Page:Last essays - 1926.djvu/20

x “Legends,” as I have mentioned, was the last article Conrad ever wrote; it was left unfinished upon his desk. It tells, with a strain of melancholy, of the breed of seamen who have disappeared with the disappearance of sailing ships, and was printed, less than a fortnight after Conrad’s death, in the London Daily Mail of August 15, 1924.

Next follow two essays which have the war at sea as background. "The Unlighted Coast” recalls Conrad’s experiences in the North Sea during his ten-days’ cruise in the Ready in 1917a full account of this cruise is to be found in Captain Sutherland’s “At Sea with Joseph Conrad”and was written for the Admiralty. For some reason or other they never used it and it first saw the light in the London Times of August 18, 1925.

“The Dover Patrol,” written at the request of the late Lord Northcliffe, was published in the London Times of July 27, 1921, the day on which the Prince of Wales unveiled the Dover Patrol Memorial. It is a glowing tribute to “the physical endurance, the inborn seamanship, the matter-of-fact, industrious, indefatigable enthusiasm" of the men who guarded unsleepingly and at extreme hazard the entrance to the Channel.

The “Memorandum on the Scheme for Fitting Out a Sailing Ship" is here first printed. Written in 1919 for the Holt Steamship Company, who had proposed to fit out a sailing ship for the training of boys destined for the Mercantile Marine, it is an example of Conrad’s intense and practical interest in such subjects. It is exactly what it purports to bea memorandum, precise, technical, full of his accumulated experience and long-pondered ideas. Nothing came of the scheme: as Mr. Lawrence Holt wrote to me, it was ‘“abandoned owing to the depression of trade which set in soon after my conversation with Mr. Conrad.” The document