Nostromo
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard is a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad, set in the fictitious South American republic of "Costaguana". It was published serially in two volumes of T. P.'s Weekly. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, it is regarded as amongst the best of Conrad's long fiction. Conrad set his novel in the mining town of Sulaco, an imaginary port in the western region of the imaginary country Costaguana. In his "Author’s Note" to early editions of Nostromo, Joseph Conrad provides a detailed explanation of the inspirational origins of his novel. There he relates how, as a young man of about seventeen, while serving aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver"; as Conrad goes on to relate, he forgot about the story until some twenty-five years when he came across a travelogue in a used-book shop in which the author related how he worked for years aboard a schooner whose master claimed to be that thief who had stolen the silver.
Nostromo is set in the South American country of Costaguana, more in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its geography as described in the book resembles real-life Colombia. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny and warfare, but has experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera. Charles Gould is a native Costaguanero of English descent who owns an important silver-mining concession near the key port of Sulaco, he is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, uses his wealth to support Ribiera's government, which he believes will bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, Gould's refurbished silver mine and the wealth it has generated inspires a new round of revolutions and self-proclaimed warlords, plunging Costaguana into chaos. Among others, the forces of the revolutionary General Montero invade Sulaco after securing the inland capital.
Nostromo is an Italian expatriate who has risen to his position through his bravery and daring exploits.. Nostromo's real name is Giovanni Battista Fidanza—Fidanza meaning "trust" in archaic Italian. Nostromo is a commanding figure in Sulaco, respected by the wealthy Europeans and limitless in his abilities to command power among the local population, he is, never admitted to become a part of upper-class society, but is instead viewed by the rich as their useful tool. He is believed by Charles Gould and his own employers to be incorruptible, it is for this reason that Nostromo is entrusted with removing the silver from Sulaco to keep it from the revolutionaries. Accompanied by the young journalist Martin Decoud, Nostromo sets off to smuggle the silver out of Sulaco. However, the lighter on which the silver is being transported is struck at night in the waters off Sulaco by a transport carrying the invading revolutionary forces under the command of Colonel Sotillo. Nostromo and Decoud manage to save the silver by putting the lighter ashore on Great Isabel.
Decoud and the silver are deposited on the deserted island of Great Isabel in the expansive bay off Sulaco, while Nostromo scuttles the lighter and manages to swim back to shore undetected. Back in Sulaco, Nostromo's power and fame continues to grow as he daringly rides over the mountains to summon the army which saves Sulaco's powerful leaders from the revolutionaries and ushers in the independent state of Sulaco. In the meantime, left alone on the deserted island, Decoud loses his mind, he takes the small lifeboat out to sea and there shoots himself, after first weighing his body down with some of the silver ingots so that he would sink into the sea. His exploits during the revolution do not bring Nostromo the fame he had hoped for, he feels slighted and used. Feeling that he has risked his life for nothing, he is consumed by resentment, which leads to his corruption and ultimate destruction, for he has kept secret the true fate of the silver after all others believed it lost at sea, he finds himself becoming a slave of the silver and its secret as he recovers it ingot by ingot during nighttime trips to Great Isabel.
