He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head
forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging
bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of
dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed
a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at
anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white
from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his
living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.

A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun,
but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically.
His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain
cheerily, forcing upon him a card--the business card of the
ship-chandler--and on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but
without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things
that are eaten and drunk on board ship; where you can get everything
to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her
cable to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where
her commander is received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never
seen before. There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars,
writing implements, a copy of harbour regulations, and a warmth of
welcome that melts the salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's
heart. The connection thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship remains
in harbour, by the daily visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he
is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience
of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon
companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane
occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk
who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the advantage of having
been brought up to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money
and some humouring. Jim had always good wages and as much humouring
as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with black
ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart. To his
employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate. They said
'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back was turned. This was their
criticism on his exquisite sensibility.

To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships
he was just Jim--nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he
was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had
as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a
fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave
suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to
another--generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a
seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is
good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good
order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but
inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in
Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia--and in each of
these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his
keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports
and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle
village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a
word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as
one might say--Lord Jim.

Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father
possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the
righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind
of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The
little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a
ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees
around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the
red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of
grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back,
a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses
tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for
generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of
light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself,
he was sent at once to a 'training-ship for officers of the mercantile
marine.'

He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant
yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation
and pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an
excellent physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the
fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a
man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude
of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered
on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose
perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and
belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing,
the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats
floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the
distance, and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.

On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light
literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting
away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a
lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs
in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on
tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat
upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men--always an example
of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.

'Something's up. Come along.'

He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above
could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got
through the hatchway he stood still--as if confounded.

It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon,
stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the strength of a
hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing
over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided,
and between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide,
the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless
buildings in the driving mist, the broad ferry-boats pitching
ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages heaving up and down and
smothered in sprays. The next gust seemed to blow all this away. The
air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a
furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of
earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath
in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.

He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A coaster
running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and one
of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys clambered
on the rails, clustered round the davits. 'Collision. Just ahead of us.
Mr. Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger against the mizzen-mast, and
he caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship chained to her moorings
quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind, and with her scanty
rigging humming in a deep bass the breathless song of her youth at sea.
'Lower away!' He saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly below the rail,
and rushed after her. He heard a splash. 'Let go; clear the falls!' He
leaned over. The river alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter
could be seen in the falling darkness under the spell of tide and wind,
that for a moment held her bound, and tossing abreast of the ship.
A yelling voice in her reached him faintly: 'Keep stroke, you young
whelps, if you want to save anybody! Keep stroke!' And suddenly she
lifted high her bow, and, leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke
the spell cast upon her by the wind and tide.

Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 'Too late, youngster.' The captain
of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on the
point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious
defeat in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically. 'Better luck
next time. This will teach you to be smart.'

A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full of
water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom boards.
The tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared very contemptible
to Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their inefficient menace.
Now he knew what to think of it. It seemed to him he cared nothing for
the gale. He could affront greater perils. He would do so--better than
anybody. Not a particle of fear was left. Nevertheless he brooded apart
that evening while the bowman of the cutter--a boy with a face like
a girl's and big grey eyes--was the hero of the lower deck. Eager
questioners crowded round him. He narrated: 'I just saw his head
bobbing, and I dashed my boat-hook in the water. It caught in his
breeches and I nearly went overboard, as I thought I would, only old
Symons let go the tiller and grabbed my legs--the boat nearly swamped.
Old Symons is a fine old chap. I don't mind a bit him being grumpy with
us. He swore at me all the time he held my leg, but that was only his
way of telling me to stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully
excitable--isn't he? No--not the little fair chap--the other, the big
one with a beard. When we pulled him in he groaned, "Oh, my leg! oh,
my leg!" and turned up his eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting like
a girl. Would any of you fellows faint for a jab with a boat-hook?--I
wouldn't. It went into his leg so far.' He showed the boat-hook, which
he had carried below for the purpose, and produced a sensation. 'No,
silly! It was not his flesh that held him--his breeches did. Lots of
blood, of course.'

Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered to
a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry with
the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking
unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes. Otherwise he was
rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement
had served the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who
had done the work. When all men flinched, then--he felt sure--he alone
would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He
knew what to think of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible.
He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of
a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of
boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and
in a sense of many-sided courage.

Meet Jim, a young guy who works as a "water-clerk" at various ports in Southeast Asia. That means that he helps ships get situated with fresh drinking water and other supplies before they head out to sea. Jim is good-looking and fairly popular, but people don't seem to know much about him. Good thing our narrator is in the know, and can give us the details. Flashback alert: Jim grew up in a parsonage in England. Because he was a younger brother, he had no shot at inheriting his family's land, so he opted to become a sailor. Maybe he saw this gem and couldn't resist joining up. The early part of Jim's career goes pretty well, except for one night when he misses an opportunity to help rescue some people at sea.

