The Mirror of the Sea

The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of autobiographical essays originally published variously in several magazines between 1904 and 1906. In discussing the work, Conrad described it as "a very intimate revelation . . . of my relation with the sea." Conveyed in his haunting, understated, and incisive prose, Conrad offers poignant and passionate observations on ships and their captains, oceans, hurricanes, departures, landfalls, and the broad range of sea-going topics he became intimately familiar with during the nearly twenty years he spent shipping out as a merchant sailor. The first of two autobiographical accounts, followed by A Personal Record in 1912, it was published to great critical acclaim in 1906 and endures as a classic memoir in literature. It is not the ship that takes her departure; the seaman takes his Departure by means of cross-bearings which fix the place of the first tiny pencil-cross on the white expanse of the track-chart, where the ship’s position at noon shall be marked by just such another tiny pencil cross for every day of her passage. And there may be sixty, eighty, any number of these crosses on the ship’s track from land to land. The greatest number in my experience was a hundred and thirty of such crosses from the pilot station at the Sand Heads in the Bay of Bengal to the Scilly’s light. A bad passage. . .