The fate of Decoud is a mystery to Nostromo, which combined with the fact of the missing silver ingots only adds to his paranoia. A lighthouse is constructed on Great Isabel, threatening Nostromo's ability to recover the treasure in secret; the resourceful Nostromo manages to have a close acquaintance, the widower Giorgio Viola, named as its keeper. Nostromo is in love with Giorgio's younger daughter, but becomes engaged to his elder daughter Linda. One night while attempting to recover more of the silver, Nostromo is shot and killed, mistaken for a trespasser by old Giorgio. Nostromo – a charismatic Italian seaman who has settled in Sulaco and established a reputation for leadership and daring. "King of Sulaco" – an Englishman by ancestry and temperament, he is nevertheles
An Outcast of the Islands
An Outcast of the Islands is the second novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1896, inspired by Conrad's experience as mate of a steamer, the Vidar. The novel details the undoing of Peter Willems, a disreputable, immoral man who, on the run from a scandal in Makassar, finds refuge in a hidden native village, only to betray his benefactors over lust for the tribal chief's daughter; the story features Conrad's recurring character Tom Lingard, who appears in Almayer's Folly and The Rescue, in addition to sharing other characters with those novels. It is considered to be underrated as a work of literature for many. Conrad romanticizes the jungle environment and its inhabitants in a similar style to his "Heart of Darkness"; this novel was adapted into the film Outcast of the Islands in 1951 by director Carol Reed, featuring Trevor Howard as Willems, Ralph Richardson as Lingard, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller. The work was quoted in T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. An Outcast of the Islands at Project Gutenberg An Outcast of the Islands at Internet Archive An Outcast Of The Islands public domain audiobook at LibriVox An Outcast of the Islands, Study Guide, with plot, critical summary, resources
Chief mate
A chief mate or chief officer also synonymous with the first mate or first officer, is a licensed member and head of the deck department of a merchant ship. The chief mate is in charge of the ship's cargo and deck crew; the actual title used will vary by ship's employment, by type of ship, by nationality, by trade: for instance, chief mate is not used in the Commonwealth, although chief officer and first mate are. The chief mate answers to the captain for the security of the ship. Responsibilities include the crew's welfare and training in areas such as safety, firefighting and rescue; the Chief Mate, the second in command of the vessel, is equated, in corporate terms, to a senior manager for the operations on board, as the Mate is in charge of a number of departmental functions. In modern cargo vessels, the Mate holds appointments like Head of Deck Department, Head of Cargo/ Stowage Operations, Head of Safety/ Fire Fighting, Head of On-Board Security, Head of Environment and Quality, so forth.
As cargo officer, a chief mate oversees the loading, stowage and unloading of cargoes. Moreover, the chief mate is accountable for the care of cargo during the voyage; this includes a general responsibility for the ship's stability and special care for cargoes that are dangerous, hazardous or harmful. Under the best of conditions, a ship is balanced precariously upon the water and is subject to a number of forces, such as wind and storms, which could capsize it; the cargo officer uses tools like ballasting and load balancing to optimize the ship's performance for the expected type of environment. Traditionally, the chief mate stands a "4-8" watch: from 4 AM until 8 AM and 4 PM until 8 PM. in port and at sea, the chief mate is responsible to the captain for keeping the ship and cargo safe. On watch, the mate must enforce all applicable regulations, such as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea and pollution regulations. In port, the watch focuses on duties such as cargo operations and security watches, monitoring communications and the anchor or mooring lines.
IMO regulations require the officer be fluent in English. This is required for a number of reasons, such as ability to use nautical charts and nautical publications, to understand weather and safety messages, communicate with other ships and coast stations, to be able to work with a multi-lingual crew. At sea, the mate on watch has three fundamental duties: navigate the ship, safely avoid traffic, respond to any emergencies that may arise. Mates stand watch with able seamen who act as helmsman and lookout; the helmsman executes the lookout reports dangers such as approaching ships. These roles are combined to a single helmsman/lookout and, under some circumstances, are eliminated completely; the ability to smartly handle a ship is key to safe watchstanding. A ship's draught, trim and under-keel clearance all affect its turning radius and stopping distance. Other factors include the effects of wind and current, shallow water and similar effects. Shiphandling is key when the need arises to anchor, or to moor the ship.
The officer must be able to transmit and receive signals by Morse light and to use the International Code of Signals. Celestial, terrestrial and coastal navigation techniques are used to fix a ship's position on a navigational chart; the officer directs the helmsman to keep to track, accounting for effects of winds, tides and estimated speed. The officer uses supplemental information from nautical publications, such as Sailing Directions, tide tables, Notices to Mariners, radio navigational warnings to keep the ship clear of danger in transit. Safety demands the mate be able to solve steering control problems and to calibrate the system for optimum performance. Since magnetic and gyrocompasses show the course to steer, the officer must be able to determine and correct for compass errors. Weather's profound effect on ships requires the officer be able to interpret and apply meteorological information from all available sources; this requires expertise in reporting procedures and recording systems.
The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea are a cornerstone of safe watchkeeping. Safety requires that one follows the principles of safe watchkeeping. Maximizing bridge teamwork, including the practice of Bridge Resource Management, is an emerging focus in watchkeeping; the main purpose for Radar and Automatic Radar Plotting Aids on a ship's bridge is to move safely among other vessels. These instruments help to judge information about prominent objects in the vicinity, such as: range, bearing and speed time and distance of closest point of approach course and speed changesThese factors help the officer apply the COLREGS to safely maneuver in the vicinity of obstructions and other ships. Radar has a number of limitations, ARPA inherits those limitations and adds a number of its own. Factors such as rain, high seas, dense clouds can prevent radar from detecting other vessels. Further, dense traffic and course and speed changes can confuse ARPA units. Human errors such as inaccurate speed inputs and confusion between true and relative vectors add to the limitations of the radar/ARPA suite.
