INTRODUCTION

Joseph Conrad’s first encounter with the East was dramatic. As he tells it in his semi-autobiographical story ‘Youth’, he went ashore in one of the ship’s boats from the burned-out and abandoned barque Palestine – he calls her Judea – at Muntok in Sumatra, as it was then called (now part of Indonesia), in 1883. In ‘Youth’1 he writes:

I pulled back, made fast again to the jetty, and then went to sleep at last . . . I opened my eyes and lay without moving. And then I saw the men of the east – they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sign, without a movement.2