The Black Mate E-Book

Joseph Conrad

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Since this is not a very famous story, and most of the pleasure that it provides depends on the surprise that the highlight in the story will present to the reader. Winston Bunter, who registered as First Mate on Sapphire, a ship bound for Calcutta. His commander, Captain Jones, is described as an extremely unpleasant person, incredulous and capricious, who believes that sailors over forty are no longer suitable, and he always talks about ghosts and ways to contact them. Despite all this strange humor that lives within the framework of this story, you can, of course, feel that the narrator is very skeptical of John’s opinion that senior sailors are no longer suitable, as he makes a sharp remark that gray-haired tars are desperate in search of a berth in the English ports.

Leseprobe

Contents

A good many years ago there were several ships loading at the Jetty, London Dock. I am speaking here of the “eighties of the last century, of the time when London had plenty of fine ships in the docks, though not so many fine buildings in its streets.

The ships at the Jetty were fine enough; they lay one behind the other; and the Sapphire, third from the end, was as good as the rest of them, and nothing more. Each ship at the Jetty had, of course, her chief officer on board. So had every other ship in dock.

The policeman at the gates knew them all by sight, without being able to say at once, without thinking, to what ship any particular man belonged. As a matter of fact, the mates of the ships then lying in the London Dock were like the majority of officers in the Merchant Service–a steady, hard-working, staunch, unromantic-looking set of men, belonging to various classes of society, but with the professional stamp obliterating the personal characteristics, which were not very marked anyhow.

This last was true of them all, with the exception of the mate of the Sapphire. Of him the policemen could not be in doubt. This one had a presence.

He was noticeable to them in the street from a great distance; and when in the morning he strode down the Jetty to his ship, the lumpers and the dock labourers rolling the bales and trundling the cases of cargo on their hand-trucks would remark to each other:

“Here’s the black mate coming along.”

That was the name they gave him, being a gross lot, who could have no appreciation of the man’s dignified bearing. And to call him black was the superficial impressionism of the ignorant.

Of course, Mr. Bunter, the mate of the Sapphire, was not black. He was no more black than you or I, and certainly as white as any chief mate of a ship in the whole of the Port of London. His complexion was of the sort that did not take the tan easily; and I happen to know that the poor fellow had had a month’s illness just before he joined the Sapphire.

From this you will perceive that I knew Bunter. Of course I knew him. And, what’s more, I knew his secret at the time, this secret which–never mind just now. Returning to Bunter’s personal appearance, it was nothing but ignorant prejudice on the part of the foreman stevedore to say, as he did in my hearing: “I bet he’s a furriner of some sort.” A man may have black hair without being set down for a Dago. I have known a West-country sailor, boatswain of a fine ship, who looked more Spanish than any Spaniard afloat I’ve ever met. He looked like a Spaniard in a picture.