Typhoon

Typhoon

Joseph Conrad

The main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the

stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been

written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.

The period is that which follows on my connection with Blackwood's

Magazine. I had just finished writing “The End of the Tether” and was

casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter

form than the tales in the volume of “Youth” when the instance of a

steamship full of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in

northern China occurred to my recollection. Years before I had heard

it being talked about in the East as a recent occurrence. It was for us

merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. Men

earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop,

not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also

because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never

had the time to get acquainted with them. Life, for most of us, is not

so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of

which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary

complication brought into the ship's life at a moment of exceptional

stress by the human element below her deck. Neither was the story itself

ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In that company each of us could

imagine easily what the whole thing was like. The financial difficulty

of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too

simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle talk

for which it was not adapted.

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that

such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient

subject for meditation. Yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all. I

felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent

to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive

that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that

would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.

What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him

I could see that he was the man for the situation. I don't mean to

say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in

contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is

not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. He

is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. Conscious invention

had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never

walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely

difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly

authentic. I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the

story, while I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a

typhoon of my actual experience.

At its first appearance “Typhoon,” the story, was classed by some

critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece. Others picked out

MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention. Neither

was exclusively my intention. Both the typhoon and Captain MacWhirr

presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction

with which I approached the subject of the story. It was their

opportunity. It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to

discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages

themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for

themselves.

Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in

the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his

mind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity;

it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary,

irresponsive, and unruffled.

The only thing his aspect might have been said to suggest, at times, was

bashfulness; because he would sit, in business offices ashore, sunburnt

and smiling faintly, with downcast eyes. When he raised them, they were

perceived to be direct in their glance and of blue colour. His hair was

fair and extremely fine, clasping from temple to temple the bald dome

of his skull in a clamp as of fluffy silk. The hair of his face, on the

contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped

short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved,

fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the

surface of his cheeks. He was rather below the medium height, a bit

round-shouldered, and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked a

shade too tight for his arms and legs. As if unable to grasp what is due

to the difference of latitudes, he wore a brown bowler hat, a complete

suit of a brownish hue, and clumsy black boots. These harbour togs gave

to his thick figure an air of stiff and uncouth smartness. A thin silver

watch chain looped his waistcoat, and he never left his ship for the

shore without clutching in his powerful, hairy fist an elegant umbrella

of the very best quality, but generally unrolled. Young Jukes, the chief

mate, attending his commander to the gangway, would sometimes venture

to say, with the greatest gentleness, “Allow me, sir”--and possessing

himself of the umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferule, shake

the folds, twirl a neat furl in a jiffy, and hand it back; going through

the performance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon

Rout, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight,

would turn away his head in order to hide a smile. “Oh! aye! The blessed

gamp. . . . Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank 'ee,” would mutter Captain MacWhirr,

heartily, without looking up.

Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day,

and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same

cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior

who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship

Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.

It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as

it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing

except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools. Yet the

uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the

bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in Captain

MacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could

have induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in

Belfast to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the

age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the

idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap

of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and

setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable

goals and in undreamt-of directions.

His father never really forgave him for this undutiful stupidity. “We

could have got on without him,” he used to say later on, “but there's

the business. And he an only son, too!” His mother wept very much after

his disappearance. As it had never occurred to him to leave word behind,

he was mourned over for dead till, after eight months, his first letter