Chapter 1
A SMILE OF FORTUNE The First Tale in Twixland and Sea Introduction A SMILE OF FORTUNE By Joseph Conrad
Introduction Ever since the sun rose, I had been looking ahead. The ship glided gently in smooth water. After a sixty days passage, I was anxious to make my landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of the tropics.
The more enthusiastic of its inhabitants delight in describing it as the pearl of the ocean. Well, let us call it the pearl. It's a good name. A pearl, distilling much sweetness upon the world. This is only a way of telling you that first-rate sugarcane is grown there.
All the population of the pearl lives for it and buy it. Sugar is their daily bread, as it were. And I was coming to them for a cargo of sugar, in the hope of the crop having been good and of the freight being high. Mr Burns, my chief mate, made out the land first, and very soon I became entranced by
this blue, pinnacled apparition, almost transparent against the light of the sky, a mere emanation, The astral body of an island risen to greet me from afar. It is a rare phenomenon, such a sight of the pearl, at sixty miles off. And I wondered half seriously whether it was a good omen, whether what would meet me in that island would be as luckily exceptional as this beautiful dreamlike vision so very
few seamen have been privileged to behold. But horrid thoughts of business interfered with my enjoyment of an accomplished passage. I was anxious for success, and I wished to do justice to the flattering latitude of my owner's instructions, contained in one noble phrase, We leave it to you to do the best you can with the ship.
All the world being thus given me for a stage, my abilities appeared to me no bigger than a pinhead. Meanwhile the wind dropped, and Mr Burns began to make disagreeable remarks about my usual bad luck. I believe it was his devotion for me which made him critically outspoken on every occasion.
All the same, I would not have put up with his humours if it had not been my lot at one time to nurse him through a desperate illness at sea. After snatching him out of the jaws of death, so to speak, it would have been absurd to throw away such an efficient officer. But sometimes I wished he would dismiss himself.
We were late in closing with the land, and had to anchor outside the harbour till next day. An unpleasant and unrestful night followed. In this roadstead, strange to us both, Burns and I remained on deck almost all the time. Clouds swirled down the porphyry crags under which we lay.
The rising wind made a great bullying noise amongst the naked spars, with interludes of sad moaning. I remarked that we had been in luck to fetch the anchorage before dark. It would have been a nasty anxious night to hang off a harbour under canvas. But my chief mate was uncompromising in his attitude.
Luck, you call it, sir? Aye, our usual luck. The sort of luck to thank God it's no worse. And so he fretted through the dark hours while I drew on my fund of philosophy. Ah, that it was an exasperating, weary, endless night to be lying at anchor close under that
black coast. The agitated water made snarling sounds all round the ship. At times a wild gust of wind out of a gully high up on the cliff struck on our rigging a harsh and plaintive note like the wail of a forsaken soul. End of introduction
