The Branch Pilot

by Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The pilot came aboard at the Sandheads a little after daylight, and he came, as the Bengal pilots did in those years, like a man arriving at his own house. First up the ladder was his servant, a grave old Mussulman in a white coat, with a tin trunk on his head and a bundle of bedding under one arm; then the leadsman, a young man in a pith helmet who carried nothing but a canvas bag and a sounding-rod and who looked about the deck of the Strathearn with the quick, inventorying glance of somebody who would have to work there; and last, taking his time over each rung, the pilot himself, Mr. Considine, Branch Pilot of the Bengal Pilot Service, in a suit of white drill so fresh that it seemed to have been put on in the boat. He was a heavy man of sixty or near it, with a grey moustache and a sunburned face that had settled, from long habit, into an expression of courteous patience, as though the whole river, from the Sandheads to Garden Reach, were a guest who had overstayed and to whom he would not be rude.

Captain Laidlaw met him at the head of the ladder and shook hands. "Glad to see you, Mr. Considine. We draw nineteen feet six aft."

"So your agent tells me," said the pilot. "We shall have water enough on the flood. We shall see." He did not look at the river when he said it. He looked at Laidlaw, kindly, from under the brim of his helmet, and then he went up the bridge ladder with his hand on the rail, and the leadsman went up after him, close, the way a young officer walks behind an admiral at a funeral.

The Strathearn was a steamer of twenty-one hundred tons, of Glasgow, sixty-three days out of Liverpool with Cheshire salt and Manchester piece-goods, and she had been a fortunate ship under Laidlaw for four years, which is to say that nothing had happened to her that anybody ashore had ever heard about. Laidlaw was forty-eight. He had come up the Hooghly eleven times in his life, twice as master, and he had the opinion of the river that every seaman has who knows it only from the bridge with a pilot beside him: that it is the most treacherous water in the East, and that it is none of his business. The Hooghly pilots were a service apart. They were paid like Members of Council and they behaved accordingly; they took charge of your ship at the Sandheads and handed her back to you, moored, at Calcutta, and in between they did not ask your opinion and you did not offer it. The law, and the custom, which on that river were stronger than the law, put the navigation in the pilot's hands. A master who interfered with a Branch Pilot on the Hooghly had better be right; and even if he was right, he would not, in that port, be forgiven quickly.

They got under way at once and went up past the light-vessels with the morning haze lying on the water like milk in a saucer. The banks were nowhere. There was only the brown river, wide as a sea, and a line of darker brown that might have been the Saugor shore or might have been a cloud, and every so often a buoy that came up out of the haze, swung past close alongside with the stream piling white against it, and went astern into nothing. Mr. Considine stood in the middle of the bridge with his hands behind his back and gave his orders to the seacunny at the wheel in a low, pleasant voice. He gave very few. The leadsman stood at his elbow.

It was the second mate, Bowie, who said the first word about it, and he said it so that it could have been taken back. He came up at eight to relieve the mate, and he stood by Laidlaw at the wing of the bridge for a while, and then he said, looking at the water, "The young fellow does a deal of the looking, sir."

Laidlaw did not answer him. But he had seen it already, and once it had been said aloud he could not stop seeing it. Every time a buoy came up out of the haze, the leadsman saw it first; that was natural, he was young. But the leadsman did not call it out. He bent his head a little towards the pilot's shoulder and said something in an undertone, and the pilot nodded, and then, after a moment, as if he had been considering a matter of his own, the pilot gave the order. Twice Laidlaw saw the pilot lift his binoculars, hold them a moment against his eyes, and lower them without, so far as could be judged, having pointed them at anything in particular. Once, when the seacunny reported the ship's head, Mr. Considine stepped to the binnacle and bent down over the card with his face so near it that the brim of his helmet touched the glass, and stayed so long that the seacunny, who was a Goanese named D'Souza and a careful man, looked up at Laidlaw over the pilot's back with no expression whatever.

