The Mirror of the Sea

"Yes, Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea – which again suggests the inscrutable blankness – in this case reflecting man back at himself. It was his first memoir, written in 1906, and a bit like Melville he was drawing on personal experience. Conrad was a sailor and of course the sea is the context for many of his stories, but I was particularly interested in this non-fiction book. He’s fascinated by the psychological patterns: departure, how a captain feels when he first goes out to sea, how he refers back to the land. It’s the only book I know that really addresses all those issues head on. Conrad’s also very good on the language of the sea, which is endemic to sailing books. Anyone who’s read the Patrick O’Brian books always comments on the language and is either put off by it – this arcane nautical lexicon – or intrigued by it. I’m intrigued. In fact one of the great pleasures of the sea is that it requires a different language. A ship’s not just different to a land vehicle in shape, it’s different absolutely. And the language reflects that. There’s a phrase Conrad picks up when the anchor is dropped. The captain asks the man at the head, “how did it grow?”, referring to the way the anchor warp goes out from the bow of the ship – at what angle, at what speed. Conrad says no one who hasn’t actually seen the way an anchor warp goes out would understand why the term is used. It’s absolutely precise. Well, both. I mean, you can’t talk about a rope on a ship, because there are sheets and halyards and warps and hawsers and they all do different things. So it’s technically precise. But the reason Conrad’s interested in that particular example is that it has a certain poetry to it. It has the precision of experience. And of course the question itself – “how did it grow?” – has in it the anxiety of seamanship. Anchoring a ship is an anxious business. You’re close to the shore, you don’t know what ground you’re on. It’s a very difficult moment. It’s interesting that in “The Mirror of the Sea”, the concerns and the style are little different from Conrad’s fiction – he’s simply placed the sea and seamanship to the fore."