At Sea With Joseph Conrad

By MAYA JASANOFFAUG. 7, 2015

THE tall ship Corwith Cramer stumbled into the Celtic Sea, engine roaring, 7,500 square feet of sail furled up mute. Its two masts ticked against the horizon like a metronome set to allegro. I joined a row of pallid sailors crouched at the leeward rail. Foam-lathered swell swung for my face, then reeled abruptly away. By the third time I threw up over the side, the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s poetry just looked like the basin of a billion vomits.

Misery loves blame, so I blamed Joseph Conrad, whose fiction had brought me here. Before Conrad published his first novel in 1895, he spent 20 years working as a merchant sailor, mostly on sailing ships, and fully half his writing — including “Heart of Darkness,” “Lord Jim” and “The Secret Sharer” — deals with sailors, ships and the sea. These loom so large for him that as I have researched a book about Conrad’s life and times, I have felt it essential to travel by sea myself.

I had already taken passage from China to England on a giant container ship, tracing a historic route with the comforts of a queen-size bed, round-the-clock hot water and a mass of steel as big as the Empire State Building between me and the sick-making swell. But the more I read Conrad, the more I realized that I had to get on a tall ship like the ones he knew best, and experience its unique ways of moving, working and speaking.

Joseph Conrad, right.CreditCulture Club/Getty Images

The brigantine Corwith Cramer, 134 feet from bowsprit to boomkin, is registered as a “sailing school vessel” and offers hands-on courses for college students in seamanship and the marine environment. Its operators, the Sea Education Association, generously let me hitch a ride on the first leg of the Corwith Cramer’s summer cruise along Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, from Cork to Brittany.

By “cruise” I don’t mean a pleasure cruise. For the 12 bright, game students who boarded with me in Cork, this was a floating boot camp. Under the patient instruction of 13 professional crew members, the students plunged into a grueling schedule of round-the-clock watch duty, hauling and heaving lines, setting and striking sails, scrubbing dishes and floors. They were learning the ropes just as Conrad did, 140 years ago.

It’s hard to think of a less relevant skill in today’s job market than knowing your jib halyard from your main sheet. The truth is, these skills were already becoming obsolete when Conrad went to sea in the 1870s. Oceangoing steamships were the way of the future: bigger, faster, more reliable.

Steamers needed engineers in place of sailmakers, firemen to shovel coal into boilers, not leather-palmed shellbacks to hand, reef and steer. Because steamships also had much higher cargo capacity than sailing ships, the total number of British ships — and jobs — went down, even as the volume of trade increased. Conrad consistently took positions below his certified rank, on poorly paid and uncomfortable routes.

By the early 1900s, steamships outnumbered sail on the high seas, and the “age of sail” passed into memory like a beloved grandmother. Conrad published an elegy of sorts with a book of essays called “The Mirror of the Sea” (1906). The sailing ship floats over its pages as an ethereal ghost of “cobwebs and gossamer,” drawing “its strength from the very soul of the world.”

But Conrad wasn’t being emptily nostalgic. He recognized that technological progress, for all its much-heralded benefits, comes with social and ethical costs. To operate a sailing ship was to master a “craft.” You had to observe and interpret nature, adapt and react to fast-changing conditions, obey without question, decide without doubt, toil without pause. The craft connotes more than a clutch of skills; it is a code for how to live. It turns a sailing ship into a “fellowship,” a community forged by shared values.

“The taking of a modern steamship about the world,” by contrast, “has not the same quality of intimacy with nature,” Conrad insisted. “It has no great moments of self-confidence, or moments not less great of doubt and heart-searching.” It lacks “the artistic quality of a single-handed struggle with something much greater than yourself.”

ANYTIME Conrad sets a story on a steamship, you can be pretty sure something will go wrong. It certainly did for him. In 1890, with good berths harder and harder to come by, Conrad signed a three-year contract with a Belgian company to captain steamboats on the Congo River. Europeans regarded steamships as engines of civilization: They opened the interior of Africa to Western products and ideals.

But when Conrad arrived in Congo, he quickly discovered that the rhetoric of progress and civilization masked a colonial regime of appalling rapacity and violence. After just one trip upriver, he resigned in disgust. “Everything here is repellent to me. Men and things, but men above all.” Conrad returned to Europe in the grip of near-suicidal depression, and never sailed the same way again.

Conrad recast his experience in the novella “Heart of Darkness” (1899), in which a veteran sea captain, Charlie Marlow, describes his journey up a river in Africa to fetch the rogue agent of an ivory-trading company. Bit by bit, Marlow registers the hypocrisy and senseless violence of European activity. At one point en route, he hears what he thinks are war cries from the banks, but then realizes they are a lament: “The glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief.” That is because they know that a steamship spells their subjugation.

Toward the end of the trip, Marlow stops at a riverside hut. Inside, he discovers, of all things, a book. “It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, ‘An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship,’ by a man Tower, Towson — some such name — Master in his Majesty’s Navy” and it “was sixty years old” — a relic from the golden age of sail. Marlow loses himself in its pages as if in “the shelter of an old and solid friendship.” It “made me forget the jungle,” and imparted “a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.” The manual has no practical relevance for a Congo steamship, but it reminds Marlow of something more essential: the ethics of sail he fights to uphold in the savage world of steam.

When I lurched belowdecks on the Corwith Cramer, my stomach voided, I found it hard to credit Conrad’s enthusiasm for the sailing ship. It was rank, dank, dark, cramped and besides, as the engine ceaselessly screamed, the sails weren’t getting us anywhere. Seawater frothed like spinning laundry against a porthole. I focused on the rusty beads of water gathering on the ceiling of my bunk. On the first mate’s advice, I had duct-taped “Baby Sesame Street”-themed diapers over the rafters to catch the drips. I dozed off wondering how anyone had figured out how to draw a recognizably juvenile Muppet.

Then came the calm. The motor snapped off. My eyes, knees and stomach all fit in the same, stable body. When I went up on deck, I saw a sprightly team of students setting sails. We moved by the power of nature and muscle, and a craft refined over centuries.

I disembarked from the Corwith Cramer knowing things I had not appreciated otherwise. I learned that to stay on course at the helm you have to watch the horizon more than the compass. I learned that sails balance a ship, so much so that oceangoing steamships carried rigs for stability long after they used them for auxiliary power. I learned how to steady myself by swinging like the gimbaled tables in the saloon, which seesawed wildly with the ship’s roll while plates and glasses didn’t budge.

Sailing in Conrad’s tracks has made me think afresh about progress and obsolescence. When I hear people say that everything’s changed (or should) in the digital age, I look at the ocean. The 21st-century economy depends more than ever on ships, which carry 90 percent of global trade. Sending data “into the ether” often means sending it through cables laid across the sea floor, just like the telegraph.

The ocean also shows the failures of progress. It is where thousands of refugees drown trying to reach prosperity. It is where slavery and piracy flourish in the face of modern law. It is where industrial chemicals and plastics pollute and destroy ecosystems.

And it is where, with rising sea levels, the planet pays us back even beyond Conrad’s imagination for our embracing fossil fuels over the enduring benefits of sail.