There is a kind of knowledge which comes to a man all at once and which he spends the next hour trying to unknow. Laidlaw went to the chart-room and looked at the chart for a while without reading it. He told himself that the pilot was a man of sixty, that men of sixty bent to look at compass cards, that the haze was thick and young eyes were better than old in a haze, and that the leadsman was there for that purpose among others. All this was true. He told himself that it was the pilot's river, and that was true also. He came out again and stood at the wing of the bridge, and it was only then that he noticed how the leadsman spoke to the old man: not as a junior reports to his senior, but in the low, steady, uninflected voice in which one reads aloud to a person who has asked to be read to. And the old man listened as such a person listens, with his chin lifted and his face turned a little away.

It was a system. That was the thing that held Laidlaw at the rail with his hands closed on it. It had not been got up for this ship, this morning. It was too smooth for that; it had the ease of an arrangement that has been worked a great many times, between two men who had stopped needing to speak of it. The young man had his eyes; the old man had the river, thirty years of it, every shoal and every set of the stream, the way the channel had shifted after the rains of every year since the Mutiny; and between them, so long as they stood together, the ship was perhaps as safe as she could be. Laidlaw found himself thinking, with an odd respect, of what it must have cost the young man to begin it, and of what it had cost the old man to let him.

They anchored off Kedgeree for the tide, and Mr. Considine took his breakfast on the bridge, served by his own servant from his own basket, and talked to Laidlaw very agreeably about the price of salt, about a ship of the Clan Line that had touched below Kedgeree the month before through no fault of her pilot, and about his daughter, who was married to a Collector somewhere up-country and had three children he had not seen. He would see them, he said, when he went Home. He had eighteen months to serve for his pension. He said it lightly, wiping his moustache, and the leadsman, who was eating standing up at the rail, did not turn round.

They weighed again at noon with the young flood under them and went up past Diamond Harbour, and the haze, which ought by that hour to have burned off, only thinned and yellowed and lay closer on the water. It was very hot. The river narrowed; the banks came out of the haze at last on either hand, low and green and featureless, with here and there a temple or a clump of palms or a boat drawn up on the mud, and the stream ran up between them, brown and quick and full of small eddies that turned slowly as they went, as if the river were thinking. Ahead, a few miles on, was Hooghly Point, where the Rupnarayan comes in from the westward and the two rivers, meeting, have built up between them the shoal which the pilots call the James and Mary.

Every seaman in the Eastern trade has heard of that shoal, and most of them have heard of it in the same tone, lowered, as of something which it is unlucky to discuss in detail. It is not a reef. It does not hole a ship. It is quicksand, shifting with every monsoon, and the flood tide runs across it with such weight that a vessel which takes the ground there is swung broadside to the stream, and heeled, and the sand is scoured out from under her bilge on one side and piled against her on the other, and she goes over. She may go over in ten minutes. Large ships have disappeared on it so completely that within a week there was nothing to show the place. The channel past it is narrow and moves from season to season, and it is crossed on the flood, when there is water enough, by marks on the shore which the pilots know and nobody else does; and at the crossing, the leadsman goes into the chains.

He went now. Mr. Considine said, "Leadsman," without turning his head, and the young man looked once at Laidlaw, a short, flat, unreadable look, and went down the ladder and forward along the deck, buckling on his canvas apron as he went, and climbed out into the fore-chains on the starboard side with the hand-lead and the line coiled over his arm. It was his duty. The water over the crossing is measured by the lead and by nothing else, and the leadsman's whole service exists for that minute. There was no one else to do it. And so the system came apart, not through anybody's fault, but by the plain requirement of the work, at the precise place where it mattered most; and Mr. Considine stood alone in the middle of the bridge with his hands behind his back, looking ahead into the yellow haze at a shore he could see, as Laidlaw now understood, about as well as a man sees the far side of a room through a steamed window.

"By the mark five," sang the leadsman from forward. His voice was clear and very young.

Laidlaw went and stood at the pilot's left hand. He did it without deciding to do it. He did not speak. He looked along the starboard bow where the bank was, a long flat line of grey-green with a few trees on it, and he looked for the mark; and since he did not know the mark, he looked for anything at all that a man might steer by. There was a white building, square, some way back from the bank. There was a cluster of three palms. There was, nearer the water, a tall thin pole with something on the top of it, standing up out of a group of country boats moored at the edge of the mud.

