"Conrad, Joseph - The End Of The Tether" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty
years at sea, and forty out in the East ("a pretty thor-
ough apprenticeship," he used to remark smilingly), had
made him honorably known to a generation of ship-
owners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear
over to where the East merges into the West upon the
coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ,
not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty
charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia
and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On
that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper
had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew
throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with
the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage
war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef
had any official existence. Later the officers of her
Majesty's steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a
survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these
two names the enterprise of the man and the solidity of
the ship. Besides, as anyone who cares may see, the
"General Directory," vol. ii. p. 410, begins the descrip-
tion of the "Malotu or Whalley Passage" with the
words: "This advantageous route, first discovered in
1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor," &c.,
and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels
leaving the China ports for the south in the months
from December to April inclusive.

This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing
could rob him of this kind of fame. The piercing of the
Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let
in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new
methods of trade. It had changed the face of the East-
ern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his
early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new
generation of seamen.

In those bygone days he had handled many thousands
of pounds of his employers' money and of his own; he
had attended faithfully, as by law a shipmaster is ex-
pected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners,
charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship
or consented to a shady transaction; and he had lasted
well, outlasting in the end the conditions that had gone
to the making of his name. He had buried his wife (in
the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to
the man of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than
an ample competence in the crash of the notorious Tra-
vancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose down-
fall had shaken the East like an earthquake. And he