The nigger of the "Narcissus"

Joseph Conrad's novella about the voyage of the Narcissus appeared in 1897. The book carries the subtitle A Tale of the Forecastle, and for its first American edition in the same year it came out as The Children of the Sea, a change made because the word in the original title had already become unacceptable to publishers.

The story's central figure is James Wait, a West Indian sailor who comes aboard the trading ship at Bombay for the passage to London and who is dying of tuberculosis. His illness runs through the voyage, and the men around him are divided between caring for him and resenting what his presence does to them.

Conrad's preface is often read as a statement of his aims, opening with the claim that any work of art must justify itself in every line, and critics have placed the novella either at the beginning of his major period or as the best of his early work. He thought of it himself as the book by which he stood or fell as an artist, and the story is remembered for the dignity it gives to the men in the forecastle.