Short Fiction Conrad, Joseph: Typhoon, v1, 3 June 2016

[AlexBell]

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857 in the Ukraine to Polish activists parents. After his parents died of tuberculosis he was cared for by his uncle, and later went to a boarding school where he learned French. At age 16 he went to Marseilles and went to sea as an apprentice in a French Ship. He later joined the British merchant navy, and sailed to India, the Far East, Australia, and the Congo. He had begun to write towards the end of his seafaring career, and published his first book, Almayer's Folly, in 1896. He wrote many other books, until The Rover in 1923. He died in Canterbury the following year.

Typhoon was published as a serial in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1902. The novella portrays many of his experiences at sea; the first mate, Jukes, may be a self-portrait. In a 1919 note he wrote that his main interest was 'not the bad weather, but the extraordinary complication brought into the ship's life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck.'

The source text was taken from the 1912 Heinemann's Sevenpenny Novels edition found in the Internet Archive, checked against the pdf and the 2016 Penguin Little Black Classics edition. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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