Project Gutenberg's The Nigger Of The "Narcissus", by Joseph Conrad

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Title: The Nigger Of The "Narcissus"
A Tale Of The Forecastle

Author: Joseph Conrad

Release Date: February 9, 2006 [EBook #17731]
Last Updated: March 10, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS" ***

Produced by David Widger

THE NIGGER of THE NARCISSUS

A TALE OF THE FORECASTLE

BY JOSEPH CONRAD

COPYRIGHT, 1897, 1914,

BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

TO
EDWARD GARNETT
THIS TALE
ABOUT MY FRIENDS
OF THE SEA

TO MY READERS IN AMERICA

From that evening when James Wait joined the ship--late for the muster
of the crew--to the moment when he left us in the open sea, shrouded in
sailcloth, through the open port, I had much to do with him. He was in
my watch. A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no
chums. Yet James Wait, afraid of death and making her his accomplice was
an impostor of some character--mastering our compassion, scornful of our
sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions.

But in the book he is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship's
collective psychology and the pivot of the action. Yet he, who in the
family circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the
Nigger, remains very precious to me. For the book written round him
is not the sort of thing that can be attempted more than once in a
life-time. It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an
artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to
stand or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound
affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea--the
moulders of my youth, the companions of the best years of my life.

After writing the last words of that book, in the revulsion of feeling
before the accomplished task, I understood that I had done with the sea,
and that henceforth I had to be a writer. And almost without laying down
the pen I wrote a preface, trying to express the spirit in which I was
entering on the task of my new life. That preface on advice (which I now