Jim was an impressive young man -- about six feet tall and powerfully built -- extremely intense, self-assertive, and lways dressed in spotless white. He was a popular and successful water-clerk -- that is, he competed against all the other water-clerks in port to be the very first man to greet a newly docked sea captain and steer him to a vast supply store filled with all the items that a ship would need for its next voyage. While the ship remained docked, Jim had to court, cajole, and serve the captain as a loyal friend and as a patient, good-natured companion so that the captain would spend a great deal of money at the ship-chandler's. Jim always drew good wages, but he never stayed at one port for very long; he had "something of the unknown" about him, something that set him apart, something which Conrad calls "an exquisite sensibility." We are also told that for many years, Jim went by only one name -- Jim -- because he wanted to hide a "fact" about himself and when that "fact" surfaced in seaport gossip, Jim would leave town very suddenly, always traveling "farther east," toward the rising sun. It was while Jim was working among the Malays that he acquired the other half of the name by which men would know him. The natives dubbed him "Tuan Jim," or Lord Jim. Seemingly, Jim became interested in sailing and adventure as a young boy, because one day, after reading some "light holiday literature," presumably about sailing, he immediately decided that the sea would be his vocation. Not long afterward, he was sent to a "training ship for officers." He was generally well-liked at the school; he was cool-headed, clever, and had an enviable physique. His job stationed him at the ship's fore-top, from which he could scan the surroundings and look down at the other boys, as if from a very privileged distance. From his high post, Jim daydreamed that he was being readied for a heroic "role"; he romantically envisioned himself rescuing people from hurricanes and then surviving half-naked on a deserted island. He saw himself quelling tempers and putting down inflamed mutinies. In his dreams, he was always the essence of fidelity and duty. One winter's day at dusk, Jim heard a call to help a coaster which had crashed into a schooner. He stopped and held his breath in awe while the other boys clamored over the rails and were lowered away. Jim was half-ready to leap overboard when the captain unexpectedly gripped his shoulder. "Too late, youngster," he said. "Better luck next time." Later the other boys, particularly one boy with "a face like a girl's," loudly celebrated their successful rescue of the victims of the collision. The pretty young boy -- and not Jim -- was the hero of the evening. Jim pondered over his failure to act, his hesitating too long. Why hadn't he acted? Next time, he vowed to himself, he would act faster and better than anyone, but this time, why should he have risked life and limb for such a trivial "rescue effort"? He breathed deeply, eager for a new challenge that would be worthy of him.

Our first view of Lord Jim, the protagonist of the novel, is that of a dedicated and moral person; consequently, we are immediately aware that this novel will deal with moral and ethical issues. Many critics refer to this novel as an "impressionistic" novel because we are given the impression of a man who, at three critical times in his life, is faced with a difficult choice, and, each time, he chooses incorrectly. First, he must choose whether, as a cadet, he will join in rescuing a sinking ship; he doesn't. Second, he must choose whether or not to jump from the sinking Patna, leaving 800 pilgrims to drown; he jumps. Third, he must choose whether or not to have Gentleman Brown killed; he chooses not to. In each case, because of his romantic illusions, Lord Jim makes the wrong decision and we see how these wrong decisions affect him. Throughout this novel, we are constantly reminded that Jim is "one of us" -- that what Lord Jim does is probably what most of us would do under the same circumstances, and until we are confronted with a similar situation, we do not know whether or not we also would "Jump." As the critic Albert Guerard states, "The universality of Lord Jim is even more obvious, since nearly everyone has jumped off some Patna and most of us have been compelled to live on, desperately or quietly engaged in reconciling what we are with what we would like to be." The first four chapters of the novel offer a view of Jim from the omniscient author's  point-of-view. The rest of the novel presents views of Jim from Marlow's point-of-view, as well as additional points-of-view from Jim's father's letter, from documents, and from Gentleman Brown's account of Jim. Significantly, also, these first four chapters show us Jim's early life and the influence of "light holiday reading" on him, his heroic dreams, a key incident in his sea training, his accident, the voyage of the Patna up until the moment when the ship strikes a submerged wreck, and a portion of the courtroom scene where the accused is being questioned. In Chapter 1, we are given a physical description of Jim; he is an ideal specimen of humanity -- tall, handsome, powerfully built, clean cut, and apparently popular. Then Conrad offers us the first incongruity -- Jim, as a water-clerk for a ship-chandler, is outstanding in this position  until unexpectedly "he would throw up the job and depart." Likewise, if anyone found out his last name, he would leave immediately. Already, then, Conrad lets us know that there is "something unknown" about Jim's past which caused him to act mysteriously and erratically. Later, Jim will be seen, by Stein and others, as a romantic, and Conrad lets us know that Jim's love of the sea was a result of "light holiday reading." Even in training, Jim tried to see "himself saving people from sinking ships. . . . in a hurricane swimming through a surf," and performing all sorts of heroic and romantic deeds, living more in the world of fantasy than in reality. Reality intruded into Jim's dreams, however, when he failed his first test of courage. All the other cadets rushed to the aid of a sinking ship, but Jim remained aboard ship -- almost paralyzed. Too late, he tried to join the others. After the others returned, Jim fantasized that next time he would perform greater feats of heroism. Thus, Jim failed his first test and resorted again to dreaming about acts of courage.

