The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad demonstrates again his mastery of prose fiction forms. In this case Conrad has written a novella about a sea captain named Whalley who has had a financial disaster at the end of a distinguished career. All he wants is to leave his only daughter some money to help her deal with her unsuccessful marriage, so he invests his last 500 pounds in an old steamer owned by its chief engineer, a man named Massy, and serves as its captain on local runs through what can be called Conrad country, the innumerable islands of Indonesia.
Massy is a desperate man who won the money to buy his ship in a lottery. He only takes Whalley on as partner because his steamer is fast deteriorating and he would like to get rid of him under terms of the contract that would give him a year to repay the 500 pounds. Whalley has a problem in that he can barely meet the terms of the contract because he is going blind and trying to conceal that fact by relying on a Malay servant who dutifully carries out the captain’s orders and could virtually sail the ship himself.
A further complicating factor is the second engineer’s desire to reveal Whalley’s blindness and take over as captain himself. All thee main characters have one more journey in which to resolve their respective challenges
The characterizations in this novella are superb, forceful, distinctive and raw. Ships require intimate cooperation that often bleeds into psychological entanglement. In general Conrad writes about the moods of the sea with dazzling perceptiveness. He has a painter’s eye for light, sunset, nightfall, the murky hours of late watches and the refreshing mysteries of timeless mornings, ever recurring, ever renewing.
The natural companion to this tale is Melville’s Billy Budd. The elemental force of Melville’s novella is its strength. The End of the Tether is more morally complex and ingeniously plotted. There is a wholeness here, a fully developed cast of characters whose motivations and weaknesses are clear and painful. Are we really such brutes? Do we have such bad luck? The poignant realism here verges on the bitter realism in Thomas Hardy’s novels. Sometime Conrad overwrites, but his missteps are an excess of talent.
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