Coolie cargoes: Emigrant ships and the burden of representation in Joseph Conrad's Typhoon and James Dalziel's "Dead Reckoning"

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 398-428

  Forman, Ross G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949432328     PISSN: 00138339     EISSN: 15592715     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2487/P13V-X481-01G0-768W     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. James Dalziel, "Dead Reckoning," in In the First Watch and Other Engine-Room Stories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), 153-54.
2. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, in Typhoon and Other Tales, Cedric Watts, ed. (1902; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). All subsequent references are to this edition, unless otherwise specified.
3. The navigational technique of "dead reckoning" is defined as follows in the text that the chief engineer of Dalziel's story actually uses as his reference point: "The position of a ship when determined from the distance run by log, and the courses steered by compass, subsequently rectified, is the position by dead reckoning; it is generally expressed by the initials D.R." See J. W. Norie, A Complete Epitome of Practical Navigation, and Nautical Astronomy, Containing All Necessary Instructions for Keeping a Ship's Reckoning at Sea: With the Most Approved Methods of Ascertaining the Latitude and Longitude, and Every Requisite to Form the Complete Navigator; The Whole Being Rendered Perfectly Easy, and Illustrated by Numerous Examples, Diagrams and Charts, rev. ed., W.H. Rosser, ed. (London: Norie and Wilson, 1896), 90.
4. This characterization of Conrad scholarship belongs to Geoffrey Galt Harpham, who argues that an interest in processes of knowledge and self-improvement unifies a range of critical approaches to Conrad's work, from "patriarchs" to feminists. Although Harpham develops this notion in the context of Marlow and Heart of Darkness (1898), the idea holds equally true of chief mate Jukes and Typhoon. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 127.
5. Ian Watt, "Comedy and Humour in Typhoon," in Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108.
6. Watt identifies the importance of the coolies to the text's structure and concentrates on the final section of the narrative containing the descriptions of the events in the hold. However, because he wants to read Typhoon through the lens of comedy and irony, rather than history, he maintains Jukes and MacWhirr as the primary locus of critical interest. The coolies are, therefore, not intrinsically interesting; they are primarily a means to elucidate Conrad's efforts to employ "traditional English humour of character" (103). See also Cedric Watts, Introduction, Typhoon, viii.
7. Dalziel, "Dead Reckoning," In the First Watch, 147.
8. Control over the water supply is also the means for routing outbreak in William Carlton Dawe's "Coolies," in which the protagonist hatches a plan to scald the mutineers with boiling water until they regain control of the ship. See "Coolies," Yellow and White (London: John Lane, 1895), 56-82.
9. See also Dawe's "Coolies," Yellow and White. In this more colonialist tale, a group of eighteen hundred coolies (some of them wanted by the police) are being ferried from Hong Kong to Singapore and Penang. They mutiny and demand to be taken to Tonkin in "Flenchyman's China," which is "[pllenty better than Singlapore" (64) because in the British colony there is "too muchee dam swingee-swingee"of criminals (73). The narrative thus pits British and French colonization against each other, with the former representing law and order and the latter laxity and lenience. The story suggests the different imperatives between British and French activities in the region, as well as the way in which unsavory elements of the Chinese population can exploit these differences to their advantage.
10. Francis Mulhern, "English Reading," in Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha, ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 256.
11. Watt, "Comedy and Humour in Typhoon," Essays on Conrad, 106.
12. Conrad, Typhoon, 98.
13. Mulhern, "English Reading," Nation and Narration, 256.
14. Prior to 1911, the term "Celestial Empire" was often used to describe China, and Conrad himself follows common usage in referring to the Chinese as "Celestials" in Typhoon.
15. Joseph Kolupke notes that "a major aspect of the meaning of Typhoon' is political; that in fact the Nan-Shan is a very familiar kind of literary symbol: the ship as ship-of-state, a political microcosm." See "Elephants, Empires, and Blind Men: A Reading of the Figurative Language in Conrad's 'Typhoon,'" Conradiana, 20.1 (Spring 1988), 74. The typhoon that attacks the ship also can be seen as a microcosm, as the term "circular storm," with its inference of encapsulation, suggests. The hurricane is part of a broader phenomenon of the weather, just as the Nan-Shan is part of a broader phenomenon of the merchant marine. Both, therefore, allude to the relationship between the particular, local situation and the broad picture, while concurrently undercutting the viability of a direct extrapolation from the microcosm to the macrocosm.
16. See Lillian Nayder, "Sailing Ships and Steamers, Angels and Whores: History and Gender in Conrad's Maritime Fiction," in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 199-200.
17. Harpham, One of Us, 133-36.
18. Conrad, Typhoon, 95, 14.
19. As Cedric Watts recommends in his introduction to the text, "It remains for the reader to decide whether Conrad's general presentation of the coolies is culturally patronizing, given that only a European can master their internecine panic, or plausibly consistent, given the thematic need to dramatize their confusion as a daunting challenge" (Typhoon, ix).
20. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 2.
