ABSTRACT
I shall focus on three ships and their voyages in particular (as indicated above): the Palestine whose ill-fated voyage formed the basis for 'Youth' (1898) where it is re-named Judea, the Narcissus which appears under its name in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897) and the Otago, whose voyages provided the basis for The Shadow-Line (1917) and other tales. I shall
deal with the first two voyages in reverse order following the sequence in which the texts based on them were written and published. And although The Shadow-Line was written in 1915 (and published in 1917), it should be borne in mind that its original idea belonged to the same phase of Conrad's writing as The Nigger of the 'Narcissus ' and 'Youth' because he mentioned it in a letter to William Blackwood as early as 14 February 1899.4
The Nigger of the 'Narcissus ' (1897)
Korzeniowski joined the Narcissus, a full-rigged iron sailing ship of 1,336 gross tonnage, built in 1876, in Bombay on 28 April 1884. When the Narcissus departed for Dunkirk via the Cape of Good Hope on 5 June it mustered a crew of twenty-four (including a master, a first and a second mate).5 The voyage itself was relatively uneventful if one discounts the facts that the new mate suffered from severe depressions for quite some time, but later recovered,6 and that one of the sailors, Joseph Barron, died near the Azores on 24 September. On 16 October 1884 the Narcissus reached Dunkirk; Korzeniowski signed off the next day.
