Ah, the beauty of summer in the northern hemisphere. What a time for Crowdstrike and Microsoft to crash all the check-in systems at numerous airports around the world and inflict misery on tens of thousands of travellers, cancelling hundreds of flights and shutting down baggage handling.
The out of office messages continue to ping back, and the summer Olympics open at the end of the week in Paris, giving everyone an excuse not to work. Therefore, there's no better time to share some more ideas for poolside reading and sun-lounger listening material.
Shameless plagiarism, but the introduction to The Economist’s summer reading list reminded me of why everyone should read Joseph Conrad’s classic at least once in their lives, and not for the reasons that the prissy London-based publication gives:
“He inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect…He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all.”
"As a description of your typical middle manager, it is hard to surpass Marlow’s view of the boss at a river port in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novella is a critique of colonialism in Africa, and an exploration of power and morality. It is also a guide to dealing with corporate bureaucracy. Marlow’s steamboat is in tatters and the manager is useless — Marlow must solve the problem himself. It sounds like an ordinary day at a Fortune 500 company….”
You don’t read Heart of Darkness because you want to become a better manager, or as a case study in problem solving. You read Heart of Darkness because it is a rip-roaring adventure – a quest up the river Congo on a puttering steamship, through a territory abused and plundered by the Belgians, heading to a trading station fallen into chaos under the rule of a mad demi-god.
Conrad’s book is the probably the shortest classic you will ever read, but also the most powerful and compelling, dealing with corruption, colonialism and the sheer intoxication of naked power. Reading is out of fashion, but four hours with Conrad will provide you with more insight into the human condition and the futility of life, than will a lifetime on social media.
Conrad describes in vivid detail an era of history which many today seek to forget as “problematic” or simply to brush under the carpet as morally repugnant and not worthy of discussion. His writing is as profound as the story is exciting:
“Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
The book inspired the Oscar winning movie Apocalypse Now, set in the Vietnam War, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Marlon Brando as the mad and very bad Colonel Kurtz, who has gone rogue upriver. This is another must see, a film that grows richer when you have read Conrad’s novella, culminating in the same climatic lines rasped out by a sweaty and tortured Brando: “The horror! The horror!”
The author’s story is itself remarkable, as Conrad wrote of what he knew from his first-hand experience, and he only became fluent in English in his twenties. Conrad was a Polish-born seafarer, at a time when Poland was then under (another) oppressive Russian occupation. He began his seagoing career in Marseille, having attempted suicide, before enlisting in the British merchant navy in 1878, where he worked his way up to captain, spending over a decade on board ships, including a stint working for the Brussels-based colonial enterprise Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo in Congo itself.
The territory was then the personal fiefdom of the Belgian king, who was intent on extracting as much wealth from it as possible, by the most murderous means, including by systematic executions and amputations. This is the true background to the awful events made fiction in Heart of Darkness.
For a history of that non-politically correct era, a learned friend recommended King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) by Adam Hochschild, which documents in depressing details the large-scale atrocities committed in the Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908.
After his time at sea, Conrad settled in England, started a family and wrote a series of novels that capture that bygone age of empire and trans-continental commodities trade that profoundly shaped the modern world. Over one hundred years after Heart of Darkness, and more than sixty years after independence, both what was formerly the French Congo (now Congo-Brazzaville) and what was then the Belgian Congo (now The Democratic Republic of Congo) are both corrupt basket cases, as we have documented before.
The rulers of the river and its riches are no longer distant whites in the “whited sepulchre” of Brussels, sending warships to bombard the coast randomly, and plunder the land – instead, Belgian shipowners are now focused on renewable riches, with Windcat Workboats just now ordering a sixth new windfarm commissioning service operation vessel (CSOV), as their Norwegian rivals Rem Offshore ordered a third. Today, Congo has its own home-grown dictators and autocrats, equally adept as Leopold at keeping their own people brutalised and poor, and their personal bank balances large.
We were not surprised to find Congo-Brazzaville president Denis Sassou Nguesso receiving the Order of Honour from Russian president Vladimir Putin last month, nor to read Human Rights Watch’s report that “the human rights situation across the Democratic Republic of Congo remains dire, with internal conflicts and poor governance contributing to a severe food crisis and the internal displacement of 5.8 million people.”
"We live, as we dream, alone," as Conrad concludes.
My next pick, The Wager, is nothing to do with betting, although many of the protagonists do end up gambling with their lives as a bad situation grows steadily worse. David Grann’s superbly written and meticulously researched book is another reminder than life at sea in the past was often bloody, deadly, and very, very unpleasant.
Modern seafarers may lament low wages, long working hours and poor internet connections. However, their predecessors in the eighteenth century had to contend with a very real prospect of drowning in shipwrecks, lingering and painful death by scurvy, and primitive shipboard living conditions that remind us why the Maritime Labour Convention was necessary.
In 1740, Britain was at war with Spain (again), and Commodore George Anson led a squadron of eight ships out of Spithead in England in an attempt to capture the fabled Spanish galleon carrying treasure from Mexico to Manila. Unfortunately, to reach his target, his flotilla needed to round Cape Horn, at the tip of Argentina and Chile, both then ruled by hostile Spain, in order to transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Cape Horn is known for its raging seas, treacherous lee shores and violent storms. By then, two ships of Anson’s squadron had already turned back, and hundreds of sailors had died of scurvy caused by a shortage of vitamin C.
One of the surviving vessels, HMS Wager, under captain David Cheap, who had been promoted from another ship to replace his dead predecessor, was separated from Anson’s fleet.