"And a half four," from the chains.

The pilot stood perfectly still. Laidlaw could hear him breathing through his nose. Then Mr. Considine lifted his right hand a little way from behind his back, as a man does who is about to give an order and is bringing the ship in his mind round with his hand, and in the same low, pleasant voice in which he had given every order since the Sandheads he said, "Port a little."

"Port a little," said D'Souza at the wheel, and his hands moved on the spokes.

Laidlaw looked at the pole among the boats. It was the mast of a country boat, a big one, with a basket or a bundle lashed at the masthead, and as he looked it moved, very slightly, against the trees behind it, as a mast moves when the hull under it is lifted by the wash of a passing steamer. And then, a long way beyond it and to the right, coming out of the yellow haze as if somebody had drawn it there in pencil, he saw a beacon on the bank, black, with a cage at the top; and he knew, without knowing anything about the James and Mary, that a man does not build a beacon on a riverbank to be steered by a boat's mast that will be gone in an hour.

"Quarter less four," sang the leadsman. The young voice had gone up a little.

It is a strange thing, and every seaman knows it, how much time there is in such a moment, and how little of it is used for thought. Laidlaw had time to see the bow begin to swing, very slowly, the bank beginning to slide along the stem. He had time to see the leadsman in the chains with the lead swinging, and the young man's face turned not forward to the water but aft, up at the bridge. He had time to remember the letter from his owners in Glasgow that had wished him, among other things, a pleasant passage. He did not have time to consider the pilot, or the pension, or the Port Officer, or what would be said at the Bengal Club that night; and he was afterwards glad of it, because if he had considered any of them, he might have spoken a second later than he did.

"Steady," he said. "Steady as she goes."

He did not say it loudly. D'Souza's hands stopped on the spokes, and moved them back, and the man said, "Steady, sir," and the ship's head, which had swung perhaps a point, hung, and came back a little, and held, with the black beacon fine on the starboard bow.

Mr. Considine turned his head and looked at him.

Laidlaw had expected, so far as he had expected anything, to be ordered off his own bridge. It would have been in the old man's right; on that river it would very nearly have been his duty. A Branch Pilot with thirty years of the Hooghly behind him, countermanded at the James and Mary by a Glasgow shipmaster who had been up the river eleven times, had every reason in the world to say, in that same pleasant voice, "Captain, I have the ship," and to send for the Port Officer when they anchored. And Laidlaw would have had to give her up, or else take her entirely, against the pilot's protest, on a crossing he did not know.

Mr. Considine said nothing. He looked at Laidlaw for perhaps three seconds, with his pale eyes a little narrowed, the eyes of a man looking into a strong light; and Laidlaw understood that the old man could not see the beacon, and could not see the mast either, and could not now tell which of them had been right except by waiting for the lead. And the pilot understood that he understood. It passed between them without a word, as such things do pass at sea, more completely than any word could have carried it. Then Mr. Considine turned his face forward again and put his hand back behind him to join the other, and waited.

"And a half four," sang the leadsman. Then, after a long minute, in which nobody on the bridge moved, "By the mark five." Then, "By the deep six."

"Very good," said Mr. Considine. "Very good. Starboard a little, quartermaster. Steady. Steady so." His voice had not changed in the slightest. The Strathearn went on up past Hooghly Point with the flood under her, and the country boats at the edge of the mud fell astern, and the leadsman went on calling out water that grew deeper every cast, until the pilot sent word for him to come in.

He came up to the bridge in his wet apron, with the line coiled over his arm, and took his place at the old man's elbow, and said something in an undertone, and the pilot nodded. Neither of them looked at Laidlaw. The leadsman's face was quite white under the sunburn, and his hands, when he began to unbuckle the apron, would not do it; and he stood there holding the two ends of the buckle, not trying any more, while the green banks went by.

