risky.

In Falk, another tale set in this area, Conrad describes the true nature of this area as a great nuisance to the shipping.

But in The Shadow Line, this danger goes unmentioned.

Another example of topographical manipulation involves the Paknam pagoda, which the narrator passes on his way up the Chao Phraya River.

The narrator explains how he steamed up the innumerable bends, passed under the shadow of the great gilt pagoda, and reached the outskirts of the town.

In this description, Conrad placed the pagoda near the end of the twenty-five-mile river trip to Bangkok.

Yet in reality, the pagoda lies only three miles from the mouth – and before the many river bends, rather than after them, of the Chao Phraya River.

In addition to relocating the pagoda in The Shadow Line, Conrad also changes its appearance.

In Falk, Conrad conforms to historical accounts when he describes this structure’s shining curves and pinnacles like the gorgeous and stony efflorescence of tropical rocks.

Yet in The Shadow Line, the narrator offers a much shorter description of the pagoda.

By contrast, in describing the passage from the mouth of the Chao Phraya River across the Gulf of Siam to Singapore, he asks advice from a local captain about how to return from Bangkok to Singapore.

The captain calls the gulf a funny piece of water and adds a mysterious warning about the dangers of the gulf’s west side:

Don’t let anything tempt you over. You’ll find nothing but trouble there.

The narrator agrees that the western coast, a place of currents and reefs, should be avoided.

Overall, the gulf is depicted as dangerous, and the atmosphere of dangerous mystery extends over the rest of the narrative.

But in reality, the Gulf of Siam was seen by pilot guides of Conrad’s time as ordinary, and a straightforward approach was considered best for crossing that body of water.

During the November to January northeast monsoon, ships followed the eastern coast.

The May to September southwest monsoon made sailing better along the western shore.

Both seasonal tracks were used as a matter of routine, and the choice of passage depended on seeking favorable winds, rather than avoiding specific hazards.

Conrad made these changes to suit the themes and atmosphere of his fiction.

Ford Madox Ford, a British novelist who helped Conrad to write his first English works, recalled him in a memoir:

He was small rather than large in height; very broad in the shoulder and long in the arm; dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped black beard.

He had the gestures of a Frenchman who shrugs his shoulders frequently.

When you had really secured his attention he would insert a monocle into his right eye and scrutinise your face from very near as a watchmaker looks into the works of a watch. He entered a room with his head held high, rather stiffly and with a haughty manner, moving his head once semi-circularly. In this one movement he had expressed to himself the room and its contents; his haughtiness was due to his determination to master that room, not to dominate its occupants, his chief passion being the realisation of aspects to himself. […]

It was in short the passion of Conrad that you noticed first and that passion he applied to his writing: his darkness, his wide gestures, his eyes in which the light was like the glow of a volcano.

This is not over-writing: his personality deserved these tributes. It was chivalry too. After his discussion with the lady over the divine right of kings he was pale, exhausted, panting almost. That was because he remembered Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie, so ill-clad, so deprived of her children, so pallid and unkempt that to him she was real and he remembered her.

And she was dead and a cheerfully heartless fine-lady should not make fun—which was what it amounted to—of dead queens. Dog should not eat dog; fine ladies in silks should not gnaw the reputations of ladies fine that once wore finer silks and were now dead.

It was the want of imagination in all humanity, thus in little summed up and presented to him, that aroused in him such passion and called for such self-control.

For it is to be hoped that it is apparent that it was only to the writer that the impression remained of tea-cups thrown into the fireplace.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)