Wager was shipwrecked in May 1741 in a terrifying storm. The ship broke up on rocks near an inhospitable and bleak island off the coast of Patagonia, amid scenes of terror, drunkenness and looting.
About 140 cold and hungry survivors made it ashore. They then began to fight amongst themselves, as they sought to stay alive in bitterly harsh conditions, with only salvaged pieces of the wreck to shelter and sustain them. Their loyalties fractured, cliques developed, and Captain Cheap faced mutiny, which he attempted to forestall by shooting one of the conspirators dead in cold blood.
What’s amazing is not that there was death, disease, drowning, starvation, murder and cannibalisation – anyone who has read of the awful 1629 wreck of the Dutch East Indiaman Batavia off Western Australia might expect as much – but that three separate groups of survivors actually made it out of the hellish conditions on the island in heroic and unbelievable voyages of thousands of miles through treacherous seas in tiny boats.
A dozen returned to England, including the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, and documented their stories in a series of dramatic and best-selling publications to exonerate themselves and justify their decisions. This war of words on what had happened in Patagonia came ahead of an epic Admiralty court marshal trial on April 15, 1746, where some of the survivors seemed likely to face execution.
David Grann is an accomplished writer who crafts a masterful narrative. His previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), dealt with how the oil-rich Osage native American tribe were murdered for their money by ruthless whites, who often married their victims before poisoning or bludgeoning them to death. The true events in that book became one of the FBI’s earliest investigations, and it was made into a 2023 film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone. If you haven’t seen this depressing tale of human greed, you should.
The Wager reminds us that “no fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.”
Of course, that is a quote from Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
If there is one shipwreck that everyone knows about, it is the wreck of the luxury liner Titanic on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in the early hours of April 15, 1912, with the loss of over 1,500 lives, after the supposedly unsinkable ship collided with an iceberg on a frigid night. Driving the awareness of this tragedy is Titanic, the 1997 film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron, which was the most expensive film ever made at the time, and went on to become the world’s highest ever grossing film in 1998, raking in over US$2.2 billion to date.
For those unaware, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a romantic drama, with DiCaprio playing an honest and fun-loving Irish immigrant in third class, who falls in love with the beautiful, but sheltered, first class passenger Rose.
Spoiler alert! The film climaxes in a tear-jerking finale, as the doomed young lovers are parted in the dark and freezing waters when the ship sinks, accompanied by the haunting soundtrack of Celine Dione belting out her classic My Heart Will Go On.
What’s interesting about the Titanic disaster is that a lot of what we think we know as facts about the tragedy simply aren’t true. The ship had safety equipment far above the norms for the time, and the conditions of the steerage passengers were not half as bad as you might be led to believe.
Yes, the doors between the decks were sealed, but this was a legal requirement of the American immigration department, and was not due to the callousness of the managers or the officers. James Cameron was making a box-office blockbuster based on the history, not a documentary. Therefore, one of the most interesting podcasts for your poolside tanning this holiday is a six-episode series on the doomed ship in The Rest is History, a fascinating deep dive by British historians and television personalities Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland.
They set the scene for the building of the record-breaking ship at Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard, which was once again in the news this week as its CEO John Wood left his job after it emerged that the shipbuilder will not secure an emergency loan guarantee from the new UK government.
This was age of mass migration from Europe to America, and of luxury travel by the new industrial elite criss-crossing the Atlantic for business and pleasure. Sandbrook and Holland highlight the business rivalry in the highly competitive transatlantic liner industry and the tensions in Belfast at the time, as the Irish Home Rule movement caused political and sectarian divisions, both in the city and in the shipyard. They dig into the backstories of the passengers, rich and poor alike, from New York millionaires to Lebanese Christians fleeing persecution at the hands of the Ottoman empire.
The pair look into what we know about Titanic and its design as well as its designers and managers, White Star Line. Their examination of how the tragedy unfolded that fateful night is fascinating and sobering.
Lives were lost or changed forever, depending on which side of the boat people were on, or who they spoke to, and one poor boy, who was given a pair of trousers for his birthday, perished because of that. The Rest is History’s study of Titanic reminds us that small decisions can have huge impacts.
One new book I have not read is House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power by Tom Bower (2024). It is not nautically themed and has no relationship to the offshore industry or seafaring or the shipping business more generally.
So why do I mention it? Because the quality of writing in Andrew O’Hagan’s review of the tome in The London Review of Books is so high. This is how book reviews should be written. Even if you don’t read the book, the acidic and amusing LRB review is more than worth your time, especially if you have some spare minutes of tedium in the check-in queue or the departure lounge. I will close with a flavour:
“Some couples spend time in separate beds, but the Beckhams went for separate continents, with Posh boosting her dying career or pursuing another one (as a fashion designer, earning her decent write-ups and huge losses), while Becks endorsed everything he could touch, failing to impress on foreign football fields.”
“It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core,” as Conrad put it.
Happy summer holidays!
Background reading
Our first set of 2022 holiday shorts can be found here and part two is here. If you did not read Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel’s Dead in the Water, what are you waiting for? This masterful book describes a shocking scheme to defraud insurers of millions of dollars through the deliberate destruction of a laden crude tanker in the Gulf of Aden. Who knew that the Greek tanker sector contained some very dark actors? Call me shocked.
If you need any help with Heart of Darkness, here are the Cliff Notes for the text.
Before HMS Wager came the wreck and mutiny of Batavia in 1629, now masterfully told in Australia’s premier shipwreck gallery at Fremantle Maritime Museum. National Geographic has a summary of the depravity and horror of this Conradian story here.
Wikipedia has everything you could possibly want to know about the film Titanic.
