ABSTRACT
The uncle adds that he cannot consider meeting his nephew abroad. The harbor master sent for him and after a brief conversation entrusted him with the command of a British ship then in the port of Bangkok, whose captain had just died. The port authorities of Singapore had appointed Joseph Conrad ex officio to the command of the Otago, left without a master by the sudden death of her captain. The new captain must have been profoundly shocked by his predecessor’s betrayal of the principles and long traditions of the community of ship captains into which he himself had just been initiated, but he had little time to think of the faults of the dead: he had to see to the needs of the living. The cargo was held up; the delay went from bad to worse, and each day’s delay brought a new outbreak of fever in the crew.