The novel opens with a detailed description of Jim. He is an inch or two short of six feet, is powerfully built, and has a slight stoop. He walks with his head forward and looks with a stare, almost like a charging bull. He is intense by nature, and his voice is deep and loud. He is very neat and clean and always dresses in absolute white from his shoes to his hat. In the beginning of the novel, he is a water-clerk. His job is to greet the captain of an incoming vessel and persuade him to come to a supply store that provides for a ship's needs. During the captain's stay, Jim is expected to entertain him and become his friend, so the captain will want to spend a lot of money in the store. Jim displays good manners and patience in carrying out his duties. As a result, he is very popular with the various captains. Jim, however, is a restless young man. He never stays in one port for very long. When people begin to know him too well or mention his past, he leaves very quickly. Jim is from a parsonage, one of five sons. At an early age, he decides he wants to make a living on the sea. He is sent to a ship for training, where he proves that he is calm and clever. On the boat, Jim feels himself to be an outstanding sailor and is confident about dealing with storms and winds in the high sea. He dreams of rescuing people from sinking ships and becoming a hero. One day while on board ship, a schooner collides with a coaster nearby. The other boys immediately jump overboard to help in the rescue effort. Jim, however, hesitates. When he finally gains enough courage to go and help, he is stopped by the captain who tells him he is too late. When the other boys return from their rescue efforts as heroes, Jim is forced to think about his hesitation, his failure. He promises himself that next time hewill act faster.

Notes The first chapter is an introduction to Jim, the protagonist of the novel. He is described in almost perfect terms. He is handsome, well built, clever, self-confident, neat, clean, and popular. He is always dressed in white, a symbol of cleanliness and purity. He is also a romantic thinker, whose love of the sea has come from reading tales of adventure. Conrad hints that his romanticism is a negative trait for him. As a young man, Jim imagines himself becoming a hero capable of managing the high seas and rescuing people from sinking ships. Ironically, while in training to become a sailor, there is a shipwreck nearby. Jim does not immediately jump overboard to help in the rescue effort like the other boys; he does not have the courage to act. When he finally decides to join them, it is too late. He is perplexed by his hesitation and tries to excuse it by saying that the next mishap will be worthy of his efforts and he will perform heroically. Unfortunately, such never happens in the course of the novel. Jim's first reaction to a tragic event foreshadows his future reactions. Until the very end of the novel, he never has the correct response; he never lives up to the noble image presented of him in this first chapter of the book and he miserably fails to act like a hero on most occasions. There is another incongruity about Jim presented in this chapter. As a water-clerk, he earns good wages and is well liked by the captains of the ships that he must entertain. In spite of his occupational success, he never stays in one place too long. If anyone finds out about his past or even calls him by his last name, he leaves town immediately. This lack of stability creates an aura of mystery about Jim; he seems to be hiding from something in his past. Conrad writes with vivid descriptions throughout the novel. As a lover of the sea, he brings the ocean to life. In this opening chapter, he descries the "trembling tide" and "the driving mist." Through his imagery, he makes the reader see, hear, and feel the setting. He also alternates the use of light and darkness in the chapter.


After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so
well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure.
He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between
sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the
sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread--but
whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded
him. Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing,
disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his
prospects were good. He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a
thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he
became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by
those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of
a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal
the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not
only to others but also to himself.

Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the earnestness in
the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people
might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and
gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of
facts a sinister violence of intention--that indefinable something which
forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication
of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose
of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty
that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his
fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to
annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is
priceless and necessary--the sunshine, the memories, the future; which
means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by
the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of which his
Scottish captain used to say afterwards, 'Man! it's a pairfect meeracle
to me how she lived through it!' spent many days stretched on his back,
dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an
abyss of unrest. He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid
moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has
the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and
Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated,
sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing
but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the
midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on
deck. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip
him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the
unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such
sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost.
Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about It.

His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at an
Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow, and he
was left behind.

There were only two other patients in the white men's ward: the purser
of a gunboat, who had broken his leg falling down a hatchway; and a kind
of railway contractor from a neighbouring province, afflicted by
some mysterious tropical disease, who held the doctor for an ass, and
indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medicine which his Tamil
servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devotion. They told each other
the story of their lives, played cards a little, or, yawning and in
pyjamas, lounged through the day in easy-chairs without saying a word.
The hospital stood on a hill, and a gentle breeze entering through the
windows, always flung wide open, brought into the bare room the softness
of the sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the
Eastern waters. There were perfumes in it, suggestions of infinite
repose, the gift of endless dreams. Jim looked every day over the
thickets of gardens, beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of
palms growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare
to the East,--at the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by
festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its brilliant activity resembling
a holiday pageant, with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead
and the smiling peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space as far as
the horizon.

Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the town to
look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing offered just then, and,
while waiting, he associated naturally with the men of his calling in
the port. These were of two kinds. Some, very few and seen there but
seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the
temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live
in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of
civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the
only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable
certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself,
thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country
ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder
conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They
were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They
loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the
distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work,
and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal,
always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs,
half-castes--would have served the devil himself had he made it easy
enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got
charge of a boat on the coast of China--a soft thing; how this one had
an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the
Siamese navy; and in all they said--in their actions, in their looks, in
their persons--could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the
determination to lounge safely through existence.

To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more
unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a fascination
in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing so well on
such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside the original
disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly, giving up
the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the Patna.

The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank. She
was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort
of renegade New South Wales German, very anxious to curse publicly
his native country, but who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck's
victorious policy, brutalised all those he was not afraid of, and wore a
'blood-and-iron' air,' combined with a purple nose and a red moustache.
After she had been painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred
pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with
steam up alongside a wooden jetty.

They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by
faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp
and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and
when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed
forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner
recesses of the ship--like water filling a cistern, like water flowing
into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the
rim. Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections
and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south
and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths,
descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in
small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting
strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They
came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous campongs, from
villages by the sea. At the call of an idea they had left their forests,
their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity,
their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their
fathers. They came covered with dust, with sweat, with grime, with
rags--the strong men at the head of family parties, the lean old men
pressing forward without hope of return; young boys with fearless eyes
glancing curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long hair; the timid
women muffled up and clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of
soiled head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of
an exacting belief.