21. See "Foreign Undesirables," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 169 (February 1901), 289.
22. A comprehensive overview of Conrad's depiction of Chinese characters appears in Heliéna M. Krenn's "China and the Chinese in the Works of Joseph Conrad," Conradiana, 27.2 (Summer 1995), 83-96.
23. Krenn argues that on the surface, Conrad's imagery of the Chinese seems to correspond with the stereotypes of his era, but that reading across his oeuvre reveals a more nuanced picture. "To be sure, contemporary stereotypes of the Chinese occur in Conrad's work: among the most frequently mentioned occupations are those related to trade and business, food culture, and the earning of money as coolies and 'boys' by any kind of labor, and Conrad's 'Chinamen' wear pigtails, have 'almond' eyes, are 'yellow,' speak pidgin English, and several of them smoke opium. Despite this compliance with stereotypes, however, Conrad presents individualities, traits, and situations that reflect the changing Western opinions of China which, as the reader gradually discovers, resulted from the change of attitudes toward that country and her people at different periods of Western history." See Krenn, "China and the Chinese," Conradiana, 85.
24. Andrew Michael Roberts, Conrad and Masculinity (London: Macmillan, 2000), 78-79;
25. Typhoon, 101.
26. Kolupke, "Elephants, Empires, and Blind Men," Conradiana, 73.
27. Kolupke's reading is based, in part, on William R. M. Hussey, who discusses the "internal hurricane" of "unleashed emotions" which threatens the Nan-Shan and which the coolies make manifest by their actions. See "He Was Spared That Annoyance," Conradiana, 3.2 (1971-1972), 17-25.
28. Dalziel, "Dead Reckoning," In the First Watch, 159, 158, 164-65.
29. See also Linda Dryden's comments in Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000) on MacWhirr, that he is "no romantic hero: he neither possesses nor dreams of acquiring the characteristics that would make him so" (108).
30. Robert Hampson, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2000), 158.
31. Hampson's analysis is based on Anne McClintock's reading of Marx in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995).
32. See Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 40.
33. The problem of leisure also harkens to the issue of gender representation. Nayder's statement that Conrad depicts women "as members of a powerful leisure class, the unproductive 'passengers' on board his ship of state" suggests why the coolies' position is so anomalous and potentially threatening, as well as how the feminization of the coolies might paradoxically work to empower them within the limitations of their position. See Nayder, "Sailing Ships and Steamers," Iron Men, Wooden Women, 199.
34. Maurice Greifenhagen, "The sun, pale and without rays, poured down a leaden heat, and the Chinamen were lying prostrate about the decks," in Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, Pall Mall Magazine, 26 (1902), 103.
35. The condemnation of opium use was by no means universal, nor were views of smoking as enervating, debilitating, and destructive unanimously espoused. Writing of a population of Chinese coolies in Southeast Asia much like that in Conrad's novella, Carl A. Trocki argues that opium consumption advanced capitalist interests by creating structures of indebtedness among workers, while simultaneously appealing to the workers themselves: the drug served as their "rainy-day woman," eased pain, increased productivity, and alleviated ailments in an environment mostly devoid of medical care. "It can be argued," Trocki notes, "and indeed it was by many defenders of the system, that opium was a necessary 'work drug' for the Chinese laborers." See "Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia," Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 86-88.
36. In Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), Milligan deconstructs the mythology of infection and reverse imperialism that arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with respect to the London opium den.
37. Anxieties often centered around the Chinese, Malay, and Indian sailors (Lascars) who ostensibly frequented opium houses in the East End. See, in particular, the chapter entitled "'The Plague Spreading and Attacking Our Vitals': The Victorian Opium Den and Oriental Contagion," 83-102. Greifenhagen's role as illustrator to the novels of H. Rider Haggard also suggests more colonialist allegiances than those of Conrad.
38. Lord Charles Beresford, The Break-Up of China with an Account of Its Present Commerce, Currency, Waterway, Armies, Railways, Politics and Future Prospects (London: Harper & Brothers, 1899), 2.
39. G.A.Henty, With the Allies to Pekin: A Tale of the Relief of the Legations (London: Blackie& Son, 1904), 371.
40. This is one of many instances in which the archetypal imperial adventure writer proves subtler than scholars such as Dryden have claimed by characterizing the genre as "pure escapism laced with patriotic overtones and a zeal for imperial adventures." (Dryden, Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance, 2.)
41. See Edward Greey, Blue Jackets; or, The Adventures of J. Thompson, A.B. among "The Hea - then Chinee." A Nautical Novel (Boston: J. E. Tilton & Co., 1871)
42. and Harry Collingwood [William Joseph Cosens Lancaster], A Chinese Command: A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas (London: Blackie and Son, 1915).
43. See also W. C. Metcalfe, Pigtails and Pirates: A Tale of the Sea (London: Blackie and Son, 1908).
44. See Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London: HarperCollinsAcademic, 1991), 225-26.
45. Bristow continues: "So where had these men been all along? They were located in the pages of story books which pieced together a myth that could absorb boy readers for hours. It was within the compulsions of these boys' own narratives that all the problematic elements of male identity could, momentarily, cohere" (Bristow, Empire Boys, 226).
