Joseph Conrad · 1917 · sea
Joseph Conrad's novella, drawn almost directly from his own first and only command. A young officer throws up a good berth on impulse and is handed a ship in Bangkok whose captain died at sea. Getting her down the Gulf of Siam takes weeks: the wind fails, the crew go down with fever, and the quinine in the medicine chest turns out to be a fraud.
- 1Singapore
The narrator resigns a comfortable post for no reason he can explain, and is idling in the Officers' Home when the Harbour Office offers him a command in Bangkok - the thing he has wanted all his life, arriving without warning.
- 2Bangkok
He takes passage up and steps aboard his first ship, and the elation lasts about a week - the cargo delayed, the chief mate certain the dead captain has cursed the vessel, and the crew going down one by one with fever.
- 3The Gulf of Siam
At sea the wind dies completely and the ship lies for days in a flat calm with everyone aboard sick but the captain and the cook - and the bottles marked quinine turn out to have been emptied and sold by the man who died.
- 4Singapore
They make Singapore at last with the crew carried off to hospital, and the young captain signs on new men and sails again next day - across the line the title names, and not the same man who crossed it.