'Look at dese cattle,' said the German skipper to his new chief mate.

An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He walked slowly
aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large turban. A string
of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the Patna cast off and
backed away from the wharf.

She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the
anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in the
shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming reefs. The
Arab, standing up aft, recited aloud the prayer of travellers by sea.
He invoked the favour of the Most High upon that journey, implored His
blessing on men's toil and on the secret purposes of their hearts; the
steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the Strait; and far astern
of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on
a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as if in
derision of her errand of faith.

She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way through
the 'One-degree' passage. She held on straight for the Red Sea under a
serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor
of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all
impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of
that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir,
without a ripple, without a wrinkle--viscous, stagnant, dead. The
Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain, luminous and smooth,
unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the
water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of
a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.

Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the
progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly
at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon,
pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the
men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea
evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her
advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from
the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from
stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone
revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the
ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one
into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake
of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her
steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if
scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.

The nights descended on her like a benediction.

A few years later we catch up with Jim who is now serving as a mate aboard a nice ship. During rough weather, Jim gets whacked by a falling spear. Ouch. The injured Jim has to go to the hospital and gets left behind by his ship. Not cool, mates. After his stint at the hospital, Jim takes an easier job aboard the Patna, " a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank." . Sounds charming. Appearances aside, life on the Patna is pretty easy for Jim. The crew is an international hodgepodge of dudes who don't care to work all that hard, so there's no need to impress. The Patna is ferrying a large group of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, in nice, warm weather. All is well.

After two years of naval training, Jim's dreams of romance seemingly became reality. While still a young man, he was assigned to be the chief mate of a fine ship, but it was soon apparent that his new job was both monotonous and barren. Yet, curiously, Jim was addicted, "enslaved," as it were, to life at sea. Jim loved the sea because he felt constantly challenged by its savage capriciousness. He felt that at any time, he could triumph over its untamed power. Ironically, he had never been tested by the sea; only once, in fact, had he glimpsed the sea's "sinister something," that power which reveals that the sea can, if it chooses, smash, destroy, and annihilate everything, including Jim's individual and unique life. During the single time that Jim witnessed the deadly fury of the sea, he was wounded. A heavy spar from the ship's mast fell on him from high up. As he lay on his back, he felt pleased that he didn't have to be on deck during the storm. Then he was swept with guilt. When fine weather returned, Jim was taken to a hospital in Singapore. His recovery was slow, and his ship sailed without him. At first, Jim was wary and disdainful of Singapore's "bewitching breath" which seemed to smell of softness and decay. And yet Jim was increasingly fascinated by the white men whom he saw. He realized that unlike the heroic figures of his romantic dreams, these men "did well" on a very small allowance of danger and work. Suddenly, he decided not to go home. He accepted the position of chief mate on the Patna, an old, rusty steamer which was owned by a Chinese, chartered by an Arab, and captained by a "blood-and-iron" German, steering toward various holy places with 800 ragged, hopeful, and meek Moslem pilgrims crowded into every crevice and cranny.

The actual day-to-day routine of being first mate was "strangely barren" and dully monotonous; it contrasted significantly with Jim's romantic dreams and fantasies. Jim's injury served merely to place him in a hospital in an "Eastern port"  where he was in danger of "lounging through the days in easy chairs . . . with eternal serenity." Thus, he determined to take the first available passage out and, consequently, he signed on as first mate on the Patna, a rusty, old dilapidated steamer, "eaten with rust worse than a condemned water-tank." It was commanded by an incompetent, disreputable captain and a crew from which Jim stood out; he was too "perfect." Conrad's description of the ship and the captain portends that this ship is unsafe and that an unfortunate incident is imminent. Reading the description of the pilgrims boarding the ship, one is reminded of cattle being blindly herded and crowded into small, unclean quarters. The German captain's view of the pilgrims as "cattle" emphasizes his disgust with them and justifies, in his mind, his later desertion of them to seemingly certain death -- a view that completely separates him from Jim, who is deeply and profoundly affected by his actions. Jim's jumping from the Patna controls the rest of his life. Concerning the episode of the Patna and the pilgrims, Conrad is basing this part of Lord Jim upon an actual event. The actual ship was named the Jeddah, and it was loaded with about 1,000 pilgrims. When it almost foundered, the ship was abandoned by the captain and the crew, who were picked up by a steamship and taken to the port of Aden, where they reported the "loss" of their ship. The next day, the Jeddah was towed into the port of Aden with all of her pilgrim/passengers still on board. This was a naval scandal, and the disgrace became widely known throughout the nautical world, causing horrendous gossip and a full inquiry. But Conrad's readers will not be informed about the events concerning the Patna until later, and even then, the facts will be only slowly revealed.

