particular care has been taken to avoid any aspect of absolute completeness, as though a dead author’s desk had been ransacked for every fragment: all the articles included in this volume have been included for very definite reasons. Nothing has been printed merely for the purpose of adding to the bulk.
For some time Conrad had had the idea of writing a pendent volume to “The Mirror of the Sea,” and the unfinished article, ‘‘Legends,” on which he was at work the day before he died, was, he told me, to have formed part of such a book. And I suspect that “The Torrens,” “Christmas Day at Sea,” “Ocean Travel,” ‘“Outside Literature,” and part, at least, of ‘“Geography and Some Explorers,” would also have been incorporated in this book, and therefore I have placed them all together at the beginning of the volume. They form, as it were, the shadowy nucleus of a projected work.
“Geography and Some Explorers,” the second longest essay in this collection, was written as a general introduction to a serial work called "Countries of the World.” It appeared as ‘“The Romance of Travel” in the first number, February, 1924, and was reprinted under its proper title in The National Geographic Magazine, March, 1924. In this fascinating essay, Conrad, after discussing the feats of some of the early navigators and explorers, gives a memorable account of a passage he made in 1888 (when in command of the Otago) through the Torres Straits on a voyage from Sydney to Mauritius.
"The Torrens: A Personal Tribute,” was published in The Blue Peter, October, 1923. In the early ’nineties Conrad had been chief officer of this ship—he joined her on November 2, 1891, and left her on October 15, 1893— and he made two journeys from England to Australia and back in that capacity. For her he always retained