46. For a fuller discussion of narratives about the Boxer Uprising, see my "Peking Plots: Representing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900," Victorian Literature and Culture, 27.2 (Autumn 1999), 19-49.
47. See also F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 183-87.
48. For Leavis, MacWhirr's matter-of-fact solidity constitutes a truer kind of British heroism. As an example of particularized ordinariness, MacWhirr is the "embodiment of a tradition," and the narrative technique which persistently reminds readers of this ordinariness creates the "particular effect of heroic sublimity" that reveals Conrad's ingenuity as a writer (Leavis, The Great Tradition, 186, 185).
49. See "Typhoon at Hong-Kong," Times (London), 15 Nov. 1900, 4a.
50. See also S. F. Clark's description of the terrible damage wrought by this typhoon in "Signalling the Approach of a Typhoon at Hong Kong," Good Words, 44 (1903), 529-32.
51. The November 1900 typhoon may have influenced Conrad's decision to make his storm occur providentially on Christmas Day, in a period outside the regular monsoon season (as John Batchelor has noted), despite the seemingly inconsistent comment at the start of the second chapter that MacWhirr was "in command of the Nan-Shan in the China seas during the season of typhoons." See John Batchelor, The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 116;
52. The description of the effects of the storm apparently was based on one Conrad had experienced in the Indian Ocean. See Rodolphe Louis Mégroz, Joseph Conrad's Mind and Method: A Study of Personality in Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), 42.
53. Although Conrad first mentioned the idea for the story in a letter in February 1899, it was only after the Boxer Rebellion that he actually began to compose it. The events of the Rebellion were widely bruited across Europe, so even while abroad, Conrad could hardly have avoided exposure to the news.
54. Conrad's choice of the Nan-Shan for the name of his ship may also suggest such an interest. Nan-Shan is Chinese for "South Mountain" and also refers to a mountain range that was being explored and mapped in the 1890s. However, Conrad may have been familiar with a British steamer called the Nan-Shan, launched in 1896 and based in the China Seas; in 1898, it was sold to the U.S. for use as a collier in the Spanish-American war and served in the Battle of Manila. See Donald H. Dyal, with Brian B. Carpenter and Mark A. Thomas, Historical Dictionary of the Spanish American War (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 231.
55. This speculation about the origin of Nan-Shan in no way precludes those of other critics, who point to the many references to mountains, avalanches, and so on in the description of the typhoon's action on the ship. See, for instance, Francis E. Zapatka, "On the Meaning of Nan-Shan [sic] in Conrad's Typhoon," American Notes & Queries, 13.10 (June 1975), 152-53.
56. In a different vein, Heliéna Krenn reads Nan-Shan in Buddhist terms as referring to the name of the monastery and school of the Four Noble Truths (which concern suffering and the path to eliminate it). See "Conradian Space in Typhoon," Joseph Conrad: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, Lalitha Ramamurthi and C. T. Indra, eds. (Delhi: Pencraft International, 1998), 126.
57. The July 1900 issue featured "Distracted China" (168, no. 1017, 149-54), while the August issue continued with "Distracted China.-II" (168, no. 1018, 287-94).
58. In the September issue, an article entitled simply "China" (168, no. 1019, 405-15), concluded as follows: "China has dragged itself, not into the white light of open contest, but into the lurid light of Hell. It has roused itself indeed, but it is to an orgie of oriental massacre. Until the fumes of Gehenna have passed away, it will be idle to forecast what the new century may have in store for China and for the world. The Yellow Peril is upon us with a vengeance" (415).
59. The January 1901 number of the magazine had an article on "The English in China" (169, no. 1023, 64-83).
60. On Conrad's relationship to newspapers and his depiction of journalists, see Stephen Donovan, "Prosaic Newspaper Stunts: Conrad, Modernity, and the Press," Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Gail Fincham, Attie de Lange, and Wieslaw Krajka, eds. (Lublin: Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, 2001), 53-72.
61. On the materials drawn together to create Costaguana and the Gould mining concession, see Guy L. Moyer, "Inner Secrets' in Conrad's Nostromo," Conradiana, 27.3 (Autumn 1995), 235-49.
62. Matthew Phipps Shiel, The Yellow Danger (London: Grant Richards, 1898);
63. Kenneth Mackay, The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1895).
64. Captain Charles Gilson, The Lost Column: A Story of the Boxer Rebellion in China (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), 41.
65. Conrad, Typhoon, 47, 57.
66. Shiel, The Yellow Danger, 109.
67. See also Susan Staker's reading of MacWhirr in "Youth (1902)
68. and Typhoon (1903)," in A Joseph Conrad Companion, Leonard Orr and Ted Billy, eds. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 115: "Certainly important structural parallels are drawn between MacWhirr and the Chinese-perhaps most important their marginality within the social order, their limited English, and also their shared status as subalterns within the British empire. MacWhirr is after all Irish." This reading overemphasizes MacWhirr's marginality by making it atemporal in relationship to the narrative as a whole. He is, after all, not only captain of the ship, but also the preferred choice of the vessel's owner, and his subalterity as an Irishman is not of particular concern to Conrad.
69. See Israel, Outlandish, 41.
70. Conrad, Typhoon, 3, 102.