They moored at Garden Reach a little after six, with the lights coming out along the Calcutta shore and the smoke of the city lying over the river in long flat bars, and Mr. Considine wrote up the pilot's certificate at the chart-room table, holding the paper very close under the lamp, and signed it, and Laidlaw countersigned it. Nothing was entered on it but the ship's name and draught and the times. There was no column on that form for what had happened at the crossing, and the pilot did not invent one. He thanked Laidlaw for a pleasant passage. His servant had already gone down into the pilot's boat with the tin trunk and the bedding; the leadsman stood waiting at the head of the ladder with his canvas bag.

"Captain Laidlaw," said the pilot at the gangway, holding out his hand, "you will do whatever you think right." He said it without emphasis, as he might have said that the tide would turn at nine. Then he went down the ladder, rung by rung, taking his time over each, and the leadsman went down after him, close, with one hand out a little way from his side, not touching.

Laidlaw sat a long time that night in his cabin with the port open and the mosquitoes coming in. It was very hot. The noise of the city came across the water, and the hulls of the moored ships creaked and knocked, and somewhere up the reach a steamer was blowing for a berth. He had a sheet of the ship's notepaper in front of him, and his pen, and he had written at the top of it The Port Officer, Calcutta, and the date, and nothing else.

He was not a man who had ever believed himself to be anything in particular. That was his strength, if he had one. He had not, in thirty years at sea, formed any idea of himself that a single afternoon could disprove, and so he had not been much surprised by what he had done at the crossing; he had done it as he would have caught a falling man, without any opinion of himself at all. The crossing had cost him nothing. It had been over in four minutes, with the lead to tell him whether he was right, and D'Souza and the leadsman and the pilot himself to see it done. This sheet of paper nobody would see him write or leave unwritten, and it would not tell him, now or ever, whether he had been right.

Because the system would be worked again. That was the plain fact, and he made himself look at it. The old man had eighteen months to his pension, and he would take ships down that river and up it for eighteen months, with the young man at his elbow reading the river to him in an undertone. Fifty ships, perhaps. And every one of them, at the James and Mary and at every other crossing where the lead was wanted, the leadsman would have to go into the chains, because that was his duty, and the old man would stand alone. Laidlaw had happened to be there. Fifty other masters would not happen to be anywhere; they would stand at the wing of the bridge where custom put them, and look at the river, which was none of their business. And the young man knew all this. He had known it every day for a year, perhaps more, and he had gone on doing it, for loyalty, or pity, or because he would have had to destroy the man who taught him the river in order to stop. Laidlaw thought of his white face over the buckle. A system of loyalty like that is a fine thing, and a very terrible thing, because it will hold together exactly up to the point where it fails, and not one inch beyond.

He wrote the letter. It was short. He set down the time and the place and the soundings, and that the pilot had ordered port helm when, in the master's judgement, the ship should be kept steady, and that the master had countermanded the order, and that the pilot had made no objection. He wrote that he believed the pilot's sight to be impaired, and he stated his reasons for that belief and no others. He did not write anything about the leadsman. He read it through twice and found nothing in it that was untrue, and nothing that was kind, and he understood that this was the best that could be done with it. He signed it, and folded it, and gave it in the morning to the agent's peon to carry ashore with the ship's papers, and watched the man go down into the dinghy with it in his hand.

Three days later, when they had begun to discharge the salt, a big four-masted ship went down the river past Garden Reach on the morning ebb, towing behind a paddle tug, with her yards squared and her people standing about her decks in the idle way of a ship's company with nothing yet to do. Laidlaw was on deck with the mate, watching the slings come up out of the hold. He looked up as she went by, because every seaman looks at a ship going to sea. There were two figures on her poop, a heavy man in white drill with his hands behind his back, and a young man in a pith helmet at his elbow, bending his head a little towards the old man's shoulder.

Laidlaw watched them go. There was nothing to be done; he did not know whether his letter had been read, or shelved, or read and put by until the old man's eighteen months were out. The tug's paddles thrashed the brown water. Then the ship was past the bend, and a sling of salt came up out of the hold and swung over the side, white in the sun, and the mate called to the winchman to lower away, handsomely.

THE END

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōsēphō Conradō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

If you would like to talk to this simulacrum, please sign in at the Universitas Scholarium.

◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