After two years of training, Jim goes to sea as the chief mate of a fine ship; but he does not find the romantic adventure he has expected. On every voyage, he has to work very hard and endure the monotony, but he does his best and loves being at sea. He still dreams of becoming a hero, being triumphant over the power of the ocean. On one of his voyages, a falling spar during a storm disables him for some time. He is delighted that he does not have to stay on deck during the violent weather; later, he feels guilty for such thoughts. When the pain subsides and good weather returns, he puts the accident out of his mind. His lameness, however, persists, and when the ship arrives in port , he is taken to the hospital. Since his recovery is slow, he cannot sail with his ship. There are only two other patients in the hospital ward with Jim. One is the purser of a gunboat, and the other is a railway contractor from a neighboring province. They keep each other company, telling the stories of their lives, playing cards, or lounging together in easy chairs during the day. The hospital is located on top of a hill, and every day Jim looks longingly out over the thick gardens towards the sea and thinks about his return to ship life; he does not want to get too comfortable with his life on land. When Jim is able to walk without a stick, he goes into town seeking an opportunity to sail home, but has no luck. As he stays in Singapore, he becomes more fascinated with the life that surrounds him and finally decides not to go home. He accepts a position as the chief mate of the Patna, a rusty old steamer. It is owned by a Chinese man, chartered to go to holy places by an Arab, and commanded by a tough German captain. Eight hundred Moslem pilgrims, from north, south, east and west, are crowded aboard, like cattle. When the Patna finally leaves port, the Arab pilgrims are praying aloud. The steamer soon crosses the Strait and sails towards the Red Sea.

Notes The omniscient third-person narrator continues the tale of Jim's life in the second chapter. As a young man, he is given a position of chief mate on a good ship. On board, Jim's positive qualities are again emphasized. He is a steady and obedient worker who has a thorough knowledge of his duties. He also continues to be a romantic, dreaming of the day he will be challenged by the sea and win. Ironically, when Jim is faced with his first challenge from the sea, a rough storm, he is injured by a falling spar and feels thankful that he does not have to stay on deck during the violent weather. He later feels guilty about his lack of courage, just as he did in the first chapter. On land Jim also worries. He does not want to get too comfortable with his life in the easy chair. He seeks a job on a ship and finally signs on as first mate on the Patna. It is important to notice how Conrad describes the ship. It is on old steamer "eaten with rust worse than a condemned water-tank" and captained by an "iron" German. There is clear foreshadowing that all will not be smooth sailing on this vessel. Although the setting changes several times in this chapter, from Jim's first ship to the hospital to the Patna, the Mood remains the same; it is serious, sometimes almost glum, reflecting the feelings and surroundings of Jim. The sea is also a constant throughout the chapter. Even when the injured Jim is in the hospital, he thinks about his return to the sea. The sea itself is not so constant. Sometimes it is gentle and smiling; at other times, it is an angry sea, which smashes and destroys with fury.


A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with
the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance
of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the
west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the
Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended
its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller
turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme
of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of
water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within
their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting
in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that,
left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the
passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last
into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the
moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.

Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded
safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like
the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother's
face. Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men
and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron
shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept
on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in all the dark
corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled rags, with their
heads resting on small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent
forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the
decrepit with the lusty--all equal before sleep, death's brother.

A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the ship, passed
steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks, swept over
the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-lamps were hung
short here and there under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles
of light thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibration
of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyelids, a dark hand
with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn covering, a head bent
back, a naked foot, a throat bared and stretched as if offering itself
to the knife. The well-to-do had made for their families shelters with
heavy boxes and dusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with all they
had on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men slept,
with drawn-up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with their hands over
their ears and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his
shoulders up and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a
boy who slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly
extended; a woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece
of white sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each arm; the
Arab's belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken
outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of
vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a
deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an old sword
leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The
patent log on the taffrail periodically rang a single tinkling stroke
for every mile traversed on an errand of faith. Above the mass of
sleepers a faint and patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a
troubled dream; and short metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in the
depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel, the violent slam of a
furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious
things below had their breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high
hull of the steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare
masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the
inaccessible serenity of the sky.

Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to
his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming
about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the
unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only
shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from
the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in
the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each
side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval
of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black
fingers alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes,
appeared in the illumined part; the links of wheel-chains ground heavily
in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the compass, would
glance around the unattainable horizon, would stretch himself till his
joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very excess
of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the invincible aspect of the
peace, he felt he cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end
of his days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged
out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea
presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to
a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of
the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the
ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross, and
the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course
of the ship--the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
salvation, the reward of eternal life--while the pencil with its sharp
end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked ship's
spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,'
thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high
peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of
valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary
achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its
hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness,
they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away
with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded
confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so
pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes
ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of
the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black
line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.

The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch
was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to
part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his
thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor
running through every limb as though all the blood in his body had
turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and
with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake,
the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung
his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was
something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his
sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead,
resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the
fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge
of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but
the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a
revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation
of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the
sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the
air that fills our lungs.

The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond
the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented
glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The
ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the
senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through
the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and
calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations. 'Hot is no name
for it down below,' said a voice.

Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved
breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly unaware
of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a
devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon
that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt;
the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with
damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his
complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the
use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see. The poor
devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could
very well do the rest too; by gosh they--'Shut up!' growled the German
stolidly. 'Oh yes! Shut up--and when anything goes wrong you fly to
us, don't you?' went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he
expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned, because
these last three days he had passed through a fine course of training
for the place where the bad boys go when they die--b'gosh, he
had--besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below.
The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap rattled and
banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so; and what made
him risk his life every night and day that God made amongst the refuse
of a breaking-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more
than _he_ could tell. He must have been born reckless, b'gosh.
He . . . 'Where did you get drink?' inquired the German, very savage; but
motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a
man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went on smiling at the retreating
horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was
contemplating his own superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with
amiable scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadowy
figure with flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain. You're far too mean,
b'gosh. You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of
schnapps. That's what you Germans call economy. Penny wise, pound
foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a four-finger
nip about ten o'clock--'only one, s'elp me!'--good old chief; but as to
getting the old fraud out of his bunk--a five-ton crane couldn't do
it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly like a little
child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow. From the thick
throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which the
sound of the word schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious
feather in a faint stir of air. He and the chief engineer had been
cronies for a good few years--serving the same jovial, crafty, old
Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings of red silk plaited into
the venerable grey hairs of his pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the
Patna's home-port was that these two in the way of brazen peculation
'had done together pretty well everything you can think of.' Outwardly
they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy
curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the
head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
somewhere--in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably
did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause
of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could
get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a
gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of heroic
adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . .
His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued
gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The
quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but
they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was
different. . . . Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life
was easy and he was too sure of himself--too sure of himself to . . .
The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.

The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the consideration
of his finances and of his courage.

'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to know by
this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a sparrow drunk,
b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my life; the stuff ain't
made yet that would make _me_ drunk. I could drink liquid fire against
your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as a cucumber. If I
thought I was drunk I would jump overboard--do away with myself, b'gosh.
I would! Straight! And I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect
me to take the air on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that vermin
down there? Likely--ain't it! And I am not afraid of anything you can
do.'

The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a little
without a word.

'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with the enthusiasm
of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of doing all the bloomin' work
in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing for you that there
are some of us about the world that aren't afraid of their lives, or
where would you be--you and this old thing here with her plates like
brown paper--brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very fine for you--you
get a power of pieces out of her one way and another; but what about
me--what do I get? A measly hundred and fifty dollars a month and
find yourself. I wish to ask you respectfully--respectfully, mind--who
wouldn't chuck a dratted job like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it
ain't! Only I am one of them fearless fellows . . .'

He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in
the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in
prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the better
emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he
had been clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!' as he tumbled; an instant
of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the skipper staggered
forward by common accord, and catching themselves up, stood very stiff
and still gazing, amazed, at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they
looked upwards at the stars.

What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the
earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and
suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably
insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed
again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled
accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of thunder
infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration,
passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the thunder had
growled deep down in the water. The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel
glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few
inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become
pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the
smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise
of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a
narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.

One still night, Jim is on watch aboard the Patna, his mind wandering as usual, when the ship's fat German captain waddles up on deck and chats with the second engineer, who is drunk. The two start to argue. Shmoop smells trouble. Sure enough, while the captain is busy yelling the ship hits something and shudders. Everyone is confused, since no one recalled ordering up anything ominous with a side of doom: "They could not understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of destruction." This is totally Titanic in the tropics.

The stillness of the night and the serenity of the stars seemed to shed an assurance of everlasting security, and the Patna, moving smoothly and routinely across the Arabian Sea, seemed to be a perfect part of a safe universe. On deck, Jim paced during his night watch. As usual, he was dreaming, his imagination lulled by romantic visions of courageous deeds and bold action. He had a full and wonderful sense of self-confidence. Minutes before he was relieved, he saw the pig-like outline of the skipper come up on deck; he was repulsed by the man's disgustingly naked belly, glistening and obscene with greasy sweat. The second engineer also came up, and he began to argue drunkenly with the skipper. Then suddenly, everything changed. The gesturing engineer, descending below the deck, lurched violently and pitched head-down, cursing loudly. Jim and the skipper staggered forward. Distant thunder rumbled, then there was silence. The ship quivered, then regained its slow, peaceful progress.

This chapter devotes itself to presenting a repulsive picture of Jim's captain and fellow officers. The captain, the chief engineer, and the second engineer are all described in derogatory terms in order to foreshadow their despicable, disreputable, horrible immoral actions -- that is, the desertion of the 800 Moslem pilgrims to certain death. For example, the immoral nature of the captain is first expressed in his physical description -- "There was something obscene in . . . his naked flesh . . .  odious and fleshly figure . . . fixed itself in his memory as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurked in the world we love." In addition to the captain's obesity is the drunkenness of the second engineer. Against these people, Jim and his romantic purity and ideals stand in sharp relief. And yet in the crucial moment, as we later learn, Jim "Jumps" along with these immoral derelicts. Later in the novel, and especially at the end of Chapter 3, note Conrad's technique of impressionistically suggesting that "something" has happened. Conrad, however, will not reveal fully "the jump" until quite later. In fact, the reader should try to determine at what point in this novel it becomes perfectly clear that Jim did indeed "Jump" and abandon the Patna and the Moslem pilgrims.

It is a clear and still night as the Patna travels through the Arabian Sea. Jim is on night watch; as usual, he is dreaming of romantic adventures in which he will be the hero. As he walks, he observes the different people on board the ship. There are pilgrims with their children and rich families who have made special shelters for themselves. He observes his shipmates and sees the skipper of the ship, half-dressed in pajamas, looking at the charts. He watches the second engineer, who has traveled with the skipper for many years. He looks at the two Malays who steer the ship. Jim is again filled with confidence, for he is sure that no other officer has his abilities. These thoughts are interrupted by the sudden quivering of the ship. Jim and the others are thrown forward, but manage to control themselves. The ship then settles down and moves steadily forward through the calm water.