Under the best conditions, the radar operator must be able to optimize system settings and detect divergences between an ARPA system and actual conditions. Information obtained from radar and ARPA must be treated with scrut
The Inheritors (Conrad and Ford novel)
The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story is a quasi-science fiction novel on which Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad collaborated. It looks at society's mental evolution and what is gained and lost in the process. Written before the first World War, its themes of corruption and the effect of the 20th Century on British aristocracy appeared to predict history, it was first published in London by William Heinemann and the same year in New York by McClure, Phillips & Co. In the novel, the metaphor of the "fourth dimension" is used to explain a societal shift from a generation of people who have traditional values of interdependence, being overtaken by a modern generation who believe in expediency, callously using political power to bring down the old order, its narrator is an aspiring writer who himself makes a similar transition at a personal level only to feel he has lost everything. The inheritors are a breed of cold materialists, calling themselves Fourth Dimensionists, whose task is to occupy the earth.
An unsuccessful English writer meets a fascinating woman by chance. She claims to be from the Fourth Dimension and a major player in a plan to "inherit the earth", they go their separate ways with her pledge they will meet again. At their next meeting, the woman reveals her "identity" and two others in their circle, one a cabinet minister and Fox, the editor of a new paper – all of them competing with each other, she has taken on his name and pretends to be his sister, invading firstly his down-on-their-luck aristocratic family by financing improvements to their estate, until she moves with his aunt, to Paris. Each time she turns up, she is in greater connection with prominent political people and appears more dazzlingly beautiful and more desirable to Arthur; the authors introduce the story via science fiction tropes such as the uncanny – coincidences, ESP, unearthly lighting effects, distorted visions, supernatural aural frequencies and scenes dissolving into another – pointing to the underlying threat of instability that drives the novel.
The story is told through the eyes of Arthur, a writer turned journalist who feels he is compromising his art. Although Arthur at first holds to high ideals, he moves away from them because he wants to be a somebody. After first compromising his work, obsessed with the woman, he is seduced into thinking that he has a chance with her, he further believes he has a choice between being phased out without making his mark or being "one of them", one of the inner circle who inherits power along with Them. She chooses him for his weaknesses: his sense of failure and impotence as a writer with a need for significance. While her reasons for bringing Arthur into play are not clear at first, they are complex. Arthur is her tool for bringing down her opponent. For the authors, Arthur serves as an observer and an experiment at the hands of the Dimensionists, proving their effectiveness on an individual's psyche; the story is a Machiavellian labyrinth involving the British Government's tenuous support for a railway baron, a bid to annex Greenland, a tilt at party leadership.
Themes of unrealised potential, the cold-blooded manoeuvering, the upward climb of the influential mystery woman, fictionalise the intricacies and interactions of class and power in Britain at the time. Two contrasting mindsets of society are delineated by generational values or lack of them and the changes they portend for the everyday people they rule. By chance Arthur is offered a job writing "atmospheric" pieces for a new journal put together by an editor, a well-respected writer and a Minister for Defence. Although Fox is a Fourth Dimensionist, his group represents the more humanitarian version of the Dimension threesome. Arthur is to write about celebrities. In this way, through his own sense of superiority and lack of sympathy for others, he is drawn into the machinery of politics and the players who aim to inherit the earth. Although he thinks of ways to expose their plan and tries to warn others such as his aunt and Churchill against the woman and Them, he is outwitted; as her brother, people see it as sibling rivalry, contaminated by jealousy, ambition.
His every move outmatched, Arthur lapses into passivity on that front. Instead he tries to win her favour. Using the ploy of hinting that she cares, the woman leads Arthur into believing there's hope if he can impress her; the ailing and exhausted Fox admits his own defeated position, trusting him with editorial power for a few hours. The climax comes when Arthur has the chance to insert an article that would avert history, to stop the presses at The Hour, but with a desire to show how much he is like her kind, to earn her favour, he decides not to. He learns to his dismay that he did just what he was meant to do, undermine Fox – Gurnard's opponent – that he never had a place in her scheme, has betrayed anyone who would have meant anything to him, such as Churchill and Fox. Learning she is marrying a triumphant Gurnard, realising there is no going back and no future for him, he has a minor breakdown at his Club, where people speak of him as "the one they got at"; the Inheritors contains the themes that preoccupied both its authors in their respective bodies of work.
