Search Results for 'Joseph Conrad'

The south Bostonian, James Brendan Connolly, was once described by Joseph Conrad as the ‘best sea-story writer in America’. He wrote 19 novels and short stories about ships and sailors at sea, the US navy, submarine patrols in World War I, and the heroic struggles of the Gloucester fishermen on the treacherous Grand Bank and Nova Scotia regions hunting for cod and halibut.

On that terrible cold night of April 14 1912, in the North Atlantic, the Titanic was sinking head first into a freezing, calm sea. It had struck an iceberg 400 miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. And was fatally wounded. The incessant bip bip bip SOS call for help from the wireless telegraphist Jack Phillips and his assistant Harold Bride was interspersed with more dramatic calls for help: “We are putting passengers off in small boats. Women and children in boats, cannot last much longer”.

Sir Roger Casement was a notable humanitarian and a British consul by profession but, ironically, an anti -Imperialist by nature. He over-stepped his diplomatic role to fiercely condemn Belgium for its brutalisation of the people of Congo*. His report, published in 1904, was however, well received by the British establishment, perhaps because it feared that little Belgium was getting too big for its boots, and too wealthy from its African ventures. Casement received a knighthood.

I’ve been reading again, for the first time in many years, Graham Greene’s novels, and in particular Brighton Rock, one of his earliest and still one of his finest, a new film of which is soon to be released.

In Sligo town the library was. On the floor of a dusty old attic, the books hadn’t been moved for decades and, with the exception of some older local history journals, seemed to be of little interest. However, based on the promise of these journals, a deal was struck.