Notes This chapter opens with a description of the peaceful darkness and Jim responsibly performing his duties as night watch; but it also says that he is again romantically dreaming about his own heroism. In contrast to Jim's prim performance on deck and the calm beauty of the night sky, the captain is obscenely described as half-dressed with a disgusting and sweaty belly, "the incarnation of everything vile and base." He argues loudly with his second engineer, who seems to be drunk. It does not appear to be a very reliable or moral crew, a fact that once again foreshadows trouble on the Patna. As the engineer turns to go back below deck, the ship seems to struggle, quiver, and pitch forward, foreshadowing its future troubles. As the ship groans, all of the officers, including Jim, lurch forward, almost in a jumping motion, again foreshadowing later actions. Almost simultaneously, there is an appropriate roll of distant thunder, changing the Mood from serious to somber.


A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions,
tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking
of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling
over a stick.' The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at
facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police court of an
Eastern port. He stood elevated in the witness-box, with burning cheeks
in a cool lofty room: the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and
fro high above his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him
out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces
attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows
upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice.
It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only
sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that
extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain
within his breast,--came to him poignant and silent like the
terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun
blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the
shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The
face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at
him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads
and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the
half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of
staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him,
as if facts could explain anything!

'After you had concluded you had collided with something floating awash,
say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered by your captain to go forward
and ascertain if there was any damage done. Did you think it likely from
the force of the blow?' asked the assessor sitting to the left. He had
a thin horseshoe beard, salient cheek-bones, and with both elbows on
the desk clasped his rugged hands before his face, looking at Jim with
thoughtful blue eyes; the other, a heavy, scornful man, thrown back in
his seat, his left arm extended full length, drummed delicately with his
finger-tips on a blotting-pad: in the middle the magistrate upright in
the roomy arm-chair, his head inclined slightly on the shoulder, had his
arms crossed on his breast and a few flowers in a glass vase by the side
of his inkstand.

'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to make no noise
for fear of creating a panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. I
took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings and went forward.
After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing in there. I lowered
then the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard, and saw that the forepeak
was more than half full of water already. I knew then there must be a
big hole below the water-line.' He paused.

'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-pad;
his fingers played incessantly, touching the paper without noise.

'I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a little
startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very suddenly. I
knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the collision bulkhead
separating the forepeak from the forehold. I went back to tell the
captain. I came upon the second engineer getting up at the foot of the
bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he thought his left arm was
broken; he had slipped on the top step when getting down while I was
forward. He exclaimed, "My God! That rotten bulkhead'll give way in a
minute, and the damned thing will go down under us like a lump of lead."
He pushed me away with his right arm and ran before me up the ladder,
shouting as he climbed. His left arm hung by his side. I followed up in
time to see the captain rush at him and knock him down flat on his back.
He did not strike him again: he stood bending over him and speaking
angrily but quite low. I fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't
go and stop the engines, instead of making a row about it on deck. I
heard him say, "Get up! Run! fly!" He swore also. The engineer slid down
the starboard ladder and bolted round the skylight to the engine-room
companion which was on the port side. He moaned as he ran. . . .'

He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he
could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for
the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first
feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous
precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the
appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had
been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in
space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton
steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that
had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be
remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible,
a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent
soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This
had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost
importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on
talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his
utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the
serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off
from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself
imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place
to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape.
This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his
speech. . . .

'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he seemed calm
enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I stood speaking to
him he walked right into me as though he had been stone-blind. He made
no definite answer to what I had to tell. He mumbled to himself; all I
heard of it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!" and
"infernal steam!"--something about steam. I thought . . .'

He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that--and now, checked
brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered truthfully by a
curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy
eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed
within him. He was made to answer another question so much to the point
and so useless, then waited again. His mouth was tastelessly dry, as
though he had been eating dust, then salt and bitter as after a drink
of sea-water. He wiped his damp forehead, passed his tongue over parched
lips, felt a shiver run down his back. The big assessor had dropped his
eyelids, and drummed on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes
of the other above the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with
kindliness; the magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face hovered
near the flowers, and then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair,
he rested his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs
eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound about in
voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot and in
drill suits that seemed to fit them as close as their skins, and holding
their round pith hats on their knees; while gliding along the walls the
court peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted rapidly to and
fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed, red turban on head, as noiseless
as ghosts, and on the alert like so many retrievers.

Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a
white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded,
but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. Jim
answered another question and was tempted to cry out, 'What's the good
of this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot slightly, bit his
lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the eyes of the white man.
The glance directed at him was not the fascinated stare of the others.
It was an act of intelligent volition. Jim between two questions forgot
himself so far as to find leisure for a thought. This fellow--ran the
thought--looks at me as though he could see somebody or something past
my shoulder. He had come across that man before--in the street perhaps.
He was positive he had never spoken to him. For days, for many days,
he had spoken to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless
converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a
wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At present he was answering questions
that did not matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted whether
he would ever again speak out as long as he lived. The sound of his own
truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was
of no use to him any longer. That man there seemed to be aware of his
hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as
after a final parting.

And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed
himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail
and audibly.

Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless
foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery
cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent
listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and
expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in
profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes
overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very
first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at rest in the seat, would
become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the
lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.