Themes of universality and the corruptibility of human nature, isolation, self-deception, the outworkings of a character's flaws are signatures found throughout most of Joseph Conrad's writings. In Ford Madox Ford's work, both The Good Soldier and Parade's End published much later
Chance (Conrad novel)
Chance is a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1913 following serial publication the previous year. Although the novel was not one upon which Conrad's critical reputation was to depend, it was his greatest commercial success upon initial publication. Chance is narrated by Conrad's regular narrator, Charles Marlow, but is characterised by a complex, nested narrative in which different narrators take up the story at different points; the novel is unusual among its author's works for its focus on a female character: the heroine, Flora de Barral. The narrators describe and attempt to interpret various episodes in the life of Miss de Barral, the daughter of a convicted swindler named Smith de Barral. Miss de Barral leads a sheltered life while her father is prosperous must rely on the generosity of others, who resent her or have agendas for her, before she escapes by marrying one Captain Anthony. Much of the book involves the musing of the various narrators over what she and the Captain expected from this union, what they got from it.
When her father is released from prison, he joins them on ship, the book heads towards its denouement. Chance opened a path to commercial success for Conrad after years of slow obscurity; this success could be measured by the record sales of the book in 1914, which outsold all his previous publications and shot him to fame. Breaking away from tradition, Chance dealt with social issues surrounding feminism and financial speculation, involving Mrs. Fyne and Flora de Barral, as presented by the various narrators; the storyline oscillates between human will and purposeful activity and an opposing "apathetic" force which nullifies the importance of human action. The complex style of Conrad's narrative in this novel invited widespread criticisms from peers and readers alike. Chance at Project Gutenberg Chance public domain audiobook at LibriVox
The Arrow of Gold
The Arrow of Gold is a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1919. It was titled "The Laugh" and published serially in Lloyd's Magazine from December 1918 to February 1920; the story is set in Marseille in the 1870s during the Third Carlist War. The characters of the novel are supporters of Duke of Madrid. Curiously, the novel features a person referred to as "Lord X", whose activities as arms smuggler resemble those of the Carlist politician Tirso de Olazábal y Lardizábal, Count of Arbelaiz; the narrator of The Arrow of Gold is unnamed. The principal theme is a love triangle which comprises the young narrator, Doña Rita and the Confederate veteran Captain Blunt (named for Simon F. Blunt. Doña Rita finances the operations of the narrator's vessel, Tremolino which smuggles ammunition to the Carlist army. Nautical operations are detailed in the Tremolino chapters of The Mirror of the Sea rather than in this novel. Conrad dedicated the novel to his friend and literary assistant Richard Curle. Politics in fiction Third Carlist War Carlism Carlos, Duke of Madrid Tirso de Olazábal y Lardizábal The Arrow of Gold at Project Gutenberg The Laugh in Lloyd's Magazine.
URL http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/conrad/pva47.html
Victory (1919 film)
Victory is a surviving 1919 American drama film directed by Maurice Tourneur and starring Jack Holt, Seena Owen, Lon Chaney, Wallace Beery. The film is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Joseph Conrad; the screenplay was written by Jules Furthman. As described in a film magazine, Axel Heyst, a strange and silent man, forms but one friendship being that of a sailing man without any apparent resources, who rewards this charitable assistance by giving Heyst a half interest in coal deposits on a South Seas island. Difficulties arise which cause Heyst to return to civilization where he meets and rescues from her annoyers Alma, an abused member of a hotel entertainment company, he takes the young woman back with him to the island. It is not in Heyst's nature to love, so there is nothing of sentiment in their relationship. A trio of fortune hunters led by Mr. Jones, hearing tales of Heyst's valuable possessions, come to the island and attempt to take his treasure and the young woman, it is when Heyst discovers his love for Alma.
Heyst triumphs over his persecutors and a happy ending results. Jack Holt as Axel Heyst Seena Owen as Alma Lon Chaney as Ricardo Wallace Beery as August Schomberg Ben Deeley as Mr. Jones Laura Winston as Mrs. Schomberg Bull Montana as Pedro George Nichols as Captain Davidson Victory on IMDb Victory synopsis at AllMovie Dialogue and commentary about the movie at silentsaregolden.com Stills and commentary at Dreamland Cafe
The Secret Sharer public domain audiobook at LibriVox
