Both of these stories sprang from Joseph Conrad's own experience sailing in the Far East with the merchant navy. "For it can hardly be denied that it is not their own desserts that men are most proud of, but rather of their prodigious luck, of their marvelous fortune," wrote Conrad of YOUTH. In it he captures a young man's exhilaration in the face of danger and the unknown. THE END OF THE TETHER is of a different mold. Captain Whalley, aging but still afloat, compromises his principles without understanding what can follow. But life, like the sea, is unsparing, and the captain's fate arrives in due course, served up with Conrad's own brand of uncompromising logic.