Let's fastforward folks. Sometime later, we find Jim in a courtroom at an inquest, or trial. Our man is on the stand, and he's testifying about what happened the night the Patna hit whatever it was that it hit in Chapter 3. He explains that he examined the ship after impact and found a hole. That doesn't sound promising. The poor Jim starts to ramble, so the judges have to cut him off. Answer "yes" or "no," they tell him. An embarrassed Jim shuts up right quick. That's when he notices a white man in the courtroom who keeps watching him. Who is this guy? And why does he keep showing up? As it turns out, this dude is Marlow, who will be taking over the storytelling shortly.

The narrative resumes a month or so later, and we are now in the police court of an Eastern port. An official hearing was called to investigate "the Patna incident" in an attempt to determine what struck the ship and what happened on board after the mysterious collision that night. Standing in a box above the hot, packed courtroom, Jim was the only white member of the Patna's crew to answer to the panel of inquiry. His answers were obviously painful and difficult, and he shivered, his mind flying. Slowly, in fragments and half-statements of memory, Jim explained to the panel that he tried to determine that night if any damage had been done to the ship; he remembered that he immediately realized that the hatch in the front of the ship was rapidly filling with water. Clearly, there was a hole in the bottom of the ship. Only one wall kept the ship from being flooded, and if that wall broke, they were doomed. In shock, yet strangely calm, he went to warn the captain, and he met the second engineer, who was complaining about a broken arm. Jim explained what had happened, and the engineer dashed toward the captain, shouting and swearing in panic. The captain silenced him and sent him below to shut off the hot engines before the icy water broke against them. Lost in futility and frustration and wiping his damp forehead, Jim unexpectedly saw a "distinctive looking" white man in the room, sitting apart. His face was worn and clouded, but his eyes were "straight, interested, and clear." Jim had seen this man before -- he was sure of it -- and this man seemed "to be aware of hopeless difficulty."

This chapter shifts to sometime later. Here, the reader could be justifiably confused about the time, the place, the purpose of the "inquiry," and the indistinct introduction of a strange man called Marlow. Throughout these first four chapters, we see Jim through the omniscient narrator as a magnificent physical specimen endowed with an "exquisite sensibility," a man who dreams of "valorous deeds" and who lives on an idealistic level. Later, we will realize that this view is ironic: here, for example, Jim is on trial at a court of inquiry, and he is filled with horror and shame, and yet we don't know the reason why. Jim is forced, we hear, to give facts -- even though facts do not answer the essential questions: "They wanted facts. Facts. They demanded facts of him, as if facts could explain anything." Meantime, Jim knew that "only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things." Jim's realizations, by the very nature of the language, imply that something horrible has happened, yet the reader is still essentially in the dark as to the nature of Jim's "horror" and his "shame." In summary, the first four chapters have presented, from an omniscient view,  Jim's early life and training for the sea,  his dreams of performing acts of courage and heroism,  an important chance to be a hero during his sea training,  the voyage on the Patna until some unexplained misfortune strikes, and  Jim's being tried for some unknown but horrible and shameful act.

A month or so later Jim stands in the witness-box and painfully answers questions about the wreck of the Patna and the subsequent events. He is attending an official inquiry in the police court of an Eastern Port about the accident. Outside the court the sun shines brightly; inside the packed room, the intense and attentive eyes of the onlookers peer at him, making Jim feel hot and uncomfortable. In spite of his discomfort, he is determined to tell the truth about what has happened. He honestly explains how the ship had been moving as easily over the waters as a snake moves over a stick. As the presiding magistrate stares at him, the questions continue. "You were ordered by your Captain to go and find out the extent of the damage after the ship had collided with something floating," one of the assessors says to Jim. "I did not," replies Jim, "I was told to call no one for fear of creating panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. So I took the lamp, lowered it and saw the forepeak was more than half full of water already. I knew that there must be a big hole below the water-line." Jim goes on to explain how he saw the second engineer, dazed and feeling that in no time the whole ship would go down like lead. The Captain was also worried and kept moving here and there on the bridge, mumbling to himself. He ordered the second engineer to go and stop the engines before the icy water damaged them. Jim is then made to answer the most critical question about whether he jumped ship. He says honestly and miserably, "Yes, I did." The words make his mouth feel dry. He wipes his damp forehead, passes his tongue over his parched lips, and feels a shiver run down his back. He looks around the court and sees a white man sitting apart from the others in the audience. As the man looks at Jim, there is something different about his glance, as if he understands Jim's difficulties. Jim feels that he has seen him somewhere, but is sure he has never spoken to him. He looks away from the man, whose name is Marlow.

Notes This chapter leaves the sea and takes the reader to an official inquiry in the police court. The scene is carefully described, and Jim is pictured with "burning cheeks in a cool lofty room." At first, the reader does not know why Jim is present or that the ship has been in a collision; but as Jim is questioned, the details of the accident are given and Jim's shame is revealed. The others in the inquiry try to save themselves, but Jim's only wish is to tell the truth. His total honesty is clearly displayed, but no one is ready to listen to him, which makes him feel helpless. The fourth chapter introduces Marlow, who becomes Jim's good friend and the second narrator of the novel. From this chapter forward, the story is told from Marlow's point of view. As a result, the reader is introduced to many new facets of Jim's character, but in a subjective manner. Introduction of a narrator, like Marlow, in the midst of a story is an original and effective Conrad device.